Would You Pay Pennies For Game Features?
Friday at GDC Austin saw the day starting with a keynote that may seem unusual to players unfamiliar with the Asian online gaming market. Nexon is a major player from the country of South Korea, boasting a handful of titles that see more users in a month than many well-known online games made here in the US. All of the company's titles, regardless of genre, have one thing in common: they're free to play, sort of. Microtransactions, the practice of paying a very small amount of money for an object or service, is what provides Nexon its revenue ... and plenty of revenue it is. Nexon America's director Min Kim gave a discussion on the realities of rolling Microtransaction-based titles out in the states, with a case study of the success of Maple Story's launch in our country.
Paying for added features is ok so long as those features are not deliberately omitted from the game so you have to buy them.