pass

This is pretty sleazy. Basically charging players extra $ for content they've already developed, and it's not just vanity shit, it's an entire race with its own racial bonuses.

Imagine if Everquest were released with a collectors edition you had to buy in order to play Half Elves, and that was the only way you could play that race.

To me it is a symbolic gesture as well... it shows the devs/publishers are willing to provide real, tangible, major rewards to people who will take out their wallet and pay for them.

Also, given the cross-faction freedom they briefly had up for basic pre-orders, I anticipate paid faction changes where you get to keep your race.

lol they know its gonna be a failure so try to milk as much money as possible from people before the titanic sinks

Yup. And with the game having a price tag of over 200 million now, they are going to want to milk it hard to make up for it. So, if each person buys the game (50), and pays for 1 month assuming no free 1 month, that's $65 per person for the first month to learn the game. 200,000,000 divided by 65 is 3,076,923 players to make up costs the first month. If they only get 1.5 million people (using TOR's first month value), they'd make $97,500,000 in the first month.

From there, they will make at best, $22,500,000 a month after the first month. If they retain their full player base rather than dropping off (as is the general trend), that means they need to have $200,000,000-$97,500,000, or $102,500,000, they will need to keep the 1.5 million people for roughly half a year to break even on development costs.

By 6 months in, a sizable chunk will have broken out of the game content, and make it take longer, and longer. If the game is actually a success, and the population grows, then it will drop to breaking even shorter.

So clearly they will want to up the price of buying in and micro transactions to extract the most resources in those first few months when they have their huge population. Plus, the $200 million figure is only a threshold from a few months ago, that cost is still rising.

It's basically $20 for an extra race, better mount, and exp bonus. That's essentially what we call a cash shop.

Box price + subscription fee + cash shop = shady fucking cashgrab. All these new WoW clones are the same - they care more about siphoning as much $ from you than they do about creating a quality game.

This is like a huge red flag. Anyone who felt like they made a quality game wouldn't tarnish it with these kinds of awful business practices.

This shit will be free to play within a year.

This is a modern day digital collectors edition, if you haven't been playing MMO's since 2004, I understand, so I will lay it down for you with a few recent examples.

Rift: http://biobreak.wordpress.com/2011/0...tion-worth-it/

This is before it went Free to Play.

SWTOR: http://techland.time.com/2011/12/20/...-old-republic/

This is before it went FTP, the digital deluxe version had all the in game goodies without the cool stuff in the box.

TERA: http://store.steampowered.com/app/212753/?cc=nl

This shit is still available and was on day one. This is the same edition from before it went FTP.

The idea I'm trying to get across to you is that this is the normal thing now. Almost every game launches with a digital add-on package of mounts and such that you can buy. Most of these games did not start with a cash shop, in fact none of them did. Yes they found the FTP model more lucrative in the long run but that's just how things have evolved.

Mounts and vanity pets are in almost every digital collectors edition for an MMO out there. This time it included a race, but it's no more shady than any of the other games offering incentives for paying a little extra for a slightly easier experience.

Believe what you want however.

There's a reason why all of those games are meh.

Free-to-Play Microtransaction came around as a means for new MMOs to be created without having a barrier to entry, as a way for new MMOs to survive with WoW out.

However, since then, it has changed the core of MMOs. It isn't so much about what you earn, and what you work for, because now you can pay for extra advantages so that your same amount of work nets more result, and exclusive items.

Most people see this, and go "Well, alright. So long as it is cosmetic." (as in TF2, DOTA 2, etc.), but when you go beyond that into things that have a direct effect on game play, rather than just cosmetics, it makes it so the game isn't giving back what you put in in terms of effort, but effort + real life money. That's an issue.

I don't believe that the reason that the above games I mentioned are meh is because they offered a collectors edition of the game, digital or otherwise. I do believe that they had some very flawed design principles and I also believe that ESO will probably be the last MMO if its kind. However, I don't believe it is a bad game and I don't think their decision to hide the 10th race behind the Imperial edition is really a big deal. Yeah it's a shitty move and they probably should not have done that, but to also complain about things like a mount and whatever else is really just rolling into full retard at this point and people are just looking for shit to hate. Games give you some small advantage these days for paying extra, even single player games.

I'm not saying that I enjoy that direction but it is something that is normal and a company shouldn't really be hated on for doing it. The rings are earnable in game (for the extra experience bonus when leveling with a friend) the mount is not implied to be any faster than any other mount you just save some money, and the other perks are probably pretty small. The ability to craft imperial armor was already in the last beta if you found the book, and if you have no interest in being Imperial race then it's probably not even that important to you to get the pack. In no way does this even imply that they are headed towards a cash shop either, Rift lasted a LONG time without moving to that model and it's a model that they decided to move to with their entire company and it had very little to do with the success of the game itself.

Bottom line for me though, this isn't shady. There's nothing in the shadows about this. It's all up front. Take it or leave it. Use a new word if you have to but there's nothing underhanded about the collectors edition.

Why? Why shouldn't we hate them for doing it? Bioware deserved the hate they got for Mass Effect 3. The moment we start saying what you are, saying it is normal so we shouldn't hate on people for it, that's consent for them to do it. No, raise bad press, make a fuss, scream and shout over it, or else the market will continue to devolve.

I have not paid for a game since Square Enix shut down Chrono Ressurrection, as they have shown absolutely nothing but contempt for any player based interaction with their legal IP. Sure, I myself will not be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but I am showing through my abstention in paying them that their policies are unacceptable. If you just pawn off the responsibility to others to not buy something you're against, you're equally as responsible for the state of the gaming market as it is.

well said.