OK, so those who are accepted into the beta are informed they’ll have to order a CD and that it costs $5.95, presumably for shipping and handling. :?
But no! That’s without shipping, and the least amount of “shipping” you can put on it is UPS 2nd Day Air, which brings the cost up to $12.25. :evil:
Ah well, capitalism. Still, that seems like a bait and switch to stick on extra cost like that after you enter your credit card info.
Yeah, I’ve been in the SW Beta for a bit and forked over my $12. I thought it was going to end up like the EQ beta but now I’m not so sure.
With the EQ Beta, you didn’t have to buy the game when it was released. You simply logged in and the patch server downloaded all of the new material for you. You could even do a fresh install using the Beta disk and redownload everything again.
But SW Beta may be different. I’m starting to hear rumbles that they are going to disable all of the account keys that were handed out for beta. Dag nabbit, I hope that ends up being false.
Either that, or offer a discounted direct purchase from Sony. Something like $25 - 30 for the full version.
If they’re asking you to pay $12 to be a guinea pig, I don’t think it’s likely they’re going to be handing you the finished game client when the beta is done.
“Greed is good” is the mantra of the MMORPG.
–Dave
Keep in mind: 5 is for the shipping, 5 is for the CD. It’s not free, but it’s not highway robbery either.
because cds cost 5$. Yeah.
Well, the beta is three or four cd’s or something…and even if you pay a monkey minimum wage to babysit a CDR… well you get the idea.
I was accepted into the beta and that’s why I’m not playing it now–I wasn’t willing to fork out 12 bucks.
Maybe if no one volunteers to pony up the dough, they will be forced to send you all out Betas for free. My guess is there are plenty willing to pay and plenty more willing to whine about it and still pay. :wink:
Exactly, which is why the “Greed is good” mantra is easily supported by MMORPGs. It’s a digital crack pipe that a lot of gamers can’t remove their lips from.
–Dave
I’ve given up on SWG.
I dunno, when you get into the $10+ range, it starts to sound like highway robbery to me.
Im in Europe, found out it would cost around 30-40$ having the beta cd sent to me, so I gave my station account to someone who was stupid enough to pay that ammount of money for a betatest…
I’m not complaining about the $12, I’m complaining about how it’s listed as $5.95, and then they pretty much double it once you put in your credit card info, hoping you’re willing to still hit OK.
Or that trying to hit cancel will somehow get interpreted as ok and then you’ll have to deal with the CS retard in chat who will tell you to email the CS retards that don’t respond because there’s no fucking cancel option on your billing info page which is where they fucking say it is.
Exactly, which is why the “Greed is good” mantra is easily supported by MMORPGs. It’s a digital crack pipe that a lot of gamers can’t remove their lips from.
–Dave[/quote]
Dave last time I checked companies were in business to make money. I don’t get where this greed thing is coming from. The games are reasonably priced especially when you take into account the cost per hour over time. Also, if they were truly greedy no one would buy their service. $13 a month is nothing for a game you sink a lot of time into. Try reading Jessica’s book sometime to see what the costs of developing, maintaining, and providing customer support for these games are it is pretty staggering. The successful ones make a decent amount of money but it is a big risk and a lot of them crash and burn.
As for the beta CD cost thing I can understand the frustration with the way it was handled. Whoever is in charge of the SWG beta really didn’t think a lot of stuff through in terms of how best to present this stuff to beta testers. If the real game support/communication is going to be handled like the beta they could be in for a rough ride. This stuff is so damned easy to avoid with a few minutes of thought and planning.
– Xaroc
Ya’ll are probably much more experienced than I am with beta-testing but I really didn’t have a problem paying to get into beta. I’m helping, I hope, shape some input on the game with my contributions both hunting down bugs and pointing out issues that could affect the quality of the experience. This is important enough to me that I’d pay for the chance because I’ve grown somewhat vested in the concepts presented over time. Charging people also will hopefully cut down on people frivolously getting into beta and just goofing off entirely. Lastly, I am getting in my learning curve early. When the game starts I’ll know what I’m doing and be off and running. It also puts me in a position where I can help teach others - not 'cause I’m a swell guy (though I am) - but because the people I help will probably help me out when they’re experienced enough.
I don’t have much of a problem with this at all. What’s $12? Three days of lunch at McDonalds?
All of this doesn’t make me a complete SWG fanboi and apologist, I’m just an engaged gamer. I pick my fights where they’re worth fighting and SWG is an important skirmish on the road to better gaming. Once the NDA is lifted, though, I’ll probably seem somewhat less sympathetic about other issues than I might about this one. :)
I’m with Rucker if that was not already made clear in my previous delicately worded post. It seems like when I Beta tested Fireteam, I paid $29.99 (incl. headset) for a game that eventually sold for $59.99. I would do it again for a title I held that dear and wanted to make better. Whether it is gouging by the publisher/developer, I guess does not concern me. I am contributing to a greater good in my mind: Fun for Tyler. What is more important than that, I ask.
Charging people to participate in a beta stinks because they’re demanding money from people for the privelege to provide free labor to test their unfinished product. I always thought it was implied that the nominal cost to them to send out CDs was considered a fair exchange for the valuable service they get in return. You get a sneak peak at their game, and they (hopefully) get some help squashing bugs in their product. The only explanation I can think of for the change is that maybe they’ve decided that too few who are admitted to the beta actually contribute to the process by playing regularly and submitting bug reports. You put a $10 cost to scare away the people who aren’t serious, I guess. Still don’t like it, they could have just made a $2.00 charge and cut deeply into the throngs of credit cardless kiddies, while recouping what little cost they have for mass pressings and mailings.
Whats next… pay for patches? Oh wait thats why we have expansion packs…
why oh why!
etc
You are almost there, but not quite. What actually happens is that maybe 1 in 100 ‘testers’ actually ever report a bug; the rest play the game as if it were released and bitch like hell if the character database is rolled back. That ‘valuable service’ is not generaly provided by 99% of people who volunteer to ‘test.’
Frankly, this will weed out the curious and the lookie-loos, but probably not many of the hard core; this cost is chump change to the hard core, who are price insensitive. And the hard core is where you normally find that 1 in 100 who will actually report bugs. And considering how close they are to their annoounced release, I’m not surprised the main option for shipping is 2 day UPS; they need to get people banging on it.
Personally, I don’t think they went far enough; remember that in 1997 UO charged $4.95 to get the beta disk and 50,000 took them up on it. For initial game system testing, Sony should have charged $20, plus a nominal monthly fee of $3 or $4, then dropped the price the closer they got to pure load testing.
A $2 credit card charge usually isn’t worth the time it takes to make the charge. After paying the bank, overhead, account management, etc., you’re lucky to have 60 cents left over. And that’s before state and Federal taxes. At the end of the day, you’d be lucky to have 30 cents left. Increase that to $3 or $4 and at lest the charge makes a bit of sense.
The costs don’t stop at mailings and pressings. What about bandwidth, for example? If I’m going to pay several thousand dollars per month for 50k-100k simultaneous players, I want a reasonable chance at getting people who will actually report bugs. And the server clusters for an MMOG are not cheap to set up; they can easily cost around $80,000 to $120,000 eaach just for a minimal configuration. If I have to set up two or three for a test, I’ve already made a significant investment; I want a serious chance at getting at least SOME bug reports.
And it is not a simple matter of just hiring a bunch of testers, either; there are bugs that crop up only when there are several thousand simulataneous players on, or after a certain command is issued a certain number of times… you get the idea. These things are not easy to test.