Episodes 1 & 2 for the Xbox?
You MURDERER!
is confused
How much is it per month? I miss PSO =(
$8.95
I used to play it a bit online on the GC, but not anymore.
I have the belief of paying once to play something. I refuse to play a game with monthly fees, unless someone else pays them for me.
Okay Arac. One initial investment in a server. No maintenance staff, no revision staff, no GMs, no nothing! Can you imagine how horrible that would be?
I used to play this on the GC. Ahh, it was so fun. I remember playing with Sonic. Is it still online for the GC? Or are the rumors about them taking it down true?
One initial investment in development staff. No further staff, except on expansions, maybe.
Yes, I can imagine how horrible a good single player game would be.
Also, asa seconday point, I don’t ever remember paying for multiplayer on Starcraft, Red Faction, Warcraft… have I made my point?
It is still online for GC and Xbox, and they aren’t taking it down for a long time coming.
I used to play it, back in the days of Dreamcast, but redundancy and lack of variety killed it for me. It was fun for multiplayer on the Game Cube, but that was all I did with it.
I guess I really quit when I started playing Everquest.
No. 
…
I pointed out that many good games, even a few multi-player games, could exist without a monthly fee, and no-one has yet to argue, so I stand by the statement that I made my point.
Any normal console game can exist because they STOP WORKING ON IT. There’s no one to keep on having to pay, that’s why there is no monthly fee. With MMORPGs, there are constantly new things under development.
That was my point, Lanyx.
Many of those console games are good, correct?
Better than MMORPGs?
Also, if you made a game that was good enough to not require constant content updates, you would make enough money of expansions to not need a monthly fee. Guildwars is going to try that out. I’d like to see how it works out, but I still hold faith that it’ll be just as good and have no more bugs than any other MMORPG at its release. We’ll have to see.
If there comes a time when providing prompt service to the millions of people playing an MMORPG each month will be smooth without requiring some fees for the HARD ASS work the staff puts into it… Then I’m sure you’ll find your dream. Untill then, you’ll either deal with the fact that good MMORPGs have online fees… OR you’ll sit and complain about it while we have fun.
I miss the glory days of the DreamCast.
Or, I could have just as much fun on single player games.
OR you can shut the hell up about it, on BOTH SIDES.
I used to share your moral outrage at paying a monthly fee for a game, but then I did a little cost benefit analysis which raised an interesting point.
The average game costs about $70 CND, and will take me on average between 3 days to 3 weeks to finish, but most take less than a week. However, for the sake of argument lets bias the analysis towards the one time fee and say the game takes 3 weeks to finish. We therefore have an average cost of $23.33 per week of entertainment.
Let us consider the MMO now, most games offer a demo which lasts between 3 days to a week, assuming you missed the open beta. You’ll thus usually get a chance to try the game before you buy it and know if you really want to play it. Now most, if not all MMOs come with a free month and cost about the same as a normal game, therefore if we assume that you only play the game for the same amount of time you would have played the other game, then we still have the $23.33 per week average of cost of entertainment.
If however you like the game and decide to play it for an additional 3 months (for a total of 4 months) at a monthly fee of $18 per month, you know have a total cost for the game of $154 for 16 weeks of entertainment. Now if you do the math you’ll notice that the weekly cost for entertainment drops to $7.75.
So if you’re playing an MMO you enjoy and the devs provide regular new and interesting content, it’s actually more cost effective to pay for the game, than it is to just buy a new game.
I would suggest you actually try it before you reject it out right, worst case scenario, you just cancel you subscription at the end of your free month and you never have to pay the monthly fee.