Here's what the big costs are in running an MMORPG:
Development. This is, literally, millions of dollars. I Figure a largish team (larger than is common for a standalone game) for longer than a standard standalone game development cycle. On top of that, some of the people on the team that you have to assemble are rare in the games industry--DBAs and fault-tolerant network designers and mission critical system administrators. (Us designers usually come a bit cheaper. )
Deploying the servers. This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. You're writing to disk constantly, you need a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc.
Those are your initial investments. Oh--forgot, there's the standard costs involved with getting a game into your hands in the first place (packaging, the monies charged by distributors, the monies charged by stores to put your product on a shelf--did you know they charge publishers for that?)... but we can skip all that for now, since it isn't applicable to the monthly fee.
Now, if you are successful, you can make back your initial investment off of box sales and off of the first few months of monthly fees. Notice that already the monthly fee starts to matter.
Now we get into the meat of the matter--ongoing costs.
Assuming you live in the US, you are likely paying someone around $20 for the privilege of tying up some wires or phone lines and using up some bandwidth. In normal usage, you're not using it all that much--odds are that even if you have a cable modem or ISDN, that you're not doing bandwidth-intensive stuff all the time. In fact, if you DO have cable, I suggest you go check right now and see that your user agreement probably prohibits you from doing bandwidth intensive things all the time. In my area, my cable provider says "you can't run a dedicated FPS server on your cable modem," for example.
That's what you get for 20 bucks.
Playing an MMO is probably one of the most bandwidth intensive things you do on a regular basis. It's like downloading a large file, the entire time that you are playing. The key here is that the bandwidth is sustained bandwidth, not "bursty" the way that most things you do on the Net are, like web browsing. ISPs don't like sustained bandwidth, because it means they can support fewer people. They rely on the burstiness to squeeze more people onto the limited capacity of the wires.
Why does this matter to us? Well, simple logic. Let's say that you at your end are using 1k of bandwidth every second while playing our game. That means that we at our end are also using 1k a second receiving what you are doing and sending back what you see. But for you, that's $20 and you're worried about one guy. For us, it's a lot less than $20 a head, but we have to pay for the bandwidth usage of everyone playing the game.
That right there wipes out a significant fraction of your monthly fee.
Then there are hardware issues. You have to pay someone--actually, many someones--(and these guys don't come cheap) to make sure that the network stays running. Do backups, monitor things, fix whatever goes wrong. These poor guys wear pagers and are on call 24/7. Plus, depending on your setup, these boxes may not be at your office. They may be at co-location facilities. And that means you're paying monthly fees for rack space and for guys there who sit at that facility and make sure all the blinky lights stay on.
That's only a small drop in the bucket of the people costs though. There's an expectation of customer service too. I'll be up front and say that as an industry, we're still figuring that part out. But we already know that it's really really expensive! After all, you can't just go hire a bunch of kids fresh from flipping burgers, train 'em in the game and the customer service tools, and pay them minimum wage. They'll be lousy customer service reps. real customer service people have a multitude of skills, and cost a lot more than minimum wage. You can train people to be real customer service people, of course, but then you have to pay them real money, too. So support eats up another huge portion of the monthly fee...
What else? Ongoing development. There's a development team that stays on the game after it finishes. They fix bugs that crop up, and they also add new content. This is an ongoing thing, and it can be quite a large amount of people--not as many as it took to make the game in the first place, but a significant fraction.
[[By the way, just to address the issue--some companies have promised to never charge for an add-on or expansion. We are not making that promise, and I'll tell you why. Making large content additions can require extra team members, which incurs extra cost, of course. But also, having a new box on the shelf means that new people join the game. It's very hard to keep a year-old game on the shelf in this industry (in fact, it only happens for fairly rare hits) but it's an absolute necessity for an online game, whose lifespan is measured in multiple years. It's hard to afford ongoing marketing out of the monthly fee, and it's almost impossible to get press (which drives awareness for drawing in new people) or media attention without a new box. So you make a new box because it comes with these things--which cost money, of course, but then the new box sales help pay for it.]]
There are other miscellaneous costs going in there. Consider the fact that if you call a support guy in-game once and keep him tied up for an hour, you just burned up all the monthly profit we make off of your subscription fee. Actually, you probably burned up quite a bit more than that. We have a direct incentive to reduce the amount of bugs and make the game as easy and trouble-free as possible, because the more you need to call, the more it costs us, and the less money we make...
When all is said and done, if there's no ongoing costs, there's no massively multiplayer game. If you decided not to have a monthly fee, you would lose money before you even launched the game, and never make it back.
Yes, there are online games that have tried other revenue streams. Some matchmaker services have used ad revenue to support the cost. Of course, being matchmakers means that they don't actually run the game--they just pair you and your opponents up, so they don't have servers, customer support people, or bandwidth cost (except for the lobby). But notice that even most of the matchmaker services are gone now...
When all is said and done, the subscription fee is a necessity for this type of game. However, it didn't have to be a flat monthly fee. It could have been hourly, the way that it was for a decade and a half of online gaming. But fortunately, that all changed a few years back. It used to be that online gamers regularly paid hundreds of dollars a month to play their favorite MMOs.
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