Trials and Tribble-ations

Something I've come to realise over the past few weeks is how poor the average trial account system is for MMO's.

In WoW, you can get a free 10 day trial, just by clicking a few buttons, and providing your email address. It's simple, it makes sense. Blizzard want people to play and if, by letting 100 people try it out for a week and a bit, it results in 1 more subscriber. Who plays for a year. They'll still make a profit.
I remember buying the original game, and being suprised that there was actually a little flyer inside saying something like "Lend the discs to a freind" and give them one of these voucher codes so they can try it out.

It makes a massive amount of sense in the MMO market, where it isn't how many people 'own' the game, it's about how many 'subscribe' to play it.

For some reason though, it seems that many other MMO developers don't feel the same way. I've looked around at other MMO's recently, and out of the ones that have interested me, only a very few offer trial accounts.

Why?

I'm a working guy, and have the spare cash each month to be able to afford the luxuries like computer games. But that doesn't mean I'm stupid and want to piss that money up the wall by paying for something that I'll never be able to use again.

If I buy a game for my Xbox 360, and think it totally sucked, I could at least take it to the shop and trade it in for something else. I might not make back every penny I spent, but that doesn't bother me. I'm willing to spend money trying things I think I might like.

But if that Xbox game costs £70 (as some have done) and from the minute I play it, it's bound to my console. Then I wouldn't buy it. No matter how much marketing hype there is, or how awesome it looks on the box, I don't like spending my money on something that could be worthless to me within hours.
In the console world, that's where demo's come in. They're obviously the Console version of free-trials.

But in the MMO world, once you've bought that game, it's tied to you. You'll never be able to sell it on (not properly anyway) and, if it sucks, all you're money has been wasted.

With a free trial, you get at least a taste of the game before you lay out your £40+.

So why don't more companies offer a free-trial of their games?

Sure it costs them money, but I'm also sure that if there were more free-trials, they'd also lure more longer-term subscribers.

Or, to cover their costs, why not offer a £5 version of the game?
That way they can cover their costs, and the players can get a slightly longer free-trial. I know there's a lot of MMO's out there that I'd try, if I new it would only cost me a fiver a time.

If it turns out to be trash... *meh*... It's cost me 5 quid, and hasn't cost the Devs anything.
If it turns out to be great, I simply upgrade my account to the full version, and everyones a winner.

StarTrek Online... Atari... StarWars: ToR... BioWare... Take Notes!