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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.
I want to take Anarchy Online as an example. What they did (I don't know if that service is still running) is that you can play the original game without expansions free of charge. Only limitation is that you get kicked if the server load gets too heavy and paying customers are getting preference in slots on the servers (i.e. when a paying player wants to play, you have to wait). This is actually quite playable, you don't get access to all areas but it's still quite fun. Sure, you don't have access to the more current content, and you will level a lot slower than someone who does. But you can still get anywhere you could when the game was released, you can reach the (then existing) maximum of levels and if you're so inclined, switch to a paid account when you reach that limit. Imagine WoW sans Burning Crusade for free.
If the game's more like a demo, where you have access to only a severely limited version of the game where you have to pay to actually play "sensibly", it's a different matter. If you have to pay for something that you simply NEED to play at all, we're talking about bait and lure. It's only a buck here, only a buck there and in the long run, you pay a few 100 bucks for a game that you would've gotten for 50 if it was a "normal" game.
Generally, the idea is good, though. I'm honestly surprised that especially MMORPGs don't offer that kind of service, where you can either invest time to get a certain item or simply buy it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not my idea of worthwhile gaming, what about all your buddies you end up grouping up with? What will happen when they have purchased content you haven't and vice versa? Well, of course you will both have to purchase the missing content to play everything together!
Here would be the process; Develop game, beta test(get everyone clamoring for the full game), dismantle-scrap-cherrypick all the fun and otherwise entertaining pieces, charge the sorry bastards.
No words of wisedom here.
What other way is there to do it? If they weren't after money, then all of the features would be in the game.
Look, people pay good money for cheat books to unlock all the bonuses and that money doesn't go back into game development -- instead, it pays a few guys to sit in a room and play games exhaustively. In capitalist terms, this is inefficient: the coders can do the job more quickly, hence cheaply. If they sell unlocks, the extra revenue they generate goes to the companies that are writing the games. In the long term, this means that the average player (he who has a bit of patience) pays marginally less.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
While I understand the knee jerk reactions that some have to this idea, they should realize that this isn't really a model for single player games IMO but more of a new model for Pay to Play games. So while this doesn't work for say Bioshock (I'd be pissed if 2k wanted to me to buy my Power to the People Terminals!) but it does work for online games. Right now the only legal currency in most MMO's is time, if you put in the time to "earn" (silly concept in a game) something its yours to keep or trade. Now, the problem is that most MMO's are closed systems meaning that even though you can trade, its only for in game items or money that were "earned" by someone else's time. I have long felt that any business model that favors the unemployed (they have lots of time) over skilled gamers who might not have as much free time, is flawed. Micro transaction based games at least offer a possibility of changing that model. The current system of favoring college students, the chronically unemployable, or those willing to break the EULA to buy stuff from IGE or other virtual to real money trader is dumb.