Pirates of the Burning Sea is too expensive

Pirates of the Burning Sea is a game with many good points. Keen and Graev just pointed out one, the great ability to search a PotBS database in game by pressing F1. I keep liking the economy game and the ship-to-ship combat. But then I hear that Flying Lab Software has announced the subscription price scheme, and one month of PotBS costs $14.99 (with the usual reductions for longer subscription periods), the same as World of Warcraft. Only PotBS is no WoW!

Warcry had a recent editorial about The Year the Subscription Model Died. They say that post World of Warcraft new MMORPGs with a subscription business model failed to attract more than a quarter of a million subscribers, while free games like Club Penguin, Second Life, or Habbo Hotel attract millions of players. Doh! Stop the press! Headline: "People prefer free stuff over having to pay for it!"

If you have two restaurants sitting right next to each other, and one is offering high-quality meals for $15, and the other is offering greasy junk food for the same price, the junk food restaurant will suffer. That does not mean that the restaurant model of demanding money for cooked food is dead. That does not mean the junk food place should give away their food for free and try to finance themselves by selling brand T-shirts or putting advertising on their walls. It simply means that the junk food place needs to adjust their prices to correspond to the quality of their food. Given the choice between a steak for $15 and a greasy burger for $5, enough people will opt for the burger.

MMORPGs aren't much different. As I said, PotBS has many good qualities. But to pretend that it is as good as WoW, that it has as much content, is as polished, and offers as much variety of gameplay is really stretching the truth. In a one-to-one comparison it is obvious that World of Warcraft is the better game. And while of course not every MMORPG player is price-sensitive (often time is the restricting factor), Pirates of the Burning Sea would be better served with a lower price tag reflecting that lower quality. Who says you can only either ask for $15 or nothing? Why not a $5 per month subscription, which would attract a larger number of players?