F2P Thriving ??? LOL
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Not in revenue...
Watch Zynga stock going down from 14.2 dollars Feb 2012 ... to 2.7 dollars June 25th 2013 ...
Why ? 82% of the 75 million players of Farmville never spend a dime in game. Only 3% of all free to play gamers in Farmville spend 20 dollars...
Quote:
"
Despite the game's popularity, 82 percent of FarmVille players do not spend any money in the free-to-play game. Around 5 percent spend $1-5 in the game, and about the same amount spend $6-10. 3 percent of FarmVille users, though, spend more than $20 a month. Those figures aren't surprising considering that 57 percent of players also said they don't like spending a lot of money on gaming (46 percent of "average console gamers" said the same).
Source:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...y_It_Daily.php
Yeah these games are "thriving" alright.
With WOW raking in 275 million dollars in GAAP revenu (that's the ONLY official way that counts for official bookkeeping btw) in the first quarter of 2013 ... the rest gets the peanuts.
With the above average figures,
WOW needs to go to 150 million to 200 million players in a free to play status to arrive at 275 million GAAP revenue.
And in an MMORPG development cycle .... going F2P from scratch is pure suicidal.
OLD subscription based MMORPG's turn F2P in order to get SOME funds back, but that doesn't mean they are "thriving" in revenue (read $$$ sugns).
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F2P is good enough for CHEAP games with short development cycles and limited costs (example: Hearthstone, dota games) ... but MMORPG's are much too costly to produce as F2P or you have to resort to pure JUNK (cost effective games). Even GW2 had to resort to loading screens to replace fast travel mounts, open ended background loading worlds etc.
Did you know that a full 3D world you can fly over (with no borders or loading screens between zones) ... cost 3 times more than a game with seperate zoned loading screens. 3 times more, no wonder GW2 has only loading screens to jump from one instance to another...