£8.99 or $15 doesn't seem like much, it can hardly buy anything nowadays, but add at the cost of that monthly and the figure raises astronomically (Obviously). Of course I'm talking about MMORPGs (Again) and the prevalence of a subscription based model. Beware I'm going to talk about World of Warcraft quite a bit.
The Big Selling point of an MMORPG is the vast amount of content that has been created and that will made in the future, the idea of a monthly fee is justified by the company as the way to pay for the content to come and the upkeep of the servers, 8.99 a month on server upkeep, you're joking right? The biggest MMO at the moment is World of Warcraft which has roughly 12 million subscribers, now imagine the amount of money this brings in to the company, this figure is more than any of can hope to achieve in a lifetime, let alone monthly. For that amount of money you'd expect the content to fly in fast and of a high quality, but as any rational minded player can see, this isn't happening. The time between content in World of Warcraft is huge, Mostly of High Quality and sometimes not (Hello 3.2 and 4.1), the time between the two most recent patches 4.2 and 4.3 (Tomorrow in the EU) has been 6 months, the last set of content was the Firelands Raid and Daily Quest Zone, Blizzard put a 7 boss raid dungeon and a set of dailies.

| | | A Galaxy Far Far Away, all for the price of 8.99 |

When a Developer releases content slowly or when they release content that is poor, then the subscriber base will react and people will unsubcribe, this has been problem for both established and brand new MMOs. This is an awful practice by companies, other games have adopted a much better model to work by.Yes, I'm talking about Free to Play. Free to Play is by far the most cost effective way for consumers to enjoy their MMO. There is no subscription fee but you have to pay for the content you want. This is by far the consumer favourite, pay for the stuff you want, don't pay for the stuff you don't. Dungeons and Dragon Online do this fantastically with the entire game being F2P from launch and you pay for the extra dungeons. League of Legends is an excellent example, there is a set of F2P champions that are rotated every week, you can buy the ones you like with real money or a currency you earn by playing games.Maybe a good idea would be for Blizzard and other developers to lower the cost of the subscription and the other premium services (Save that can of worms for another time) and then just have a nominal fee for each content patch, like £5 or something, that seems reasonable to me. This would also be a good incentive for developers to make decent content at a regular pace as the consumers would let them know if it was shit by voting with their wallet. (Not paying)Would a game like WoW benefit from having a F2P model? No and that's because they're making millions a month off putting a content patch out every six or so, and an expansion every 1 and a 1/2 years. Am I going to try and make some kind of valiant statement about the evils of subscription based games and that we should all play F2P? God, no, I have to go pay Blizzard my 8.99 a month so I can keep punching internet dragons in the face.