Hidden Costs of MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds

If you live in one of the few countries in the world where you have access to unlimited Internet at acceptable speeds and monthly costs, you probably won’t find this as a trouble. But in the rest of the world, playing MMOGs causes additional and unwanted costs.

Consumption of bandwidth, especially where it’s limited, can be real pain and can cause additional costs that are not included in game you bought. If you're an average user on capped access, example, you probably have up to 20GBs per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage. If you’re such user, downloading a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do easily. It's something you have to plan for – including every day and even next month. For you, even ‘smaller’ downloads of 500MB have to be handled with caution.

MMOGs generally don't use a lot of bandwidth in actual operation. The quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, for example where are large numbers of mobs, or raids, or if you're using voice as well. Most of the MMORPG content is already on your hard-drive communicating with server when needed.

The real problem is getting that content onto your hard drive in the first place. The most efficient and cheapest method is the optical disk (CDs or DVDs), where large amounts of data can be installed to the drive in several minutes.

If the content of the MMOG is dynamic, that might be a problem. Player installs the core on the HDD, but what comes later in patches and content updates takes more place on your hard drive, more time and of course money, especially if you’re capped user.

On a capped Internet connection, you have a limited number of hours per month. However, it’s not easy to spot all add-ons and installations, although users with caps are used to frequently monitor their Internet usage for the month.
If you go too far and spend too much, for the rest of the month you’ll be without internet access or you’ll have to pay exorbitant fees for excess data.
Keep in mind that background updaters that are based on peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, eMule or others, can consume far more of a users’ monthly quota than the actual data downloaded to their systems.

Despite the fact that every year the average usage on capped connections rises, the content patches and updates for MMOGs certainly aren't getting any smaller.

For those who have unlimited Internet access, this means only that games and updates take just a little longer to arrive.
For everyone else, it may mean not playing a favorite MMOG until quotas are reset for the following month, and then managing other usage for the rest of that month.

This problem isn't something you can put off for too long, because there will be another update, and yet another after that very shortly. If you wait for too long, you may as well suspend your game account, because you certainly won't be playing it.

Limited Internet access is apparently more profitable model than unlimited access schemes, for companies, but for users, especially those who are practicing online gaming, it’s quite inefficient.

Even the limits and bandwidth caps are more than enough for most users needs, the amount of data required for MMO games and virtual environments just keeps growing. This raises two opposed questions - Do the caps present a threat to the MMOG and virtual worlds or the caps will expand to outpace the growth?

Time will probably tell.