When Zenimax and Bethesda Studios announced the making of The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO) MMORPG, I was thrilled!! Having played Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim … I am completely familiar with the TES Lore. The one pet peeve (which almost all TES players would agree) was the fact that none of the games hitherto did not have multi-player support.
Multi-player Support
Multi-player is not a health factor in making a game famous … Skyrim has already taught us that. However the way the games industry is evolving, it makes sense to make the game multi-player and evolve the game over a period of time. A good example of this is World of Warcraft. I keep coming back to this game because it is by far the highest revenue grossing MMORPG out there. It is true that even WoW is loosing subscribers to the other games out there … but this is the only other game which has successfully shown that a 15 USD per month subscription can work.
The Elder Scrolls Online is also structured around the same subscription concept. If you want to play, you have to pay.
Does a Payment Subscription work?
A payment subscription is not something many gamers like shelling out. Having played World of Warcraft for more than a year, I stopped playing the day I realized that I had spent well over 50,000 INR in subscription and upgrades. However, the effort and content that needs to be put in to make this work is huge. Many have tried and failed at making their games a paid subscription. The most notable among this would be the Star Wars MMO, which started off as a paid subscription but did not gather enough users … to attract more users they eventually changed their model to a free to play + pay 2 win.
Many game critiques have already declared this game as 2014’s game disaster, not only because of the payment subscription model but also because of the huge budget that both the companies have declared.
Time will tell
There will be people who will make predictions … yes it will be a huge success, no it will be a trouncing failure. When the dust settles, one of these parties will say … see, we told you so! We said it first.
However, for now instead of making forecasts, I would rather focus on getting into the Beta this weekend. The amount of hype generated this weekend will help in understanding whether people are willing to give more attention to this game and whether TESO can reach mainstream adoption rates … just the way Skyrim did.