Life is a vicious cycle. You want games. But to play games, you need two
things: time and money. If you've got the time, you won't have the money. If you acquire an
honest source of income, you'll have the money but not the time. It's a delicate balance, and
the last thing any hard-working gamer wants to have to do is to keep paying for a game even
after he's bought it. Those wonderful saints over at Sega of America, God bless them,
are not deaf to our pleas. PR, at least, is assuring us that there will be no charge for the
"Online" in Phantasy Star Online save the normal ISP fees. We, of course, can rub this into the
faces of our less fortunate Japanese companions. I just hope there will be an icon to say:
"I'm playing this for free. Heheh." in all five languages of PSO.
Moving on into speculation mode, I wonder how long this will last. I mean, it
has got to cost something to maintain the servers over an extended period of time. The
way I see it, if PSO proves to have the lasting power of other online RPGs, some sort of
periodical fee will almost invariably have to be charged eventually. They'll probably also be
dipping into the till of ChuChu Rocket! servers...the online regions of that
destined-to-be Dreamcast classic are all but dead at this point.
