[Nadja]

Speaking from the Genre POV Hourly subs are probably a bad idea for the West.

The gaming industry is competative and while thats good it would invite more FotM swapping games, multiple games played per player, and less loyalty to a particular game. For the player you may be saying HELLYA! for the developers of games it would be bad news.

As the market grows and newer games come onto the scene that would mean that they could expect less cash flow per account, more frequent upgrades, and force games to dumb down (casual friendly) their content in order to maintain market share.

It would also lead to less endgame content as the larger amount of players would not stick with games very long. You could argue the reverse and say that it would lead to less grind as developers allowed you to progress rapidly through a game to get to endgame quickly HOWEVER this would lead to drasticly less content as they would not waste resources to provide a deep game experience realizing that gamers just want to hit endgame so they could move on to the next FotM game. As the profit margins shrink games would get more generic, have less community (guilds would become almost useless) and provide much more solo experiences.

Further as the profit margins shrunk games would require less developement costs in order to stay competative, ie smaller staff, less support, passable but not great graphics. Who wants to pony up the 5-12 million dollars it requires to build an MMO if your playerbase won't pay for it for long and quickly moves to the next new experience.

All in all, pay per hour would turn MMOs into LAN console games. Bad Idea.