Bethesda Defends Elder Scrolls Subscription

How many big publsihers have placed a subscription on their big AAA MMO, all the while spouting PR speak about it definitely being worth it? You can add one more – Pete Hines has defended the subscription for The Elder Scrolls Online by saying that a subscription only fails if you’re not getting your money’s worth.

From Games.on.net:

What’s going to determine whether or not it succeeds or fails is not really tied to what anyone else has done, it’s tied to ‘do we make a strong enough argument for the value that you get for your fifteen dollars?’. If we’re providing the kind of content people want to see where they’re like ‘This is awesome, I’m having a blast, this new stuff is totally worth it and I’m having fun’, then the subscription totally works. If we’re putting out stuff that doesn’t make a case for it then we have a problem on our hands and we have failed to meet that value proposition.

But I would argue that other games that have or haven’t succeeded with this: it’s more about that, not the model itself. It’s about ‘are you giving me my money’s worth for what you’re asking me to pay?’ If yes, then they don’t have a problem with it. If no, then they have a problem with it.

This is a mistake that a lot of people seem to make, and while I’ve no doubt Bethesda have done a lot of market research and would put more faith in that market research than in just one opinion, it’s never actually paid off in the past. You’re not trying to convince players that your $60 game is worthy of an extra $15 a month, you’re trying to convince genre fans to pay for something they can arguably get for free many times over. Free-to-play is prevalent in the MMO world, and it’s not as dirty a word as console-only gamers tend to think.

Bethesda don’t have to convince genre players that Elder Scrolls Online is worth the subscription, but that it’s that much better than games they can get for free, including EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, or the pay-once Guild Wars 2. That’s not something they’re going to be able to do. If they could, they wouldn’t even have to be defending the subscription. We’d have seen the case for it already.