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.

Comments

Depends

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Depends

[Fozzyuw]

Similar to that, There are "free" MMOs out there...

Last Chaos - I believe it's made by the people who made "Sword of the New World". It's a free MMO. I didn't play it much but gold selling is the norm and so are micro-transactions who have NPCs setup to pickup your purchases.

Dungeon Runners - Sort of a Diablo-esque MMO. You can play for free but you cannot use pretty much any decent weapon that might drop from a boss or be given by special quests. For that you need to be a member, which will cost you $5 / month. Oh, and you cannot use the stacking health potions either.

Sword of the New World - While not free to play, it's a pretty cheap game. $20 for the game, $9 / month membership. You can purchase things outside the game, money, weapons, spells, and pick them up in game. This Korean game is being sold at Wal-Mart in the U.S. It was also previewed in Game Informer Magazine. I played it, it was pretty cool. Kind of a Guild Wars style game. You get to create a team of up to 3 members. So, you can always have a Healer, Tank, DPS group. Though, since most monsters die in 1 hit, you don't really need the traditional setup

In Korea, micro-transations are the norm. They're starting to make their way into the US market. But I can say, that after having played Tabula Rasa Beta, LOTRO, WOW, Shadowbane (trying it again, since it's ad supported free), Last Chaso, Dungeon Runners, EQ2, EQ, DAoC, CoH, CoV, Guild Wars, Sword of the New World, and I'm waiting for the Unreal Tournament-like MMORPG Fury to open their beta (they're selling beta CD's but their launcher tells you to wait a 'couple of days'... it's been 2 weeks so far), I can say that by far WoW is the most enjoyable by far, and I haven't even played it in probably 6-months.

I'm still looking for something that will be nearly as fun as WoW but not cost as much per month. The sweet spot for me is $10, I was paying this with LOTRO (a pretty good game that was close to WoW quality, but suffered the same as WoW except before you hit the max level) and I think for the AAA MMO, this is a fair price. Having found and played several free MMO's and some good very cheap MMO's, I see there being plenty of room for MMO prices to drop. I can see there being a WoW killer out there that's open source project, free, or very cheap based on ad supported and micro-transactions. I would pay $5 / month for WoW and probably never cancel if they ad supported it by putting some ads when zoning into dungeons/instances and into the game.

Until then, I'm a bit disappointed with the MMO commitment and costs considering what I've found out there. I've just started playing console and single player games again. To get some WoW, I just fire up WarcraftIII.

Oh, one other cool thing about Sword of the New World. EXP from quests came in the form of 'cards' which is an interesting concept as they might have been able to be traded to others (I never tried). It's interesting because it could make it easy for a friend to catch up to you if they joined the game at a later time.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Buying unlocks....

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

Yes

[wantedman]

I'm addicted to MapleStory, and I often pay. Unlike WoW, where I'm required to fork over $15 a month, I can pay as much or as little as I'm willing and still get a fair amount of game experience. That is what keeps me there.

Now, the game comes with all the problems of a free online game, meaning that the individuals has little invested in the community, and for every good person, there's at least one or two assholes. The GMs have gotten better at policing them, but high level players who are willing to screw with you just because they're bored are not uncommon.

The other problem with the game, is that originally, the micropayments offered little gameplay advantage to those people who payed. It was limited to clothing items to customize your avatar, as well as other cosmetic changes.

Now, we can have pets that loot for you and give bonuses to speed and jump($12/3 months). Shops to sell things when you're offline($2/month to $10/month). Cards that give you 2x experience and 2x drops($19/month each). Teleport rocks so you can avoid waiting between continents($2 per use).

It's fairly easy to spend more than a normal pay only game, and those that do have a huge advantage over time than those that don't. There are people in the community that have hundreds, if not thousands invested in their characters.

Still, I get a good gaming experience for on average about $5/month, so I prefer it over a bigger commitment..

Re:Added features

[KDR_11k]

The stuff I've seen for sale in MMOs like that was mostly items that can't be gained otherwise, lots of cosmetic stuff and some time-limited super bonuses like "double item drops" and "crafting cannot fail".

Re:No, I wouldn't.

[Grakun]

Speaking of WoW, why should I have to pay every month to play a game that I paid for. Guild Wars is free once you buy the game. And Eve-Online is free for the game, but you pay every month. WoW skrews(sic) you instead.

Comparing Guild Wars to WoW is about as extreme as comparing Diablo 2 to EverQuest, which I've seen several people try to do. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they just aren't familiar with MMORPGs.

Basically, what it boils down to is that in the software industry, the majority of the costs go into developing and maintaining the software. The costs of manufacturing each individual disc is next to nothing. The costs are in creating the data that is pressed onto the disc. Before you can even think about selling a copy of something, you have to have something to sell. You have to pay people to design, develop, and test the software. You have to pay people to create artwork, music, sound effects, 3d models, etc. They all have to work together to create something, and if they are successful you will end up with the software that you can hopefully sell to at least make up for all of the money that was put into creating the software and continue to pay people to update the software when people who want to use it have trouble doing so. Anything made on top of this is profit, which is why someone would invest all of that money into development in the first place instead of just keeping it somewhere safe.

Now, when it comes to MMORPGs, you still have all of those software development costs. In addition, you also have to develop server software, hire people who can analyze the economics and game model to try to ensure that the gameplay and virtual economy inside of the MMORPG won't collapse or fall short, causing players to become disinterested, and the whole project to essentially be a waste of a lot of money and time. You also will likely need more designers, since this game will have to encompass the needs and desires of a lot of different players, without sacrificing too many of the needs or desires of other players.

The biggest difference is that in normal software development, when the software is released, you no longer need all of those designers, developers, etc. You may need one or two, so that they can provide updates to fix things that come up. For an MMORPG, there are still a lot of extra costs. In addition to developing and selling software, they also have to provide a service for that software to be used with. They have to pay people to keep that service maintained, and to continue designing and developing new elements in the game to give the subscribers to the service more stuff to do. So not only are the initial costs much higher, but the long term costs are also much higher.

Now, there are a lot of ideas that people are experimenting with to try and cut down the costs as well as the price. But investors typically want a model that is proven not to lose all of their money. They don't want to gamble, they want to invest. So, traditionally it's been independent developers who experiment with these new ideas. The easiest way to convince people to invest a lot of money into a new idea is by backing up your claims with proof, such as the independent developers who have already tried similar ideas and succeeded.

If you don't feel that the product is worth it's price, do NOT buy it. It's as simple as that. Play something else, use the competitor's product, etc. No matter how many people bitch and moan about their product, if they see high sales records they aren't going to listen to the people who are complaining. They are going to think, "many people are buying our product so we must know what we're doing". On the other hand, if the sales records are low, then they might be interested in listening to complaints and changing the product to satisfy them. Until then, they'll be afraid that changing the product to make the few people who are bitching happy could in turn make the people who are already buying the product unhappy.