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. guild wars gold 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. Oth