Hellgate London - Bill Roper Letter @ Hellgate Guru

Bill Roper is obviously feeling a little pressure over the Hellgate: London subscription model and has penned an open letter explaining "Another way of thinking of this would be that we’re delivering smaller expansions over time rather than having players wait a year or more before they finally get something new". Here's the intro from Hellgate Guru:

When we first started talking about Hellgate: London, there were a lot of interpretations about exactly what kind of game it was that we were making. Our online plans are as ambitious and exciting as the game itself, so I wanted to spend a few minutes talking directly to our fans about this very important topic.

Thanks, Sol Invictus!
More information.

I don't think they need to worry about it tbh.

I mean if LotRo can drag in the masses this will be huge.

Penny Arcade has created a comic of Fagship studios' subscription method.

Kinda like the mounts idea.

I really like the direction they're taking by offering smaller expansions over time and would like to see that idea taken even further. It seems to me there should be middle ground somewhere between client-server and stand-alone applications, and games could benefit from something like that right away.

I wouldn't mind seeing patches and mods roll out faster. In a system that involves frequent updates, somebody might come up with a way to reduce piracy too.

The idea of spreading the costs of expansions over time as a subscription isn't inherently a bad one, but in this case I feel it's just marketing trying to make a bitter pill go down better. If that is truly what their goal is, then the monthly fee should be a buck or two a month, even five if they really work at good new content.

If they can add 50% as much content as exists in the original game every two to two-and-a-half months, then $10/month is reasonable and inline with expansion packs in value, but I don't see that happening. Maybe they'll surprise me?

Edit: I should note that I didn't see anything about $10/mth in the main article, but it's mentioned several times in the responses to the article so I figure those people read something somewhere else that I missed. If I'm just repeating a rumor, then I apologize.

to me, it seems like this type of system is more of penalising the player if he doesn’t subscribe.. true the expansions would be cheaper in the short run and keep the game refreshing, however, blocking out all the updated content when you cancel the subscription doesn’t sound good, Id rather buy an expansion pack then be able to use it no matter if I’m a subscriber or not, plus I think having non subscribers have only 3 character slots while subscriber have 12 feels more like penalising too. I have a bad feeling that later on they will make a new character class that only subscribers can play. I hope I’m wrong.

Originally Posted by Surlent
Penny Arcade has created a comic of Fagship studios' subscription method.

Hehe - that pretty much sums it up, I'd say.