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How many F2P are successful?
Larry2298
Member Posts: 865
I wondered if it's worthy to spend time and money to produce a F2P and how many are succesful on the market? Profitable business or something else?
DDO Unlimited is succesful I believed but DDO counts half F2P because before DDO was P2P for long time before F2P, and DDO Europe still a P2P.
Comments
You can pay for DDO Europe if you wish, buying extra content and so forth, but you don't have to. I've unlocked extra character classes, extra character slots and extra content, and haven't spent a penny. It's a clever way to run a game, in my opinion.
If they are still open and operating, they are making someone, somewhere enough revenue to keep them going. (which is the only real measure of success I suppose)
Now, if you mean, how many are huge in terms of subs or something, that's an entirely different matter.
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ex-p2ps are only succesful f2ps
f2p only do porly in america and around it .where they come from (asia moslty they are very big)most game maker would love to make as mutch .check most game buying publicity they are mainly asia game its not random luck they made huge pile of money there and hope those success work here buthas pw has shown its not working thus far .the receipe that is loved and trived in asia die quick here ,because we are used to p2p model and we mostly hate p2w game.we ll see how perfect world do it this time around if they bother to do it f2p or if they ll bring forsaken world as a pay to play game instead or whatever solution they come up with.one thing is sure they kept the receipe that made them big in asia (no big surprise there ,some american tried it in asia and were like wtf same old bull!)lol of caurse its what is successfull in asia.but i bet it isnt what they ll be sending in english speaking market!because their countless title prove that receipe isnt gona cut it in america!
The reasons Asian games fail over here are many - and have been discussed here ad nauseum - but it definitely isn't because we are used to the P2P model.
Quick tip for you... try to use the spacebar and the full stop keys correctly, and definitely give paragraphs a try.
If the game has been live for more than a couple of years then it is probably making money. This is mostly due to lower overhead and the high turnover. Sit down and get comfy because this is going to be a long read.
The two things to keep in mind here are the operating costs and the number of paying customers. Think of each server as a store location. A small chain of stores doesn't require as much to operate as Wal Mart. Also, the number of people entering the store is inconsequential, only the number of people who make purchases matters.
What you want is about 30% of your active players using the item mall. Normally it's about 15 to 20 percent. Overall, most successful F2P games average $60 a month per active player. Keep in mind that, at best, only 30% of all active players are actually buying anything. Thing is, these games could make just as much money if 100% of their customers were spending $10 a month in the item shop or on a subscription (without a box sale) and still be cheaper than most AAA games.
Why? Consider that something like Dungeon Fighter Online only has about three servers and compare that to the number of World of Warcraft servers. The servers of both games support the same number of concurrent users, but DFO has few servers to maintain. When you factor in the exponential cost of bandwidth, DFO's opperating costs are several orders of magnitude lower than WoW. The overall amount of money coming may be lower, but the profit margins are much, much larger.
In short, these games can turn a profit on active populations of 50K players or less. They look like failures to most MMO players because we're all to busy comparing everything to World of Warcraft. It wasn't so long ago that having 50 thousand subscriptions was considered a huge success in the genre. The better examples of these games net at least 50K repeat customers with about 15K paying three four times a standard subscription on items per month.
although that last figure is a little misleading....
It isn't just a group of players shucking out $60 a month. it's an average. Some months you may have about 60% of your population pay about $30 and other months you may have a higher percentage paying $5. If it ever drops below 10% paying your overhead then you're in trouble.
Glad you typed that so I didn't have to
It's a common misconception in these forums that the number of subscriptions equate to the biggest success. It is better to think in terms of return on the initial investment, assuming those numbers are available. It is evident that many of those f2p games are very cheaply made, with leased engines, outdated mechanics, small staffs, but still able to find customers who will shell out the cash here and there. This is why facebook and iphone games have done so well as of late, and why many companies are avoiding the p2p model now. These half-assed f2p games have done better than most *new* p2p games in recent years.
DDO - obvious example
Maple Story
RoM
Free Realm also claims to have some success.
There is also evidence that F2P is being more accepted in NA ... the article is posted in another thread on NPD research.
Well DDO is only p2p from newbie to about mid level, it's more like a demo as most p2p games do. To play the game in the fullest, you must buy their adventure packs, and buying just one is not going to do. It basically brought DDO out of failure as they switched to a GW style of game system. DDO was already a fully instanced quasi-mmo, so it was a no brainer to switch, few would pay monthly for a fully instanced game.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
Well, all the MMORPG from asia is f2p, except wow, lineage, and aion. And there are alot of them.
And base on their financial report I would say all of them are making money.
I dont' know about DDO, since the only thing they say is their profit went up alot after turned f2p. But they never release or at least I can't find their actually profit in $.
F2P are becoming increasingly popular over here, and I think new MMO's will experiment (at least in part) with the concept. We might see more success in the future, but I don't think a high dollar MMO that costs milions to make can afford cash shop only.
And indeed, the quick tip for drbaltazar is not that different from the quick tip I would give to those trying to make profits in the West with Asian F2P games. I'm still yet to play one where the text and dialogue genuinely felt like they were written by someone for whom English was their first language. I'm sure many players don't care, but many do.
DDO has a hybrid revenue model, it is P2P as much as F2P. It is very difficult to realise how successful any MMO is. Details are commercially sensitive and you don’t release figures that tell your rivals how you are doing. Some MMO’s like WoW know they have bragging rights so use that to promote their game. Most F2P MMO’s tout their number of subscribers but that includes everyone who has ever subscribed and tons of players who have since left the MMO.
When judging any MMO look at the forums, see what is being said about it, with some experience you can sort out the rants from the real issues. So if they go on about how a class is unbalanced don’t worry about it. If they say the game is always lagging or PvP is constant ganking then you need to investigate that issue.