Where is my life time subscription option SE?

[NeoAmon]

Hello,

I'm absolutely in love with FFXIV and think Coil is one of my best MMO raiding experience ever. I have already subbed for 60 days but I would like to have a life time subscription please.

[anceru]

You realize that if SE let everyone purchase life-time subscriptions (and if everyone did so), their goal would no longer be to stretch the content to keep people playing the maximum amount of time, the goal would be to minimize maintenance costs for the game. They would no longer gain money for adding content to the game, because everyone paid a huge lump sum already.

[Miley]

Hello,

I'm absolutely in love with FFXIV and think Coil is one of my best MMO raiding experience ever. I have already subbed for 60 days but I would like to have a life time subscription please.

Ps3 player

[KhalidTheGreat]

How about auto-renewal ?

[Reslin]

Hello,

I'm absolutely in love with FFXIV and think Coil is one of my best MMO raiding experience ever. I have already subbed for 60 days but I would like to have a life time subscription please.

Lifetime subscriptions are a terrible idea. LOTRO realized that awhile back. They had an issue and the issue was they had more than enough people needed to sustain the mmo. Enough to be very profitable and lotro was a solid success. The issue? Most of the players that kept playing the game bought a lifetime sub. At first this was great considering the cost for the lifetime membership. However, a few years later.. they weren't making as much money as they had hoped. They were making "Just enough" to keep it afloat. With the number of players they had this should have been extremely profitable but lifetime subs meant they only payed once.

[AlexionSkylark]

They had an issue and the issue was they had more than enough people needed to sustain the mmo. Enough to be very profitable and lotro was a solid success. The issue? Most of the players that kept playing the game bought a lifetime sub. At first this was great considering the cost for the lifetime membership.

The lifetime sub for LOTRO implied that you payed the equivalent of 2 years of subscription in advance. This was done at the LOTRO launch.

I seriously doubt the ammount of people who bought and played LOTRO at launch AND would pay a sub for 2 years AND continue playing after that is expressive enough to justify that argument... But then again, we can only speculate.

[Reslin]

The lifetime sub for LOTRO implied that you payed the equivalent of 2 years of subscription in advance. This was done at the LOTRO launch.

I seriously doubt the ammount of people who bought and played LOTRO at launch AND would pay a sub for 2 years AND continue playing after that is expressive enough to justify that argument... But then again, we can only speculate.

They outright stated it was a problem so they did. Thing is most of the people playing LOTRO do so because they're hardcore lotr fans. Most (not all) that got it on release are still playing. Everyone in my guild in LOTRO were lifetime members. My wife still plays and she's a lifetime member as well.

That was until the game went free to play and brought in new blood.

[AlexionSkylark]

The big question to ask here is... would these lifetime subbers be active subscribers for more than 2 years IF they didn't had the lifetime subscription?

This argument seems a bit to me the one thrown around frequently about how "the game industry lost 500m USD (hypothetic value) to piracy this year", estimating how much money the companies would have made if all pirated games estimated to be in use were legit copies bought legally. Problem is, that argument is completely false. Most people who pirate games don't have money to buy the games legally (at least not as many as they have as illegal copies of). If piracy didn't exist, those people would simply not have those games, because they couldn't afford it. Hell, a lot of people wouldn't even have bought the CONSOLE if they knew they'd have to for out the kind of cash needed to buy games. So, the gaming industry didn't "lose" nearly as much as they claim to have lost.

But anyway, I'm deviating too much from the main topic. What I meant was, as the issue I talked about in the last paragraph, nobody (even turbine) can say what would happen if lifetime subs didn't exist.

[Fensfield]

All the other relevant arguments aside, for me it all comes down to anceru's point.

Single payment lifetime subscription options are invariably only available for MMO's where companies don't think they'll be operating long enough to make a significantly greater return from an average sized subscription base. They're a cynical ploy to get a little more out of an MMO with a predicted short burn lifespan.

So no, I don't want a lifetime subscription option. Why? Because even if it was implemented without the thought that it'd let them grab all the money they could while the going was good, it could potentially push them toward that logic and damage the game's development in the long term.

[Orophin]

Lifetime subscriptions are not a viable solution for MMOs with a long term plan. I'm sure they want FFXIV to run for at least 10 years, so unless you're willing to fork over like $1500 (about how much it'd cost for the 12.99 option over 10 years) I don't really see this happening.

Fensfield brings up a great counterpoint for the game as well. Just imagine if people had bought a lifetime sub to the original 1.0 game and SE decided not to go forward with the remake. People would be so screwed.