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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."
most people are going to play it like it's free, as in, not paying for anything. You'll still have a minority that will help to boost the sales by paying a whole lot more than they should for in game items. Likewise, I have never played a free MMO that didn't have someone running around the home city just shouting out advertisements.
Xaotik Designs
Actually, as an openly gay mac user, I have to say I've gotten far more dick when I leave my computer at home.
If you think your hardware choice will get you laid, I'm guessing you don't get much from either sex.
(name withheld by request)
I was looking at Warcraftrealms.com overnight; WoW's population is about to drop like a rock. It's already begun, in fact.
Character classes have been nerfed into the ground, with the Paladin or DK now being the only two worth playing. Any originality is gone. WotLK had the worst instances the game has ever had, and the only thing the developers now focus on is the Arena.
I can see it in my own behaviour; I'd be lucky to log into WoW once a week, now, and even just this last night, while I got up planning on playing WoW, it never happened, even though I spent practically the entire night idling on IRC, bored.
When I'd rather spend a night vegetating on Freenode than playing World of Warcraft, (which I used to genuinely love, incidentally) I know that the game has truly died in the ass...and it has.
I'm starting to think Guild Wars might be worth a look. WoW sure isn't getting much of my time these days, that's for sure.
I actually have noticed that a disproportionate amount of mac users bring their laptops places (library, class, coffee shop, etc) than PC users on campus, but I attributed it to a different reason. I've found Macs to be better suited to portability. Apple laptops are very portable compared to many WIndows laptops (the $500 massive PC laptop doesn't exist for Apple customers). Most Windows laptops I see around campus are massive and heavy. OS X also handles sleeping very gracefully. Maybe this has been improved with newer motherboards and/or Win XP service packs, but Windows always seemed to give me problems with not sleeping and crashing when waking up from sleep. Obviously this isn't always the case, there are plenty of portable PCs, but it seems the ones that college students buy aren't those.