> a better model
> would be for developers to provide enough
> support and content that it is worth the time
> and effort of customers to purchase the product.
> How about Everquest and other games? They have large teams adding
> new artwork (treasure items, plot lines, etc) to the game. It's
> a subscriber model, not a single item sale, and it seems to work.
Both of these require dropping the concept of game as work of art (like a novel or movie), or perhaps change it more into the TV series model.
TV series don't really happen without a TV network, so this doesn't really offer much for an independent publisher.
I'm not sure if the analogy is a good one or not -- I don't think you can play EverQuest occasionally, the way you can watch a TV show one week and then skip a few. On the other hand, I think the novel analogy is good, because I tried to make King of Dragon Pass like a novel. You could read a chapter or two, put it down, and pick it up where you left off.
I'll also add that the extra amount of infrastructure required to run an online game like EverQuest scares me off -- all that server ramping, customer service, game monitoring...
-- David Dunham A Sharp david_at_... Voice/Fax: 206 783 7404 http://a-sharp.com Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible --Samuel Goldwyn
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