| Slimebeast said: He is 100% right. A game nowadays can give you even hundreds of hours of entertainment and yet we pay no more than $60 for it. I got 100 hours with Dragon Age paying only $60 (actually I got it for free but... you understand the point). Over 250 hours with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for just $50. The value or bang for buck in games nowaydays can be amazing. No wonder publishers must change their payment model or else revenue will go down because we simply don't have time to play all these games.
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I second all of this, but I beg to differ on the deeper issue.
Personally, I am quite familiar and intimate with pay to play as I paid $15/month from January 2007 until July 2009 to play the World of Warcraft. Coincidentally, I did not purchase any new PC games during that time.
Digging deeper, I can understand why publishers would want more pay to play games online because it presents a semi-permanent revenue source with lower marketing and development costs, but I firmly believe if it became the new business model as Pachter is advocating for, then we would see a huge dropoff in new releases and dozens of game developer studios shutter because the market would resemble monopolistic competition where you have the online FPS, the MMORPG, the sand box GTA style MMOG and on.
Pay to play is good for the publishers, but if it became the norm then the video game industry as we know it would cease to exist and evolve into an ugly leviathan where the content demanded is almost entirely top down by the developers via content patches World of Warcraft style because 3 to 6 good online games would demand well over 50% of the total video game monies.
