What's Fair in Fees

I'm not a big fan of the word "fair" unless it is immediately preceded by the word "State" or the word "County". In life there are always going to be winners and losers, and whenever somebody wins and somebody else loses there's always someone to pop up and complain that it wasn't fair. Then they propose (or introduce) some new rule that ... picks winners and losers in a different way. "Fair" is never actually fair.

So Tobold proposes a way to make subscription fees more fair :

Funnily enough, it is possible to play World of Warcraft with a business model which is extremely fair, in which every player pays proportionally to the cost and drain on resources he causes. You just need to move to China for that. The Chinese WoW business model is extremely simple: You buy a time-card with X hours on it, every hour costing around 5 cents, and every minute you are online is deducted from this amount of time you paid for. Nobody subsidizes another player, every player pays exactly what he is consuming, and the whole thing is fairest business model for MMORPGs possible.

Except that consumer goods are intrinsically fair -- companies are allowed to set the price they think fair, and consumers are free to judge whether they think the price fair. No consumer subscribes to WoW unless they feel it is worth fifteen bucks a month.

Furthermore, hourly payments are not necessarily that fair. The expenses of an MMO developer do not increase linearly with time played. The number of players in prime time would drive almost every capital investment -- like servers and facilities -- as well as other major expenses like internet connections. It doesn't matter if a prime time player plays two hours a day or twenty -- they still need the same amount of server capacity. Tubes need to be big enough to support prime-time, and facilities need to be big enough to handle the prime time GM staff and all the prime time servers.

Worst of all, hourly payments would introduce a new series of value judgments for players that would make the game less fun. Time-consuming activities that are disliked now would be despised in a pay-per-hour system. Blizzard might spend millions on new content, just to discover that players aren't willing to pay for all the hours it takes to experience it.

Tobold's argument is that, essentially, MMO tourists would find it much easier to play multiple MMO's in the same time period if you could pay per-hour. I'm sure that's true but I'm doubtful how many people that would affect. It seems like most MMO bloggers have multiple subscriptions and play multiple MMO's, but they are in my experience a minority. In five years of on-again, off-again WoW I've never once heard a player say they actively subscribed to another MMO.