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.
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I feel like subscriptions are just fine though.
If you can’t afford subscriptions like those, then you should probably have other priorities to really worry about.
That said, I play WoW on and off, I never play 24 months in a row or so until the next expansion. I often total at barely half a year or maybe even less depending on the expansion. Like currently I’ve only paid for one month and have bought game time with lots of gold I had, but I barely played during these times.
If someone would play every month every expansion they probably easily got their money’s worth out of it if they’re that invested in the game, and probably spend far less on other games or hobbies. I think subscriptions for MMO games have changed the least of all too, comparing it to like Netflix that changed prices regularly and easily doubled since it became popular. And they’re most definitely not going to reduce subscription fees because other unrelated things got more expensive.
Same principle for streaming services, you probably don’t watch all of them, so why not just limit yourself to one and swap between each? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy every streaming service, they’re luxury and entertainment products, if you can’t afford it then simply don’t buy it. I do think streaming services get out of hand, but they keep doing it because people keep buying it.
If you can’t afford subscriptions like those, then you should probably have other priorities to really worry about.
If you did a simple search for poverty and How much people struggled back in 2004 when World of Warcraft released versus now, you would see that families are having a lot harder time than ever before. It has not improved at all for most people. Wealth inequality has grown massively in the past 20 years that World of Warcraft has been around. So yeah a lot of people do have different priorities, And now, the price of playing a live service game that required a subscription can definitely impact you. The same thing can be said though with other subscriptions like Netflix and Hulu. It really fucking destroys your monthly income. Alone they don’t, but added up they definitely do
A World of Warcraft subscription is not a human right. Everyone makes a cost-benefit decision about whether they can afford it.
And again, like I said, if you can’t afford it then you should rethink your priorities. It’s a luxury product, not a basic needs product.
And like I also said, these game subscriptions have barely changed in price compared to many other things in the past 20 years. They’re not that expensive.
Considering you’re talking about multiple game subscriptions and streaming subscriptions in your post, I don’t think you have it that bad anyway. You’d also require a console or gaming PC or both, a lot of people don’t have all that. Subscriptions are easily the cheapest part of the hobby.
You’re just bad with organising your subscriptions and should change how to get the most out of it.
Dude, I’m not disagreeing with your point, but your presentation is beat up from the feet up.
Caveat: been drinking because gestures at everything
- At one point, you say it’s $950 a year after establishing that the actual cost is $950 after two years.
- Your investment counterexample arbitrarily includes a $200 monthly additional investment which blows everything up and makes the example pretty much incomparable
- Your investment counterexample also assumes an immediate initial outlay of $950 rather than distributing that over 24 months.
Basically you’re comparing two wildly different scenarios, which makes your point seem pretty broken, regardless of how right your actual thesis is.
TL;DR: Cancel your MMOs, play retro and discounted indie games, and stay in school, kids.
Right? The math here is all over the place. Like he figured out how much WoW would cost over two years and then asked ChatGPT for an investment plan with $950 or something.
That’s literally what they did. They deleted and reposted because last time they forgot to edit out the “here’s a breakdown you can post to reddit” comment from ChatGPT. You can see me quote it in my comment history right now, but the post is gone.
Ugh. Fucking AI slop. As if Lemmy was so huge it was actually worth putting that garbage on here anyway.
See it’s not about posting slop for slop sake. It’s so when the account become some kind of shill it has “legitimate” history to say they’re not a shill.
Another reason to play open source remakes instead of the original
Like what? Can you give examples? Free RuneScape or something?
That’s why I quit gamepass. I need to be cemented to my xbox most of the time to justify continuing the subscription.
Where the hell are you finding an 8.5% ROI in this economy??
Russian war bonds
I don’t know how anyone has time for two live service games at once. Even in my peak college slacker days, just World of Warcraft alone was a lot. I started playing Honkai: Star Rail this summer and a friend wanted me to start The War Within expansion with her. I’ve been doing the tourist thing in WoW for a few years now, and even still with that casual pace of play, the combination was far too much for me these days.
My gaming tastes can get mercurial, so I prefer the irregular stuff now. I love that I can just log into Guild Wars 2 any time without even thinking about money, and I’ve spent a whole $10 on HSR in the six months I’ve been playing it. Makes it much easier when I suddenly get a few days of light work here and there.
Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.
Also my first deep dive into a gacha. One of my friends also plays Genshin and ZZZ and I’m like, hoooow? 😂
There were so. many. quests. that I’m just now getting to the “log in to spend energy” mode with HSR. The game’s absolutely packed with one-time content and being an MMO player, I’m so not used to this rapid release schedule.
I don’t know how anyone has time for two live service games at once
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
Your ChatGPT analysis is still garbage.
Regardless, if people feel that spending that money on a game is valuable to them, why is that so unbelievable to you? Do you expect everyone to sit quietly in the dark when they’re not working? Let people enjoy things.
Excellent, except for a tiny little detail:
I don’t play games to make money. I play games because I want to play games.
It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.
It’s because they used ChatGPT, with predictable results.
Yeah, that $950 was already 2 years of payments, which OP was complaining about “investing” in his games. Where are they coming up with an additional $200 per month?! At that point, why not just invest that $200/mo and keep enjoying your games?
EDIT: OP changed their math literally a minute after I posted this. It makes more sense now.
It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.
Thanks for pointing that out. My math was horribly off here. That’s what I get for using Google sheets to try and work this out myself :( I corrected it. I was accidentally multiplying by something without realizing it.
Giving up entertainment for money in the future is impossible for a lot of people.
lol why tf do you have two year subs to two different MMOs and why are you comparing the cost to an investment.
And I’m a psycho who keeps 3 OSRS memberships going because I don’t want jagex to go under and delete my accounts
I think the cost of WoW has been fairly reasonable over the last 20 years. The subscription has stayed the same price of $15 per month the whole time, and if you know you are going to play WoW for the whole year, it is just $13 per month with an annual sub. The only thing that has gone up in price is the expansions which have gone from $40 to $50.
I think another point that you are missing is that WoW players often spend most of their game time playing WoW, which means they spend less on buying other games.
It’s like those “if you don’t smoke and put away that money for 30 years you can buy a Ferrari!”
Where’s your Ferarri grandma?
It’s okay to have fun and WOW is cheaper than boose and a lot of other things, if you can afford it ofc.
I have never thought it is worth it, even back when WOW released, the economy was better and I was a teenager with a lot more disposable income I would never pay for a subscription to play a game. It is just a terrible way to run a game and I have always thought that.
I’ve never really understood why people would support that kind of model personally, there has never been a justification in my book.
Back then Guild Wars 1 was and always will be the far superior game when put up against WOW in my personal opinion and once I’d paid for that I could play it every month without further outlay. Shame how they ruined it with GW2 (unpopular opinion I’m sure but I stand by it xD)
