Well if they charge $15/month per MMO game, then it's gonna fail bad. Imagine if you buy DC Universe, The Agency, Free Realms, MAG, NCSoft MMO game, that's 75 bucks a month. It would be even worse for the 360 because you also pay for Live.

It's worth remembering that MMORPGs have never taken off on consoles, EQ didn't have a fraction of sales and success of its PC counterpart, FFXI bombed (First FF main entry that didn't sell one million and it was across 3 platforms). I really believe that if they want MMO games to be succesful on consoles they either have to charge a flat monthly fees for all games or get their money through microtransactions like DLC and expansions, and also through (non intrusive) advertising in game.

They are able to charge a fee on the PC MMO games because the "userbase" for the PC is ridiculous and a lot of PC owners don't own a console. I don't think that business model would work for consoles.

That is completely true, but at the same time a good amount of the 15 dollars you pay goes directly for upkeep, keeping servers lag free, paying developers so they can expand on the game, paying the technicians to fix servers when they catch fire. There was a really nice pie chart portraying this and I have been trying to find it to no avail. I also wasn't aware that MAG was an MMO.

Part of the problem of MMO's not taking off is the fact that MMO's are very expansive, and RPG's specifically are focused mostly on dozens upon dozens of spells, how do you control that quickly and efficiently with a controller. But that's a minor point to the fact that up until now only the PC had a keyboard. Without a keyboard communication is much more difficult, typed words are neutral in every way (some people just don't wanna stand there talking at a Monitor/TV set, I've always felt stupid on talking on Vent). Until these issues are fixed I really don't see any major breakthrough in the MMO console business. Unless they dumb down the games themselves, the way they dumbed down FPSes, and then port them over to the consoles.

P.S. Most PC owners also own a console, I don't know where you got that from but it's just a fabrication.

Well I consider ALL PC owners, not just gaming PC owners when I said most PC owners don't own a console.

Like I said, getting capable dedicated servers with lots of storage and bandwidth today is a lot cheaper than 5-10 years ago, you could get by and make your money off expansions and DLC, ads as well. Home is like a MMO game and its business model is a free one where they'll make money off expansions, DLC and ads.

I consider anything over 100 players online at the same time in the same room/field/universe to be a MMO, something over 200 players is definitely a MMO IMO.

The first videos of DCO were awefull and animated like EQ with inferior to WoW models. The game play also looked like City of Heroes rather than a super heroe game coming out years later than COH. I'm going to wait for NCSoft to come out with Champions Online. A real super heroes RPG and succsesor to City of Heroes. Also the various people at NCSoft have been major pushers of articles that talk about evolving the MMO scene from simple gridning.

Then again who knows Champions may end up sucking, but at least NCSoft has more experience with MMO and data management.

Edit: NM I went to you tube to see more previous video. They both look bad, but DCO did look better than it's E3 showing.