Subscription-based MMOs Breed Addicts By Jaime Jaime grew up in southern CA, but has been living in Salt Lake City, UT for five years. Since the days of Ultima Online - she has been playing MMORPGs with a passion. Online gaming has become one of her most passionate hobbies, as the games internally and externally evolve over time, providing an ever-changing gaming experience. Her professional experience comes from the fields of retail, telecomm, customer service, and investing. Her hobbies include photography, writing, crafting, outdoor activities, and, of course, video gaming.

In late July, a news story surfaced about Dr. Richard Graham, a psychiatrist who is seeking to open in-game counseling services in World of Warcraft. The claim was that World of Warcraft is more addictive than crack – and there's certainly some evidence that players have, at times, taken their virtual world experiences too far. There's the real world cases of stabbing upon selling a sword loaned in-game, the suffocation death of a 4-month-old child due to parents neglect while playing World of Warcraft in an Internet Cafe, and a player committing suicide because he couldn't beat his addiction to EverQuest. There are dozens more cases, and at least half a dozen studies, about the addictive nature of virtual worlds.

I'm not talking about these kinds of addicts, though, who suffer that kind of serious addiction that needs real world therapy to work out an addictive pattern that has become psychologically ingrained into the player.  I'm talking about a more casual, but still dangerous, addiction – an addiction that won't let a player quit a game, or keeps a player coming back repeatedly to the same thing they swore they were done with. I'm talking the kind of addiction that decides that even though the bills are two months past due and the pantries are mostly bare, a monthly fee is small enough to let slide into their budget. The kind of addiction that lets players like you and me make decisions that are bad for our health, our families, and our lives.

Let me also preface this by saying that I am not placing blame on the games themselves: it is ultimately upon the player how they place an MMO in their ultimate life scheme. However, just as certain circumstances can breed addictions to drugs or alcohol, subscription-based MMOs also provide environments that encourage addictive behavior.

Why single out pay to play MMOs? It isn't because free to play MMOs aren't addictive; there are cases that prove they can be. Nor is there any empirical evidence that indicates that subscription MMOs are more addictive. Pay to play MMOs, however, are uniquely different in their subscription model of business – in order to keep playing the game, players must continue to shell out money. Game play becomes a monthly bill, right along side utilities and credit cards. And to many, that bill becomes a monthly necessity.

Free to play MMOs, although most have micro-transactions, are still at their base level free – they only take time to play. And while that time may become a heavy investment for some, it essentially remains free – a product only of time management, not something that hurts the bills on its own accord. Subscription MMOs remain different; money must be paid to play, and that makes each month's payment of the game an investment – encouraging more time spent in the game each month to get a player's "money's worth," and more months spent to reach specific goals (end-gaming raiding, max levels, achievements, and so on.) Any lapse in subscription time – even a few months of a "break" - appears to become a waste, as this puts the player further behind on their own goals, and keeps them behind players who are playing every day so they can be at end-game too.

In short: subscription based MMOs encourage their players to  keep spending money, month after month, in chase of an illusive end-game that changes every patch, every update, every expansion. Players therefore are easily caught up in a chase to be "on top," no matter how much that costs. By November of this year, World of Warcraft players who have played since the beginning of the game will have spent, at minimum, $1,000 US to play a never-ending game.

Besides the need of more hardcore players to be "at the top," their friends also need to join them. Even if a player's intention isn't to reach and play end-game, they often find themselves caught up in the need to do so, simply so they can play with their in-game friends – because spending time with particular people has more meaning to them than it does to spend time enjoying the game at their own pace. And there can be other reasons, too.