Why the subscription-based business model is broken

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-24-2008 @ 8:07PM

tanknspank said...

So his solution is to toss around a ton of Buzzwords and hope for the best? I'm sorry, but for higher end games, the subscription based model if far superior, you are able to have an active tally of who's paying for you game, and knowing how much money you can put into it. I'm gonna have to disagree with him on this one hardcore, it seems like bashing MMOs with the standard Sub model is very popular right now for whatever reason.

8-24-2008 @ 9:06PM

Brendan Drain said...

Bashing what's standard is always popular, the difference here is that it's a fairly big name developer who has used the standard model that is bashing it.

To be clear, Runescape does use a subscription model in a sense. It offers the game for free in a very restricted form and uses advertisements to pay for the free servers. Subscribing unlocks all of the members servers and the other 90% of the game that you couldn't previously access. And that model has been massively successful, with over 1.2 million paying subscribers.

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