South Korea's Free Computer Game Business Model Hits the US 159
Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from AFP via Yahoo! News:
"Seoul-based 'free-to-play' computer game titan Nexon on Wednesday blasted into the US videogame arena with a 'Combat Arms' online first-person shooter title that makes its cash from optional 'micro-transactions' by players. The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters. To keep the battlefield even, players earn experience or advanced weaponry by skill so people essentially can't pay for power. ... Startups and established game makers including Japanese goliath Sony are venturing into the free computer game market, according to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. 'It looks like it could be very big,' Cole told AFP. 'It's one of the things everybody seems to be looking at. The challenge is it is a very new model and it remains to be seen whether customers used to a free model will be tight when it comes to actually spending money on it.'"
War of Conquest (Score:3, Informative)
War of Conquest [warofconquest.com] has a similar model. Its free, but you can buy upgrades, items, tech, etc. They even give out points that you convert to either cash or buy more items, tech, etc.
Not nearly the first (Score:5, Informative)
Nice. This article forgets that there are tons of free-to-play MMO's already available in the US.
Knight Online
Fly For Fun
Granado Espada
And lets not forget our own domestic free-to-plays, such as Guild Wars, Minions of Mirth, Graal Online and the like.
Here's a great resource for all of these- http://www.gameogre.com/ [gameogre.com]
Re:A new age of micro-transactions? (Score:3, Informative)
in Maple Story the micropayments were used for buying cosmetic items to customize your character's appearance. so you could purchase sun glasses, designer shoes, hats, etc. but they have no effect on gameplay.
Which is complete nonsense now, as they do have numerous items that "affect gameplay" to a significant degree, such as experience rate boosters, drop rate boosters, an item for penalty-free resurrection (death usually results in the loss of 3-10% of that levels EXP, which can be huge (double-digit hours of training) at higher levels), pets that allow automatic looting and automatic healing (if your HP or mana drops below a set point, it will automatically use a potion if you have the item to do so), among others.
This is old news .. (Score:5, Informative)
Every MMO to appear in Korea for several years now have been based on the Free-To-Play model.
Even those who were launched on a subscription one migrated to it, forcing their western licencees to do the same.
Example :
_RF Online (CodeMasters dragged their feet but had to accept the free to play model)
_Granado Espada aka Sword of the New World (K2 Networks wanted a hybrid system, but had to change to a pure free to play one)
Even legacy power house Lineage 2 from NCsoft is heading towards a cash shop item addition to its subscription based model.
More recent ones like Perfect World are free to play from the start.
To sum up :
Free-to-Play IS the de facto business model in asia, and has been for years. The western licencees also are bound to use free to play.
F2P is a good model...in some ways. (Score:2, Informative)
The people with money will pay for the extras and the people without money will play because its free (not really free just being paid for by people willing to do so). All the free players stay because its free fun and the pay players stay because there is always something interesting going on when the server is full. Cash shops are usually addictive as hell too. I've had to set some pretty strict rules on myself about using them or else I'll go nuts and spend spend spend.
The International (U.S) Ragnarok Online just opened a free server with a few gameplay tweaks to make it harder and the population is already consistently higher than the two smaller premium servers. The Korean RO opened a free server a while back and its population is substantially larger than all the pay servers combined and I expect it will be that way in IRO too. In fact a lot of people from premium servers are probably going to want to transfer their chars to the free server since the guild wars are probably going to be much better with such a huge server population.
My biggest problem with free to play servers is the fact that the population is a lot younger and not as english speaking as pay to play games/servers. I like having a reasonable expectation that I can communicate with anyone I come across in the game. I also like not having to assume everyone is 12. I'm a young adult with some disposable income and I want to play my video games with people like me. A monthly fee does an ok job at insuring I get what I want.
WOW so many bad facts (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly new to the US (Score:1, Informative)
Three Rings [threerings.com] has been doing this for several years with Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com], Bang Howdy [banghowdy.com], etc. So not exactly new here in the US. Three Rings does offer "traditional" US subscription model, a second currency track, doubloons, for purchase with out of game money or trading in game money for the doubloons.