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I`ve decided to put a more userfriendly FAQ about the costs of playing Eve Online so let me introduce the Eve Online Unofficial Pricing FAQ.

-I've heard there's going to be a monthly charge for this game, is that true?

The only announcement from CCP regarding price has been this:


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Well, it looks like it, players will have to pay a fee for future upgrades, maintain of servers, staff that will work on all that and more.
But it has not been decited yet how much the fee will be, or if it will be monthly/yearly. That's the way it works
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With that said, Eve Online will be a Massively Multiplayer Online Game(MMOG) and
SPECULATION has been that the price of the game will include store bought software in the range of $25-$50 and a monthly fee of around $10-$30 (all figures in U.S. Dollars)

-How much will the monthly charge be?

As stated before, there has NEVER been an official statement about pricing but all thebig MMOG games are monthly fee pay-to-play, most being $10. Asherons Call, EverQuest, Fighter Ace, Air Warrior are all $10, WarBirds is $25, and the most expensive is Aces High at $30. So we can speculate that it will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-$30.

-I don't understand, I play Half Life, Tribes, Quake and Star Craft online, and I'm not charged a monthly fee. What's the difference?

There is a substantial difference between the costs of maintaining multiplayer games like Half Life, Quake, Star Craft, Unreal, Myth, Diablo, Delta Force etc. Essentially what those games do is provide you with limited dedicated server space with built in matchmaking software to help you find other players who are playing at the same time. The servers and bandwidth required to host matchmaking multiplayer games like those mentioned above are miniscule compared to the pipes and machines required to host MMOG's like Everquest, Asheron's Call and Eve Online..

-Can't they ditch the monthly fee and just have pop up ads or something?

From the Star Wars Galaxies forum


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In a nutshell, ads don't make money for hardly anyone anywhere on the Internet. Countless businesses have crashed and burned over the last few years discovering that. Pretty much all those matchmaking services I mentioned relied on ads, and well, they're not here anymore.

It takes a very large, very high traffic site to make serious money on ads.
And the costs I described are serious money.


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He's correct, as this latest Internet crash has shown, even internet companies that charge for services are having revenue problems (Amazon, eBay, eToys, etc.) If an online business relies solely on advertising revenue, they'd better have a user base of around 10 million people and up to make it profitable and survive.

-I refuse to pay $10-$35 a month to play an online game. What do you say to that?

Well, if you refuse to pay, you won't play. Simple as that. MMOG's like Everquest, Ultima, and Eve Online are SERVICES. Just like Cable, Digital Satellite, or Cellular systems. You buy the product (Cable Box, Satellite Dish, Cell Phone, Software)
then you pay a monthly fee for the content and services that they provide THRU that product.

The price that they ultimately decide to charge is going to be whatever it needs to be in order for CCP to
1. Recoup developement costs
2. Cover operating expenses (including continuing developement)
3. Make enough of a profit to build a “war chest” to cover the costs of developing future products
4. Pay back their investors.

IF, they charge more than the “market” is willing to pay, they will have to charge less, if they have to charge less than they need to cover Costs 1 & 2, they will go out of business and we can all go back
to buying PRODUCTS like UT and Quake.

-What are these “developement costs” you speak of?

quote from Star Wars Galaxies forum


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-developement. This is, literally, millions of dollars. Figure a largish team (larger than is common for a standalone game) for longer than a standard standalone game development cycle. On top of that, some of the people on the team that you have to assemble are rare in the games industry–DBAs and fault-tolerant network designers and mission critical system administrators. (Us designers usually come a bit cheaper.)

- deploying the servers. This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy,
the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. You're writing to disk constantly, you need a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc.


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-How much could it cost to set up a few servers and a decent internet connection?

quote from Star Wars Galaxies forum


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Assuming you live in the US, you are likely paying someone around $20 for the privilege of tying up some wires or phone lines and using up some bandwidth. In normal usage, you're not using it all that much–odds are that even if you have a cable modem or ISDN, that you're not doing bandwidth-intensive stuff all the time. In fact, if you DO have cable, I suggest you go check right now and see that your user agreement probably PROHIBITS you from doing bandwidth intensive things all the time. In my area, my cable provider says “you can't run a dedicated FPS server on your cable modem,” for example.

That's what you get for 20 bucks.

Playing an MMOG is probably one of the most bandwidth intensive things you do on a regular basis. It's like downloading a large file, the entire time that you are playing. The key here is that the bandwidth is *sustained* bandwidth, not “bursty” the way that most things you do on the Net are, like web browsing. ISPs don't like sustained bandwidth, because it means they can support fewer people. They rely on the burstiness to squeeze more people onto the limited capacity of the wires.

Why does this matter to us? Well, simple logic. Let's say that you at your end are using 1k of bandwidth every second while playing our game. That means that we at our end are also using 1k a second receiving
what you are doing and sending back what you see. But for you, that's $20 and you're worried about one guy.

For us, it's a lot less than $20 a head, but we have to pay for the bandwidth usage of EVERYONE playing the game.


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-How could we get this game free!

The only thing that has come to mind is the way they are going with the game Project Entropia. here is an quote from the Entropia HQ (http://entropia.hqgaming.com)


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In order for it (Project Entropia) to be free to gamers & consumers to play without paying for subscriptions or software to the game. The game will inject real monetary value into a virtual currency, backed only by the stability of the American dollar in the world markets. The developers have contrived to add a so-called percentage tax per every player & shopper inside the game regarding all transactions. Whether these transactions are for virtual game items, or for products purchased by Internet shoppers for their real lives.
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For any other questions about Eve Online, refer to the FAQ


Disclaimer:
This is intended as an UNOFFICIAL set of Frequently Asked Pricing Questions. It is by NO MEANS connected with CCP.
This thread is the original idea of Der Teufel of the World War 2 Online boards.
All Star Wars Galaxies quotes are from Raph Koster and the thread can be found here: http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/001163.html