The asians must be doing something right…
…to make the market revenues for MMO close to 2.5 BILLION USD. That’s right, you read it correctly. 2.5 BILLION. In 2006, ten of the publishers crossed the 100 million mark USD. That’s probably including the ever popular World of Warcraft, but here’s thing key point that most people miss in many Asian MMO games.
Micropayment, micropayment, micropayment.
Practically ever large scale MMO game that I’ve ever had any playtime in has been free to play. Zilch. Nada. Zippo.
Where they really rake it in however are quest items, items that make you gain more experience, or more gold, or give you more power. Either way, each of these things only cost a measly couple dollars. What’s that compared to powering up your character right? Well, think of that fact and multiple it by many people that continue to do this over and over again because it’s “only a couple dollars.” Interestingly enough, not as many US based MMOs actually use “free” to attract the players and use micropayments to increase revenue. Should be interesting to see if any US based MMOs begin to use this data to imitate our Asian counterparts that are enjoying free games across the board.
September 5th, 2007 • 
Darius Sartre • 
comment | September 5, 2007 at 21:44 | individual comment-link
Nice to see Two Worlds on the Xbox 360 is “free” after buying the game and paying for your Xbox Live account. I wonder if they are going to utilyze the built-in Xbox Live micropayment system for that MMORPG.
comment | September 5, 2007 at 22:32 | individual comment-link
Lol @ response of goodliffe, I bet it would indeed be going with most games coming from the western part of the globe. Completely free to play! You just first have to buy it for 60 Eur in the store…
It’s definitely a good thing though to see that many of the mmo’s at least in Asia are already free to play and more are on their way, I think the main reason simply is that there are so many mmo’s there it just wouldn’t compete anymore if they were p2p. Pretty much every week a new mmo is being released as if they have an unlimited amount of game designers, most of them aren’t even worth any money to play I’d say but because it’s free they seam to be getting the attention quite well.
pingback | September 17, 2007 at 11:54 | individual pingback-link
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