When I was a kid in high school, the economy wasn’t nearly as bad as it is right now. People are very very concerned right now with having enough money to pay their bills, housing has skyrocketed, cost of living dramatically up, salaries stagnating… Almost every single friend I have, I asked them why they no longer play World of Warcraft or similar games and the answer was the same. “I cannot justify paying a subscription monthly, I have way too many subscriptions right now like Netflix Hulu HBO max some that I’m even canceling”. This was pretty much the same exact response I heard from most of my friend community on discord. It seems that people find it a horrible value to buy a game and play it when it requires repeated purchases, but you also have to pay to subscribe to the game as well. That amount of money really, honestly adds up to a lot…
Simple example: playing Elder scrolls online and World of Warcraft for 2 years
World of Warcraft:
$15/month x 24 months = $360
$50 expansion every 2 years = $50
Total WoW cost: $410
Elder Scrolls Online:
$15/month x 24 months = $360
$90 expansion per year x 2 years = $180
Total ESO cost: $540
Combined total for both games over 2 years:
$410 + $540 = $950
Investing this money
Investment Breakdown:
Initial Investment: $950
Monthly Contribution: $200
Annual Interest Rate: 8.5% (compounded monthly)
Investment Period: 2 years (24 months)
Results:
Total Amount Invested: $950 (initial) + $4,800 (monthly contributions) = $5,750
Total Accrued Interest: $587.45
Total After 2 Years: $6,337.45
So in short, you are actually spending a huge sum of money on these games, about $950 a year at least by this very very rough estimate, and if you simply invested this money, you could see huge, monstrous returns on this money that could change your damn life. It’s for that reason that I cannot justify playing these games anymore. That’s just a subscription cost!! So astronomically high it’s unbelievable to me.
TLDR:
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Economic struggles make gaming subscriptions harder to justify.
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Rising living costs and stagnant wages have led people to cancel non-essential subscriptions.
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Many friends quit games like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online due to high subscription costs.
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Example costs over two years: – WoW: $410 – ESO: $540 – Total: $950
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Investing this amount with $200 monthly contributions at 8.5% interest could grow to $6,337.45 in two years. Overall, game subscription fees seem less worthwhile given the potential for financial growth.
Think of an MMO as a theme park. Used to have to wait in a really long ass line to get to each of the rides. Now, you have fast passes to get through all of the attractions as quickly as possible. This explains the MMO market nowadays. If you subscribe for 12 consecutive months to World of Warcraft, you won’t have enough stuff to play. The gameplay loop when you get to end game is essentially brainless and monotonous, it requires no time investment really at all. You just log in daily to do some repeatable tasks, Then you spam the exact same brain dead content over and over again currently it’s raids or dungeons. They added a scaling system about halfway through World of warcraft’s lifespan. So you either go normal heroic mythic raids or you do normal heroic mythic dungeons and then mythic dungeons scale all the way up to like the 30s so you just repeatedly run the same exact stuff over and over. Lots of people don’t have the fortitude to do this, so there is a lot less time invested nowadays in a single MMO and a lot more interspersion across other MMOs.
Elder scrolls online has some pretty good story content, but it’s not enough to keep you busy for an entire month either. Some people swear that it’s worth paying for and subscribing to the game for. If you don’t subscribe to the game, you don’t have any crafting bag, and by extension, you don’t have any inventory space to hold any materials, so it’s almost required to subscribe to Elder scrolls online. You can buy all the expansions with money, but that won’t give you a crafting bag and a bunch of other goodies. Game becomes virtually unplayable at that point and it’s frustrating