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How Much Money Do Free-To-Play MMOs Make?
simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, a new feature article discusses how much money free-to-play MMO games make, with specific real-world stats from game developers willing to discuss how they make money with microtransaction-based PC games. In particular, Puzzle Pirates co-creator Daniel James reveals that 'the average revenue per user (ARPU) is between one and two dollars a month, but only about 10% of his player base has ever paid him anything. As a result, he says, approximately 5,000 gamers are generating the $230,000 in revenue he sees each month.' It's obviously quite a different model from the regular $15/month for World Of Warcraft, but it evidently works for some companies."
Puzzle Pirates is written in cross platform Java. Works on every major OS.
And if I add apples and oranges, I can eliminate the national debt as long as I remember to divide by zero!
10% of the player base is paying him
No, 10% of the player base has ever paid him. Some other % (presumably smaller) is the 5000 players paying monthly.
ARPU is only $2 on the top end and 5,000 people pay this, so that's $10,000 a month
No, the average is over all of the players, so thats (total players)*$2 a month.
Some of us are browser based. I play www.KingdomofLoathing.com all the time, and it's platform independent. I also run my own game at www.Twilightheroes.com.
With just under 30k accounts, maybe 2,000 of them active in a given month, I'm not really quite "massive" yet but my own experience is that I pull in on average less than $0.50 per account per month, with some fair bit of fluctuation. I'd be jumping for joy at an average of $2/player.
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