
Thankfully on slow news days there usually is a Brad McQuaid sighting on the official Vanguard forums. Brad recently discussed a number of topics including monthly fees, beta 0 screenshots and video, and raiding possibilities. Here's what he had to say about monthly fees increasing.
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Originally Posted by Aradune
I think you have a good point too. Entertainment is a luxury and costs come quite a bit from what the consumer wants and expects. I look at movie tickets and while people sometimes complain about how much they've gone up in, say, the last decade, I also look at how much money is being spent on making some of the big movies and what some of the better ones have delivered. For example, the LOTR trilogy. I think most of us are more than happy to have paid what we did to enjoy that level of quality, epic scope, incredible use of technology, etc.
MMOGs are costing more and more as well. EQ was around $8 million to make, and I've heard numbers higher than $30M for WoW (although I have no idea how much it truly cost).
So Taranis is certainly right -- we don't have any plans to raise prices or anything like that. But speaking more generally and looking further into the future, I also see subscriptions to these games going up as their quality, scope, amount of content, etc. increase to meet what the gamer wants. Right now there are only so many MMOGs and competition is such that they all cost pretty much the same to play. When prices went up from $10 to $15 a month and players accepted that, the rest of the MMOGs did the same thing. I predict this will probably be true for a while, but as there are more and more MMOGs in the future this could change.
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Brad also recognized that it was high time for a video of Vanguard to be released and that the next batch of screenshots should be visually more advanced than the previous batches. Hopefully we'll be graced with our first set of just such a batch of screenies!
Forum Debrief: