Why do online rpg's have a subscription fee?

Question

Where's that fee I wanna stab it to death!

I've play FPS online games and none of those have fees, whats the big idea?

Answer 1

FPS games are mostly hosted on rented servers or a players computer. They rarely include more than 20-30 players max and usually far far less.

MMORPG's typically are designed to run servers for upwards of 1000 players per server (or more accurately server group) and even small games can boast server populations of several hundred players at peak hours. This requires a great deal of very expensive hardware and equally expensive maintenance of it. That's what the fees go to support. In addition of course, the best games are constantly preparing new material which will be added to the game, often without any extra charge, those designers also have to be payed just like the ones that did the original game. Most added material for FPS is fanmod's, they don't get paid to do it.

FPS vs MMO isn't just apples and oranges, it's more like apples and cars.

Answer 2

I've play FPS online games and none of those have fees, whats the big idea?

Thats because it's the players that rent servers to play on.

Answer 3

Servers run continually. They have customer service representatives usually in the game and do active maintenence on the servers on a weekly basis. They also add content frequently.

FPS games that you play online are developed by a company, and generally don't have much attention given to them after their release (save for a patch or two). Games such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes/Villains are always changing and are almost always running. The experience of playing an online game one month, may not be the same the next month.

Answer 4

So they can make money to pay for their servers that host the game you want to play? Those aren't cheap you know.

Answer 5

Because they wanna get rich like everybody else.