Paying for Free

written on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009

What I said yesterday (or on the other side of the three fitful hours of sleep I got from 7AM to 10AM), wasn't really fair. I chose to play World of WarCraft. I'd been invited, sure. But I respected Blizzard. The game was a huge success. And even though the free trial was kind of tedious, I wanted to see what people saw in the game.

So I committed. I'm prone to black and white thinking, so I committed to six months in advance. $40 for the game and $80 for the six month subscription. But the game itself was more about planning and math than skill and daring. It was still nice to spend time with friends, but without them, the game was just grinding. And after wasting an entire Sunday trying to run a single instance only to have a continuous stream of flakes and incompetents ruin it. I had to quit. I was paying Blizzard to ruin my Sunday. I hated myself for being party to that.

Consequently, I'm much more fond of the "pay when you want something" model that Perfect World uses. I can show up and level all day and pay nothing, if that's what I want. But if I want extra bag space, or a fast mount at level 20 instead of 40, I just pay some money for it. I can use it and enjoy it at my own pace. There's no feeling that I'm obligated to play more to justify a subscription fee.

It's also sort of paying after the fact. I've been using their servers for a while. I've been having a good time. I feel it's only fair they get some money for entertaining me. By contrast, Saints Row 2 I had to pay up front for, and never would have touched if they'd had a demo. It runs horribly on PC. I knew it ran horribly when it first came out, but there've been two patches since then!

Rationalizations aside, it still feels weird to buy stuff in a free MMO, partly because it feels indulgent, but also because it feels weird to look at every loot drop as real money. One gold costs about a dollar. You can buy a gold in game for about 100,000 coins. So now I don't see a 1,000 coin piece of loot on the ground. I see a penny. I'm picking up pennies. So now the free MMO is entirely about money.

Considering I liked the relaxing nature of the game, this may end up a very bad thing.