kain_kusanagi said:
World of Warcraft used to come in a box. So did Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV will too. Why is it ok to charge for a high monthly premium for MMO's on PC, but it's an outrage to charge small fee for EVERYTHING on XBox Live? |
Because MMO's are insanely massive and complicated and have a dedicated staff year round of up to many dozen people, moderators, programers, constant bug fixing and responding to crashes, server maintenance, balancing issues, developing DLC constantly, expenses with supplying enough server capacity to fit the insane amount of traffic, public relations, account management, customer centers that dwarf anything else in gaming recieving complaints all the time, hardware maintenance on servers and programers machines etc.
There are a couple of reason in here you likely won't find for most, if not all, genres and games besides MMO's.
When I buy a game at full price on my hardware I bought for full price on my internet connection that costs money and all the gear uses power, I don't want to be charged again for simply being allowed to play the game online. Of course, since I play online games only on the PC and hate MMO's, I kind of don't have to worry about this at all... 
Bottom line though; comparing huge MMO's to regular games with (often) shitty servers, support and few patches/fixes is silly and I'm pretty sure you're aware. Yeah, I know they make DLC and patches for a lot of games, its still nowhere near on the same scale and can't be compared.
