Changing Mindsets: Understanding Halo’s pay structure
On the surface it may seem that online play for Halo 3 is covered by paying the Xbox Live Gold fee. This is in fact not true. Halo 3 essentially has a monthly fee of about $2.50 payed out in quarterly installments of 800 Microsoft spacebucks. Microsoft just really doesn’t want you to think of it that way.
For those not in the know, Halo 3 offers new map packs every four months or so. They cost around 800 points and a few weeks before the next map pack is offered they’re given away for free.
The way it’s billed is that the new map packs are optional, and that you don’t need them if you want to play the game on a regular basis. In reality the barriers they put in place to playing without the pack (many modes are unavalable, most of the players are on the new maps, ect), the game without them plays out more like an extended demo of the online game than a full fledged product.
When the fee is dropped from the maps, the time between the free download has all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork to play Halo again. Essentially, they’re giving you a few free weekends of the full service before they start charging you again.
So why is there so much effort put into obfuscating the fact that Bungie and Microsoft are essentially offering a subscription service for their game? Because telling the truth would make people grumble about haveing to pay a subscription fee on top on the Live fee. A Live fee which is already far too high.
dude srsly? ther have only been liek 2 paks releassed n one free map. no mor hav been annnounced. sounds less liek a subscription serv. and mor liek 2 dlc paks to me. some1 must rely hate teh 360.
Yes “srsly.” Honestly, does anyone who doesn’t buy the map packs play Halo 3 on a regular basis? I know they do when the packs are released for free.
Also, spelling like an inbred four-year-old and while fanboy trolling is totally awesome.
Alright then, fine. I shall use normal language. The fact of criticizing Halo and ONLY HALO for this fact is what bugs me, when this is an inherent problem in ALL console first person shooters that release map packs. I dare you to find me one example on PS3 or 360 where this fact is not true. Most of these games DONT end up giving away the maps for free anyway. Look at Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, Resistance, Hell, even Metal Gear Solid, and tell me that this isnt an issue EVERYWHERE.
Is there a PS3 shooter that even has an online community? (MGO sucks balls, and really shouldn’t be brought up, ever)
With the exception of maybe COD4, when the map packs for the shooters you mentioned dropped the games were in a downturn. I think with Halo a fairly large community of people who were playing fairly regularly became somewhat disfranchised when the map packs came out. Also Halo is the only game where the map packs come out in such a scheduled fashion (this happened with Halo 2 as well) with the very specific times opened for “free play weekends.”
And who said that I was criticizing Halo? I’m just saying that people need to reconceptualize the way they think about its map packs.
Fair Enough, but the way you’re talking about it, Microsoft and Bungie have a “evil scheme” to release new maps every 4 months and keep grabbing cash from the customer, which is hardly the case. They’ve released 2 map pack, as well as one free map, and have yet to announce ANY intentions to release more maps in the future. The same thing with Halo 2. Bungie released 2 map packs in early ‘05, and that was it until early-mid 06 when they launched a few 360-exclusive maps. Before going all conspicacy-theorist-y, try MAYBE looking at it as simply 2 packs of DLC released a few months apart?