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Interesting payment data on some Kongregate games
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,509
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/03/07/kongregate-talks-about-making-money-from-online-games/
That's normally a tech site, especially hardware and/or rumors, but it's an interesting article about item mall games.
Kongregate says that for their "free to play" games, 99.5% of people who play will never pay a dime. That means they have to extract whatever revenue they're going to get from the other 0.5%.
Among people who pay for one particular unspecified game of theirs, the average amount that they pay is $119 and the median is only $16. That means that there are a lot of people paying a little, and a few people paying really a lot.
And here's an eye-opening statistic: 0.01% of players of the game in question will pay at least $1000. That tiny handful of players accounts for 40% of the game's total revenue.
The moral that Kongregate took from this is that if you're going to make a game "free to play", then you'd better make it possible for players to pay $1000+--and to actually get something meaningful in-game for that money. That, of course, is how you end up with "pay to win".
The real trick, I think, is to come up with ways that players can spend thousands of dollars on a game and that tiny few will find it worthwhile to do so, without offending the other 99.99% that the game is "pay to win". Or perhaps rather, you can offend the 99.5% who will never pay a dime, but would really rather not lose the people who pay $10 or $20.
That's why I think it's important to get some payment from a large fraction of your players. In a "buy to play" model, you might have $40 up front from 100% of your players, at least early on. Eventually you might add a free trial, and perhaps only 10% of those who do the free trial will ever pay. But 10% sure beats 0.5%.
The trouble is that if you make a game "pay to win" and offend people who weren't paying anyway, so that they quit, you don't lose any revenue. If everyone is paying something (as with a "buy to play" or subscription model), then when you offend people that you're making a game "pay to win", you're losing real customers who are actually paying for your game, and that costs you revenue. In the former case, you have to make the game "pay to win" to survive; in the latter, it would be suicide to do so.
Comments
The 99.5% figure includes people who logged in once, ever, decided that they didn't like the game, and never came back. A large fraction of the people who ever play a given game only play for a very short period of time. For example, in Spiral Knights, the Steam Achievements say that only 16.8% of people who have played the game through Steam have ever made it to Moorcroft Manor, that is, cleared tier 1. I don't know how long it took me to do that after I first picked up the game, but it probably wasn't more than a few hours of gameplay.
I think, is to come up with ways that players can spend thousands of dollars on a game and that tiny few will find it worthwhile to do so, without offending the other 99.99% that the game is "pay to win".
The number is definately misleading. The majority of those numbers are probably people that try it for a few days and quit the game.
But when I look at those games, they definately make their money from a few selected players who pay alot.
That's the thing, you probably dont' care "that much" about those 99.99% of the people who don't pay. You just need to make the game good enough that those people dont' quit. Nothing wrong with pay to win. Many F2P games use that model.
If you run a F2P game, you absolutely cannot afford to have this attitude. There is definitely a dollar amount associated with nonpaying customers. Valve could probably tell you down to the dime how much more or less money they would make as a result of 10,000 nonpaying players joining or leaving TF2.
No matter how much you might dislike "pay to win", if you think revenue doesn't go down when nonpaying players leave the game, you don't understand the business model.
nothing is wrong with pay to win if you are willing to pay to win. Otherwise, everything is wrong with pay to win. You can spend $100 dollars weekly to be a badass player in a specific pay to win game, or you can save all that money and spend perhaps few bucks for certain cosmetic items in a non pay to win F2P game and maybe even have more fun and still be a baddass player.
So far i have noticed that people willing to pay lots of money to be the best players in a pay to win mmo are either rich or not smart enough. Once you open your eyes and realise that you dont have to pay all that money in other mmos (mostly better ones) and still be among the best players or at least a very good player, you will want to smash your head on a wall after seeing all the money you could have saved.
I believe that to be a good player the only requirement should be your own skill. As soon as you start buying your ranks to the top on a cash shop, you become worse than the publishers by supporting their greed (screweing the game with pay to win)
On a second note: Ive seen people saying, "well its my money and pay what i want".. That is true, but once you use that answer as an excuse to buy pay to win stuff then the only ones getting benefits are the devs / publishers. So no, it is not a smart answer to use.
That's the thing, you probably dont' care "that much" about those 99.99% of the people who don't pay. You just need to make the game good enough that those people dont' quit. Nothing wrong with pay to win. Many F2P games use that model.
nothing is wrong with pay to win if you are willing to pay to win. Otherwise, everything is wrong with pay to win. You can spend $100 dollars weekly to be a badass player in a specific pay to win game, or you can save all that money and spend perhaps few bucks for certain cosmetic items in a non pay to win F2P game and maybe even have more fun and still be a baddass player.
So far i have noticed that people willing to pay lots of money to be the best players in a pay to win mmo are either rich or not smart enough. Once you open your eyes and realise that you dont have to pay all that money in other mmos (mostly better ones) and still be among the best players or at least a very good player, you will want to smash your head on a wall after seeing all the money you could have saved.
I believe that to be a good player the only requirement should be your own skill. As soon as you start buying your ranks to the top on a cash shop, you become worse than the publishers by supporting their greed (screweing the game with pay to win)
On a second note: Ive seen people saying, "well its my money and pay what i want".. That is true, but once you use that answer as an excuse to buy pay to win stuff then the only ones getting benefits are the devs / publishers. So no, it is not a smart answer to use.
Games are not free to make beyond a certain quality. Developers must support the costs of running the game on top of recouping the cost of development. Just because you don't want to pay doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the model. I think there is something wrong with your attitude in that you believe you are entitled to the same level of prowess in a game you do not directly support. If everyone pays then everyone should be equal.What business model do you think they are offering? Their games are definitely not B2P or P2P.
There are a few MUDs that offer in-game rewards for donations up to a cap of $1000. I was always dumbfounded when I would read the helpfiles of some of these games and see that staff would leave some kind of bonus for people who threw a grand at the game. I thought no one would ever spend that much - at least on a MUD, where there's plenty of free alternatives.
Until I witnessed one person put down like $600 within his first month in the game. Yeah. He really wanted a customized house or something in the MUD, I guess.
To be honest, I have no clue if the guy still plays. Before I quit, he wasn't.
$600 isn't really a lot of money but I wouldn't spend it all on a game I could quit the next month. After all, that's about 20 copies of Sonic Generations. Gotta go fast.
I have zero problems with convience purchases. Get to the end faster purchases are fine too. That said, I will always perfer a subscription model over a pay to win model because it is impossible to display skill in a pay to win model.
I totally understand why there is appeal for other people in a pay to win model. Go, have fun. It is just not for me.
or you might look at it another way , people who spend lots of money on games is because they truely enjoy the climate and think that by helping the company stay afloat they will enjoy it for a longer period of time... i feel this describe my situation and how i will never buy a bioware product ever again ... Same for funcom no matter how good their future game is.
money is different depending on your relationship with it some people will swear by it and others will blow wads of cash on pretty much any useless stuff that they can think of.
What's funny is in some of the pay 2 win game, the most powerful people are actually the people don't pay at all. They are the people who just play alot. So really, the developer actually do let people being able to compete without paying.
I dont' see anything wrong with pay 2 win model. I don't like it myself, I'm sure most people don't too. But it keeps a game running. Alot of people being able to play totally free. And a few willing soul willing to pay alot of money to support the game.
Effectively, all games are 'pay to win.' You can't 'win' at WoW or SWTOR or GW without 'paying' something.
Personally, I think the whole 'pay to win' debate has gone so far off into the weeds it's hopeless and people are too busy arguing over the semantics of payment models.
I don't pay to play WoW... I fail at WoW because I can't log on. I don't pay to play STO... I'm stuck for number of characters and quality of gear as well as, if I remember right, access to many items. I don't pay to play Rift, I'm stuck at level 12... In GW, and presuambly, GW2, I pay the box copy and get full acccess and GW2 will have a cash-shop to early-unlock earnable game skills.
And so it goes...
All games, you pay, one way or another, 'to win.' And the rest is arguing over methods and semantics.
They *are* talking about MMOs. In fact, in the presentation, and i quote "This is the red line ‘Asian MMO’ in graph below".
This is very good news .. very consistent with other reports.
1) F2P means ... FREE to play for many ... since only a 0.5% (that is 1 in 200) player pays ANYTHING.
2) And so what if it is pay2win. Chances are, you will never be encountering one of the paying users. And if you want to meet the guy who spent $1000? That is 2% of 0.5% .. 1 in 10000.
I will be more than happy to live with those odds if I get a fun free game.
1 in 10000 players who have ever played might mean 1 in 100 players who still actively play.
As I see it, the real question with "pay to win" is pay how much to win? If someone who pays $10/month gets to be vastly stronger than someone who pays nothing, I'm fine with that. If someone who pays $50/month is crippled as compared to someone who pays $100/month, I'm not fine with that.
I now know for a fact there is no way you have ever played a " F2P " game. It is impossible to not meet a paying customer as they are always the ones in whole chat.
Not really a "trick", unless we call Good Item Shop Design a trick.
But shops which don't compromise gameplay are pretty well documented at this point (LoL, Tribes, and LOTRO/EQ2 are right there too) so it's hard to call it a "trick" to repeat the structure of games which are already doing this. A MMORPG could definitely be constructed with a nearly identical payment structure to LoL/Tribes, which completely avoids pay2win in the same way.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The second sentence makes some sense. So the paying customers are always in chat .. sounds reasonable .. although i would not call that "meeting" .. unless it happens in the game world.
However, the first one does not make sense. It is OBVIOUS, from the report, that 99.5% of the players never pay. So by DEFINITION, it is free for them.
So what is so "no way" to played a "F2P" game? I played many of them and they were all free since i did not pay a dime. My experience is very consistent with this report.
Nothing is wrong with pay-to-win games if you are willing to accept disadvantages because a small percentage of whales are SUBSIDIZING your game. If the game is fun (the only reason to play), you are getting value out of nothing. So what if the price is to have 0.5% of the players have an advantage over you. Seems very fair to me.
I'm just making up number, but the reality looks more like this. A game for example maple story have 100 million subscriber. 80% of them just login a few days to try the game, dont' like it and quit. The rest of them continue playing, but over the years, people continue quiting untill there's only like 200,000 active player left. Out of those 200,000 active player, maybe 10% of them use item mall regularly.
I'm just making up those number, I never even play maple story(actually I made an account and quit first day), but I think that's more realistic. I'm playing a pay 2 win game right now, Atlantica Online. The fact is a high percent of people use item mall. If you really believe a typical pay 2 win games only have 0.5% of their active players use item mall, Im' telling you no way.
But it differ game to game, you really have to check out what Kongregate is selling. To me, and the few f2p games I played, I'd say the amount of people who item mall is quite high, at least alot higher than 0.5%.
And I just check Kongregate games, their not even a mmorpg publisher of sort. So I'm not sure how the topic relate to mmorpg.