The Elder Scrolls Online(ESO) is a highly anticipated, upcoming, massively multiplayer role playing game(MMORPG). As an MMORPG, ESO will have both, massive initial investment, and equally massive server maintenance costs. These costs are the only way to facilitate features like, millions of players only at any given time, and having up to 200 players on screen at any given time. Current total investment in ESO is estimated at 200 million dollars, it doesn’t take an economist to see that, with such an enormous upfront cost, along with daily server maintenance, and promises from the developers of bi-weekly content additions, ESO is going to have to find some way to, not only recoup their investment, but also generate a return on that investment. In the MMORPG community, this is done in two ways, the first is, an upfront cost and a monthly subscription fee, abbreviated P2P(pay to play). The second is, no upfront cost or subscription fee, but the players are subject to “microtransactions” or in game purchases that are done with a fiat currency, this model is abbreviated F2P(free to play), a very basic example would be Farmville. ESO has, against popular opinion, decided to go with the P2P model. Therefore, what follows will be a systematic dissection of the logic behind the two major positions taken regarding MMORPG payment models, and more specifically the payment model chosen for ESO.
The first article to examine is an opinion piece on Forbes by Paul Tassi entitled, “Predicting The Biggest Video Game Disaster Of 2014: The Elder Scrolls Online”(Tassi). A safe assumption from the title is that Tassi is not convinced the P2P model is an effective one, but more on that later. Tassi starts by being upfront about his biases by saying ...
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...have remained for this long. Thus, ESO will be judged in much the same way all games are, on how much fun it is. If people who love MMO’s love ESO then it will succeed, if not, then it won’t. It’s as simple as that.
In the infinite skepticism that exists in the gaming community, a bit of shortsightedness can be expected, and that is much of what Tassi’s articles consist of. While he makes some strong points such as, the reaction of console gamers to a subscription fee, most of what he says fails to consider the bigger picture. In the cases of, ESO’s payment model and target audience, Tassi makes assumptions that seem to be a product of his biases rather than objective logic. For these reasons, Tassi was unable to convince me of his position that P2P games are going to automatically fail, or that no one is interested in a massively multiplayer TES game, such as ESO.
... issue of file-sharing, and the decline in music sales due to people downloading free music. Besides using vague information and few statistics, she is also making many assumptions about the facts that she is stating in this article. When she is making too many assumptions, I am not entirely persuaded to steer clear from downloading music for free. Therefore, this is why I do not think this article is effective.
I choose to discuss the topic of the internet as a new medium for pay-per-view movies because I feel it is a very fresh and new topic that has not been discussed, nor received much attention. The onset of this new medium comes from an attempt to deter online movie pirates from stealing the movies to actually purchasing them for a low price. I feel this is especially important for me to be writing this on a college campus because that is where a great deal of movie pirating occurs due to the fast online connections that the universities provide. File sharing programs like Kazaa and Limewire run ramped on college campuses making this an interesting alternative to explore. With this subject hitting close to home, I choose to research it and find out why it would be a good alternative to the free downloads that we receive from online people to people file-sharing programs. While there are a few sites out there that offer this kind of pay-per-view service, I choose to specifically focus on the site Movielink.com because it is backed by five major Media Corporations comprised of Universal, Sony, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, and Warner Brothers. For this reason, it was the ideal internet site to explore to show the recent trend towards getting new movies online, even if only for a short time.
2. Roland Paris, “R2P Is Not a License for Military Recklessness”, in the Centre for International Policy Study’s blog (March 12, 2012), retrieved online at http://cips.uottawa.ca/r2p-is-not-a-license-for-military-recklessness/
Instead of the franchises popularity having a positive impact, overtime, it infected the gaming market along with it’s consumers and developers such as Microsoft Game Studios and EA. It has become an aggrandized cancer on the face of video games everywhere, destroying franchises a...
An “analyst” was quoted in the case (in 2002) as saying that “people will pay for music on the Internet, eventually.” This person was skeptical of the willingness of consumers to pay for
In the mid-1980s, the term P2P, or peer-to-peer, was used by local area network vendors to describe the computing nodes on their networks. Previous to that, the term was used to describe ARPAnet, the military-backed computer network that would become the model for today's Internet[1]. Today however, the term P2P has a very different meaning - it has come to describe applications designed specifically to exploit peer relationships between computers, using the Internet as an extension of the local network[2]. Its primary uses include not only the sharing of huge amounts of information, but also the sharing of free resources on a vast number of computers [3]. The reasons for its success are numerous and the problems that it creates are genuine.
The following paper analyzes the initial release of Microsoft's XBOX 360 gaming system release into the United States and the changes that occurred with the supply, demand and pricing of the product in the months following its release. The social science of economics tells us that supply, demand and price are closely related to one another and have a significant on how much of a particular good is purchased and the rate at which it is purchased by consumers. The XBOX 360 phenomenon is a solid example of the impact that changes in supply, demand and price have on the marketplace and the rate at which goods are purchased.
In the first six months of 2013, e-commerce revenue in China reached almost RMB 5 trillion, a 45 per cent increase year on year. Payments through mobile dev...
Many people have rushed to Internet much like the gold diggers rushed to California in search for the illusive gold that laid hidden in the hills somewhere. People have come to view the Internet almost as a money tree where all they need to do is put up their business site and within weeks they will be making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much like the siren’s songs in sailors’ legends, consultants, venture capitalists, and others have painted a picture of how the Internet was going to change the world and make everyone who was a part of it rich. A few success stories were all that it took for everyone to jump in and take their stab at it. Now that many dot-coms have crashed and the dust is starting to settle a bit we can take a better look at what has gone wrong with this overly simple and optimistic paradigm.
From PayPal to Debit cards, from EFT to Credit cards, this modern world has been inundated with new ways of making business transactions. Instead of the conventional use of dollars and nickels, now there are electronic payment systems. These types of systems allow for better trust and acceptance between consumer and businesses. In the traditional way of buying a product, one would see a product in person, and pay for it with cash or credit. In e-commerce, the business uploads images of its products online and it enables its customers to shop it using any type of electronic payment system.
Virtual Currencies are increasingly becoming a part of not only the virtual world but also the real world. There are many problems associated with virtual currencies. Due to its similar to paper currency, a lot of questions have risen regarding its acceptance among the people in the market. Virtual currencies are growing in popularity and although they were large used by speculators who were looking at it as a way to make money by buying them at a lower prices and selling them at higher prices (much like trading foreign exchange).
Online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs. These numbers seem huge: $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010 (Freakonomics). In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “can be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which in English means these figures are legitimate and that piracy really does hurt our economy.
All around the world people connected to the internet are downloading free digital content through P2P file sharing software.
Palmer, D. (2012, June 12). The Serious Business of Games. CIO Journal. Retrieved February 20, 2014, from http://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2012/06/12/the-serious-business-of-games/
3. F. Cornelli, S. De Capitani Di Vimercati, S. Paraboschi, and S. Samarati. Choosing reputable servants in a P2P network. In Proceedings of the 11th World Wide Web Conference, May 2002.