Phantasy Star Online pricing seems to have been established for the XBox
 

http://gamestop.com/product.asp?cook...ct%5Fid=210292

Game is $39.99, first two months are free, $8.95 every month after...

:up: Great price for a great game.

Meanwhile, owners of the GC version are still SOL.

Why is it 8.95? i guess it doesn't connect to the Xbox live networks.

According to the page I linked to in the first post:

I don't know 8.95 more after already paying 50 for a year? That seems to be the same price before there was a Live charge on Dreamcast if I remember correctly. I think it should 3-5 dollars a month at the most.

I'm not going to continue my Xbox live subscription after my year is up... they're gonna charge a monthy fee and if some games are gonna charge extra, then forget it.

Yum. Yum. Yum. :drool:

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone - I knew it was coming. Doesn't matter, since I'm not interested anyway.

It was 1500 yen for 3 months on PSO ver. 2

:thmbsdwn: Sega

Well, you need XBox Live to play this game online so either:

A. It uses Microsoft's servers which should already be theoretically paid for with the start-up fee (this isn't a MMORPG so it isn't server intensive and requiring above and beyond maintenance) or

B. It uses Sega's own servers and XBox Live fees are just a donation to MS.

This is exactly why I haven't bought XBox Live yet. I don't feel like paying fees on top of fees for online games especially when they don't make any sense.

*scratches PSO off console game list*

Not in this lifetime Sega.

I love this game, but I'm tempted to pass on it because I don't want to see this trend of pay-for-play pricing on other titles as well. Just think, you pay $50 per year for XBL, and then have all these individual releases start charging monthly fees on top of it. I understand PC titles have this structure, but isn't that what XBL was trying to eliminate?

Jeremy

This is obviously the future for some games. (at least the online RPGs) I think Microsoft was pretty clear up front that not every game would be free to play on XBL. Just hope the price of XBL doesn't jump a lot for the next year of use.

At least you get two months free. GameCube owners paid $50 for the game and got no free months.

MMORPG's or games similar to that such as PSO were always going to have a monthly fee on top of Xbox Live. But those are the only genre so far.

In any case, I don't see how anyone could complain about the extra fees for MMORPG's. You would have to pay the same amount to play it on your PC.

Also, It's still cheaper for the first year than the Gamecube version if you factor in the ability to communicate effectively. The second year remains to be seen. But who will still be playing PSO after their first year? I don't even want to play it now.

Think about the pricing structure for a minute after the 1 year of XBox Live is up. It's highly possible any MMORPG's you play will be factored into the monthly fee at a reduced cost. First Party MMORPG's may be even cheaper. We will probably find out at E3.

Of course you could always go play Everquest on the PS2 for $9.99 a month without voice communication, content download or any other benefit of XBox Live.

Finally, if you don't want to pay for XBox Live at the end of you year, that's fine. But not renewing due to MMORPG charges is just silly. There will be around 50 games that use XBox Live at the end of the year and 4% of them will be MMORPGs. The other 96% will be within the monthly fee. Did I mention Halo 2 will be released around the end of your subscription?

The pricing structure of PSO on a PC and the Xbox are not similar. Xbox live is designed to be an online gaming platform - that is all. You cannot check email, work at home, or websurf on it. When you pay your broadband/dial up monthly fee on a PC, you have the ability to do pretty much anything online. If you choose to play a MMORPG like PSO, then you have to pay additional. If you pay for Xbox Live, you have the ability to do online gaming, that's all. PSO certainly falls under that category.

If PSO does reach a desired level of success with a subscription plan, don't you think others will follow suit? Although it is not planned now, what's not to say each developer won't start adding in a monthly charge to play their game. By allowing Sega to take advantage of the seemingly good Xbox Live plan, it's only creating a blueprint for future games to follow. I can certainly see Xbox live acting only as the meeting place for gamers in the future, with additional charges for each game that they choose to play. Remember, it's all about the green.

People keep saying MMORPGs inherently have monthly costs associated with them, but you also have to take into consideration the differences in playing online with the XBox versus the PC:

XBox:
XBL $50 per year
Broadband Connection ~$45 per month
MMORPG $10 per month/per game

PC:
Broadband Connection ~$45 per month
MMORPG $10 per month/per game

The difference? That $50 just to get your XBL online. Now, that XBL isn't an ISP, it's just an access point to your ISP. Some can say it gets you voice communication and gaming lobbies, but really, that's up to the developers and the game itself whether it wants to include that, not something XBL "provides".

I think the point everyone is trying to make is if more and more developers start to use the pay-for-play approach, that XBL subscription just ends up being a superfluous cost.

Jeremy

I can see if you have LIVE only for this game.. it's be a little expensive.. but as stated before, there are LOTS of good LIVE games on thier way and they are all free to use. I have no problem paying for PSO because 1. The game rocks. 2. Payments may scare off a good number of the idiots that made me quit the game when it was on DC (well, that and there's no Gameshark for Xbox!).. I don't have LIVE yet, was waiting for this game.. but I do know I will be buying MechAssualt as well. And PGR2 is going to be LIVE enabled..

Pixyboi, again I concur with your comments. There are plenty of awesome games to be played using XBL right now, and so far I think the service is pretty flawless (game developers just need to exploit it a bit more, like GR's online crashes and MA's poor lobby implementation).

And PSO indeed rocks. I never thought of it that way but yes maybe the monthly fee will scare off the losers who would ruin the experience (see MA, maybe that needs a monthly fee as well!). PGR2, Midtown Madness 3, Halo 2 are all going to be live, as well as Amped 2, RalliSport Online, etc. Then there are the games that take advantage of downloadable content (Splinter Cell, Brute Force) but I wouldn't want to pay $50 a year just for this priviledge.

But when SW Galaxies, and True Fantasy Online, and PSO, and whatever else MMORPGs are in the pipeline are finally released, then they are all going to be fighting for the same market share, because not everyone is going to pay for all three and will have to decide between one of them. That's where MS should "subsidize" the cost of the monthly MMORPG fees with the XBL subscription fee. Maybe only pay $3.95 a month, because you're already paying $4.17 a month with the XBL ($50/12).

Jeremy

I don't dispute that a persistant, constantly changing online game like a MMORPG is server intensive and requires fees above and beyond that of the XBox Live fee. That is par for the course with the genre.

PSO is not a MMORPG. It is not a bandwidth hog. It is a vert small game by comparison. That's the problem. The additional fees are not necessary except to donate money to Sega. If this game does well then what stops every other developer from tacking on service fees?

The main reason XBox Live sounded great, to me at least, was that it was supposed to be a one stop shopping deal. I pay a one time start-up fee and ultimately a flat amount each month to cover my online game needs. MS runs their own servers and works out deals with the devs so games run smoothly and there is no cheating.

As it's starting to look now, I'd be paying for a glorified matching service and every damn game could come with its own set of fees.

Edited to add:

The XBox Live fees are almost certainly going to increase. Even if it is just $10 a month for the service and Sega starts charging for its 2k4 lineup you could end up paying $30 a month in fees just to play two games online.

So even if you have no plans to go online with Xbox PSO, you are still required to purchase Xbox Live ($49.99) just to get the offline portion of the game to work? rotfl

From Gamespot:

"Phantasy Star Online can be played in its offline mode, but the game will still require you to have a valid Xbox Live account to play the game in any form. The reasoning behind this is one of timing. The Japanese version of the game was a pack-in with Xbox Live, where requiring an Xbox Live sign-up made sense. In order to get the game over here quickly, Microsoft has opted not to remove this limitation. Citing security reasons, Microsoft also announced that the North American version of the game will not connect to players from other regions.

"The game will feature voice support via the Xbox Live headset. In lobbies, the headset will allow you to chat with the seven players closest to you. Those seven players will be denoted by a speaker icon, which will float above their heads. When in a game, you can play and chat with up to three other players."

So, two things that suck about this: one, that you have to have XBL regardless of playing online or off; and two, that you can't play with people from Europe or Japan. Playing all those international players was the best part of PSO on the Dreamcast, especially with the communication icons. I remember playing with a friend of mine and two Japanese players on the Japanese server, and we were having full conversations between the party using icons and the menu-driven conversational text. I had my friend on a cell phone and we were just blown away.

Take that away, and I'm not buyin'...

Jeremy

Sounds like a bunch oc reap compared to the DC version

See... what I love about this, is that when X-box Live was first announced, everyone with an X-box was saying how it was so much better than Sony Online because you only had to pay one fee and get access to all online games where as with Sony you would have to pay a fee for each game. Now I can just sit back and laugh (oh, how I laugh!)

This is some crap, though. To make you pay for too online fees to play online, and one online fee to play offline is rediculous. Will people do it though? Many will.

People may have said this, but Microsoft clearly said that not every game was guaranteed to be free to play. I'm betting almost all online RPGs will charge a monthly fee on every console.

I expected extra fees, but I feel 9 dollars a month is a little unreasonable since its not an MMORPG. I won't purchase it, and all I'm saying is that I better not be paying extra fees to play Halo 2.