April 2012 – Mana Obscura

I promise this article is going to be the last thing I write about the World of Warcraft Annual Pass. Once this is finished, I’m done with the whole sorry saga. To me, the whole process has been a great concept gone disastrously wrong, exposing how far a company will push their terms and conditions at the expense of customer satisfaction.

It’s also – and I’m being honest here – the symptom of a bet gone bad. Of calculating the probability of when key events would happen, and getting it wrong. While these events are still somewhat inside Blizzard’s control, it’s something I’m aware I’ve got to take on the chin.

But it’s not an emotionless decision. One doesn’t just turn their back on a games studio in the blink of an eye. It takes time for opinions to change, for the fan to metamorph into the cynic. It took this latest saga to realise just how far my opinions had changed about the studio and their commercial decisions.

Continue reading “Annual Pass: A Post Mortem”

Let me be frank: I’m nervous as hell about the pre-purchase trend emerging within MMOs. While it’s understandable that publishers want to recoup earlier some of the oceans of money they sink into these games, I can’t help but feel that there’s a big potential for problems later on. The latest offer of Beta with Everything can, I think, compound the issue.

I’ll start off with the issues around pre-purchasing. In the UK at least, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Within the space of three years we’ve gone from a free preorder system, to paying a nominal deposit, to paying full price for a pre-purchase. Sure, I can choose to wait until the game launches and the previews are our so that I feel more confident in my purchase, but then I might miss out on getting a spot on the same server as my friends or not getting the character name I wanted. Add to that special pre-purchase bonuses like early access and in-game items, and delaying that purchase can seem like a bad idea.

As Spinks and Ravious points out, this could be the start of a worrying trend. As more bonuses get added to pre-purchase sales, the the pressure increases on us to take the plunge and sign up.

Continue reading “Pre-Purchase for Beta”