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Free Realms Approaches the Five-Million-Player Mark
A few days ago at Comic-Con, Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley spoke about the success of Free Realms, their free-to-play MMORPG that relies on microtransactions for a business model. The game was released at the end of April, and by mid-June there were upwards of three million registered users. Now that total is approaching five million, with no sign of slowing down. Min Kim, another panelist at the discussion, said, "When people started talking about it back in 2003 or 2004, people said Western games would never want to do this, to play a game for free and then buy items. And now everybody is saying, 'We're going to have microtransactions as part of our business model.'"
Every time Free Realms crosses another million player milestone the same thing always gets implied.
The totals are always stated to be the unique number of players who have signed up for the game and actually played the game.
Anyone who has tried the game can easily see why Free Realms is such a massive hit. It appeals to three different demographics very well:
1. Burnt out hardcore MMORPG players who love being part of an online world but need a break from the hours of hardcore raiding or grinding they are use to
2. Kids and parents
3. Casual first time players who don't want to invent the insane time required for a standard MMORGP
Beyond that Sony's years of experience making MMORPGs really shows. The game is the most bug free and polished MMORPG I've ever seen. Everything is streamed from the very start. You can be playing live withing a few minutes of signing up. A tiny loader program is downloaded and you are good to go. No 10 gig all day downloading and patching just to try out the game like most MMORPGs require you to go through.
You can jump in and out at any time without worrying about dying or losing your stuff.
And the free versus pay is pretty much evenly divided so that you can easily play a half of the game without every paying a single penny.
The artwork is beautiful but it runs on just about any computer that someone would have at home today.
And it is just plain fun and relaxing. Sony absolutely nailed it with Free Realms. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people playing gets into the 10-20 million range once the game hits the millions of PS3s already on the market.