City Of Heroes: NCsoft Game Package?

This is fairly interesting; recently someone asked if NCsoft was going to offer all of their games in a pacakge kind of like Sony (SOE) does with their Station Pass. Here's what Gaffer, NCsoft 3rd Party Executive Producer, had to say:

We're looking at the potential of package deals for PlayNC products, but want to have a bunch of titles in the lineup first (so it's a better value).

GuildWars has a different revenue model (no sub fee) so it probably doesn't fall under a package - it would be for subscription games only if we did it.

There's a number of reasons for and against the model - one of the trickier issues to deal with is that we have to pay royalties to our 3rd party companies (Cryptic Studios, NetDevil, etc.) and if someone's paying a package rate for a bunch of games it turns out to be quite tricky to properly assign royalties. Sony hasn't done a lot of 3rd party products so they don't have that issue as much (Galaxies? Is that part of Station now?) - but about half of our upcoming games are from outside developers.

(Yes, someone will say "just do it by time played" - but then you're incentivizing developers to do things like design their game so it's beneficial for you to stay logged on all night so they get more royalties).

-jg

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