If you've played an MMO at all, you're familiar with subscription fees. It's the service cost associated with the game. If you've played MMOs for any length of time, you'll be familiar with the expansion features that many MMO companies throw at players, often faster than we can chew through the content. In contrast, one of the biggest pushes in MMO delivery in the last few years is the content update. This occurs when studios update content and features in game without making you pay extra for the content.

When MMOs first came onto the scene we had patches and hot fixes that were more emergency maintenance than updates to content offerings. Now though, few games choose not to recognize what a huge boon to their community content updates are. There are even some studios that offer updates to their games exclusively via complimentary expansions. A game such as CCP's EVE Online has offered their content updates for free to paying subscribers.

Turbine's Asheron's Call has had only two expansions in its nine year run. On the other hand, long running MMO EverQuest, from SOE, launched in early 1999, has racked up an astounding 15 retail box expansions, if you consider the Seeds of Destruction, releasing next week. Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot, launched in October of 2001 (Happy Anniversary guys!), has launched 5 retail box expansions and 3 free expansions.

So, in the end, what's the difference between an expansion that comes in a box that you pay for with or without a collector's edition, a content update that studios push as free content to their subscribers and patches or hot fixes which fix or balance the game without any sort of extra payment or box requirement?

More importantly, what do paying customers desire and require for their monthly payment? Are items such as technical support, bug fixes, as much server uptime as is possible in the industry, server infrastructure (bandwidth, hardware, emergency maintenance), and future development worth your monthly fee? Not to mention your money goes to help the studio fund advertising towards potential players.

How do some studios manage to get by with free, or mostly free content updates and others come out with an expansion every six months? If we're paying for future development, why then do we also have to pay for the features we've been supporting the studio to develop? Do box sales make up for the cost of the development?

Online games with multi-player aspects Diablo 2 and Guild Wars offer their service free of monthly access or subscription fees. While both have expansions, both support their players free of charge, and with an incredible disposition towards maintaining a happy player base. Turbine incorporates constant, consistent content updates for their games, along with traditional retail expansion offers.

Expansions often offer a more complete out of the box experience. You have fewer patches to fix issues because the developers have focused on these lines of code for months! You have more complete and intricate storyline options. Adding new features can be more easily slipped into an expansion that's had months of testing and is less likely to totally break the game. Giving live teams the chance to tweak, fix and balance expansion content rather than designing and implementing systems on the fly.

I would be remiss, however, not to mention that some studios are capable of adding this expansion content as free updates. So the question remains, why? Why do some studios focus on free updates and content and some studios focus on expansions? The real answer lies within the player market. The studios that can extract and demand consistent retail box sales do. Those studios that cannot, don't. It may sound simple, but there's a lot more to it, obviously.

The fact of the matter is some game companies have a market and a player base that can and will pay for the expansions. Other studios have to be more creative in giving their players a reason to continue subscribing. Dark Age of Camelot has depreciated their old expansions, allowing paying subscribers to download and play them free of charge. This is a fantastic way of keeping your content viable while still encouraging people to pay and play newer content.

Most players, however, especially those competing in top guilds for advancement, buy the expansions as soon as they are announced. Some even pre-order. If the game company can charge you for developing content (monthly) and then charge you for the box without even offering a free month as they would for new players, why wouldn't they? What stops a studio from doing it?

Are players going to stop playing? I think the current expansion market for MMOs out there has proven that this pricing strategy is a winner. Few players leave MMOs for other games because of the cost of the expansions, and if they move to other MMOs they're going to run into the same problem. Studios like CCP are unlikely to offer a paid expansion knowing that their EVE player base is unlikely to take that offering lying down.

Let's not forget that MMOs are expensive to develop and customer service, developers, designers, quality assurance and even forum moderator salaries add up. Add to that the cost of planning upcoming features; meetings where nothing is actually accomplished as far as billable product but that help to determine the future development of such items, are a requirement and one which must be part of the process.

Adding to the frustration of MMO fees vs. expansion and content updates is the fact that games such as Guild Wars survive, even thrive, with millions of players and one of the top box sales numbers without charging players monthly! Obviously these folks are making money or they'd have shut down their servers long ago.

Now imagine if every player who purchased an expansion box at launch time, brand new, were to get the 30 days free offered to new players who've not been supporting the game! SOE would owe their longtime customers up to 14 free months of service! Wouldn't that be heaven?

In the end, games are a business and players hold the key with what they're willing to pay. Considering that most players who are taking part in free to play games seem unwilling to part with their money for items usually offered in the micro-transaction shop, what is it about the expansion concept vs. free content and updates that bothers players the most?

I believe it's the perception of value offered by an MMO. For most of us it's our main source of entertainment dollar, as well as a hobby that we don't mind sinking money into. MMOs are relatively cheap, offering both! For some, EQ's 6 month expansion schedule is simply too hard on the pocketbook. For others it's worth the money for the game they love and the hobby they've invested hundreds of hours in.

For the rest, we'll see options, such as Diablo 3, which offer MMO type content without charging a monthly subscription fee, as well as multiple free to play MMO games and studios which are committed to delivering different products and expansions schedules for the same cost as those shipping 2 expansions a year.

Only the individual players can decide if the cost is worth it and ask themselves if they've ever really quit a game over the cost of the often optional expansions. I can only think of one game that's happened with, and honestly, it was only because the expansion content changed the game! Have you ever quit a game, or changed MMOs due to the cost of continuous expansions? Would you?

Becky "Tovin" Simpson
Senior Editor, ZAM Network