DrAtomic
   |
Posted - 2006.05.24 11:17:00 -
[1]
Do I want to be able to hail ships over voice (incoming transmission on screen captain)? Do I want to be able to send out a voice distress call over local? Hell yes!
Do I want to pay for it? Hell no. Free (leftover) bandwidth is easy to come by for us geeks. Even if you have to pay for your bandwidth, like CCP has, their volumes are so high that they should be able to buy their bandwidth at around 35,- euros per mbit maybe even lower.
Main issue would be the added load on the network infrastructre of CCP, so yes outsourcing the solution would be smart indeed. But should it come at the expense of the players?
No, for 3 reasons:
1-. This is a SCI-FI game, voice chat is a logical part of it.
2-. This is allready the most costly MMORPG on the market.
3-. General adoption will struggle with it being on a subscription model (sure some PvP corps will use it if they are struggling with their current TS/vent, new players will not and so will a large protion of the carebear community).
Would I be willing to pay for increased quality of the voice server? Euhm, yes, I'd think so.
Solution:
1-. Either make this a paid expansion (one time fee) or;
2-. Offer it for free with low quality codec and high quality codec/bandwidth for an additional fee/subscription.
A little math...
120000 accounts * 15 monthly fee * 12 months = 21.6 million euros in revenue yearly...
Thats not counting revenue from other sources and discounts on longer subscriptions.
This leaves plenty of profit, the decision of CCP to risk investing their profit into opening the Chinese market is theirs and the revenue created from it if it's a success is theirs as well.
Why would I need to pay for a feature if CCP made the decision to not invest in it's current player base but instead tries to get the playerbase to pay for increased operating cost for a feature that should have been an integral part of the game from launch given the game setting?
Then I'm not even touching on stability, lag, public beta feel, and overal performance for something that we pay good money on. Now and in the past.
/rant out
|