A lot of discussion on the Twitterphone this week has centered around micropayments. @Petterm started a thread (ending up on Buzz) about Allods Online and their cash shop debacle, and as we speak, Star Trek Online forums are being hammered by disgruntled players update over recent c-shop decisions there. To make matters worse, the latest Industry Gamers newsletter quotes industry analyst Michael Pachter predicting that Activision will need to start charging for Call of Duty online play.

I’m going to open with a comment from Soss on the Industry Gamer article, because it couldn’t be said any better:

This is ridiculous to think that Game companies must now be making money at all times on a single product. What happened to making a game, making your profit, and moving on to the next game? Nooooo, everyone wants to adopt the paid subscription model to squeeze as much money out of people as you can.

We’ve got Xbox Live which charges a yearly fee of $50 for online play now, and Sony just released their optional PSN Plus service for $50 per annum (although multiplayer is still free). We’ve also got ISP fees to pay, on top of whatever other bills we have to pay to actually, you know, live life.

Situations like this remind me of a philosophy I recognized in high school. Every teacher used to give out homework. Every teacher would tell students that the homework shouldn’t be a big deal; it’s just about 30 minutes of work. Every teacher failed to recognize that every teacher said the same thing, which for a seven period school day meant three and a half hours of homework that night.

Some would say that a monthly micropayment isn’t a lot to ask to support the games you love. The problem is that we’re paying $60 up front for the game itself, plus the console (or PC), plus access fees for the Internet…plus fees for every other game that publishers want us to buy (each which has it’s own up front cost).

This need for consistent revenue is an admirable goal. I like the fact that I get paid on schedule, and I would love it if my payments were made from ever-increasing sources, but that’s asking a lot from my employer. For a company like Activision to come to the consumer, hat in hand, with the excuse that they need to now charge for what has been a relatively free ride for the past half a decade is asinine.

What the industry would be doing is shooting itself in the foot. People would end up buying fewer games in the long run because they just couldn’t afford the multi-player aspect of every single one of them. Some people do buy these games strictly for the multiplayer, which means that they would gate their purchases by group consensus: what are all of my friends playing? Everyone throw in, and ignore other games because we don’t have the money/want to pay for other multiplayer access.

I’ve come to terms with c-shops, when done correctly (which are few and far between), and personally, I don’t play a lot of multiplayer console titles, but we’re in the midst of a very slippery slope here. We’ve got monthly sub games with c-shops on top. We’re seeing uber-premium items for sale in-game ($25 mounts, $55 guild renaming tokens). Now we’re talking about ongoing fees – taking away what people have come to know for free – for what is for many people the most popular aspect of the $60 game they just purchased (and in the case of the CoD series, repurchased)?

This feels like either a blatant attempt at gouging (since this was spurred on by Activision, there’s no surprise there), or a way to shore up bottom lines. But these methods are just band-aids if the latter is true. If it’s so difficult for these publishers to make money on their products, they need to reevaluate their business model from top to bottom, not keep adding fees for their convenience.