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PlayStation Free-to-Play Revenue Up 50%, most players don't pay
nariusseldon
Member EpicPosts: 27,775
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/21/playstation-free-to-play-revenue-up-50
"As reported by Gamepot, free-to-play revenue is up 50 per cent year-on-year – although Sony stopped short of divulging exact figures."
"Sony also explained that between 3 to 15 per cent of free players are converted to paying customers, and that the average revenue per paying user on PS3 is comparable to PC figures and trending slightly higher on PS4."
Comments
That is not exactly correct. Your assumption would be right with let say 1 server and one bandwidth pipeline, you would have fix costs for it, and that would remain until your capacity is full.. both for the bandwidth and server. But if you have 1000 MB/s Bandwidth, and every user requires 500kb/s(just a random number, it can be more or less depending on your application) you can only have 2000 users simultaneous, and exactly the same with hardware servers.. at some point either your bandwidth, your cpu capacity or whatever is on limit. And then you have to increase it, and withit increase your costs.
With other words it doesn't stay always the same, and there is a difference if 1 million play your game or just 100k in actual maintenance expenses.
Free to play games are unpredictable, companies keep their costs as low as possible, but that also means when they exceed those resources, they pay more. You may have a fixed cost for X amount of bandwidth each month for the servers, but you will exceed it on occasion, when promotions happen, when updates occur, when players return after trying out the latest failure... and at these points costs will spike because you go over X.
Sony's conversion rates are extremely high for the industry average, but I suspect that is due the continued influx of new users from PS4 pushing it up. When things calm down, it will drop. And conversion rate is different to percentage of paying users.
You have 1000 users and on average 10% pay (100), but your conversion rate at time of press is 15%. What that means is, that of new users joining the game at that time, 15% are converting to paying. So if 100 people join each day, you add 15 people to the paying users group. For that point in time you then have 115 paying users out of 1100 users, that is only 10.5% of your user base that is paying. Also you will have churn, there will be a number of people leaving as people come in. Depending on the point in the life cycle of the MMO, this could be lower or higher than those coming in, which again affects those numbers dramatically.
Most MMOs will find that once they've past that 3 month period, the influx of new people remains constant (low but constant), with the churn remaining constant, but their conversion percentage drops dramatically, down to 2-5%. Depending on who is churning, this usually leads to a decline in paying user base, therefore a loss in monthly revenue and the reaction of the company is always to carve up more of the game towards micro transactions.
The second poster is right about percentages not meaning much without a figure to work from. Frankly, having worked on MMOs for a number of year, I think anyone who makes them or builds an operation around them is insane, they are just really hard to make money from. Those you do hear about making a lot of money, either are AAA or have most of that revenue coming from MMO heavy markets like China and South Korea.
Reasons not to pay:
The game will surely die and close so its and investment not worthy, since old games u could play them anytime not restrcited by online services
Most add ons are extremely expensive and purely cosmetic so they add not much gameplay or replayability to the game
Online is not the most important feature like this era wants to sell everyone thus why paying for a service that become useless once game closes?
Most important a large amount of population is less than 16 year old players is foolish ask them that overhigh prices for stuff will be gone afte servers go down, when they have little money on their own
The other population work for the money so they value it more and more so will not spend it so easily on a new hat for a hero for an already ended game
Want the money? sell content not online restrictions, plus stop taking away games just because the servers are down
DARK AND LIGHT I GOVERN BOTH
wow wow wow ... you care far too much about what others may or may not say.
I don't pay for MMOs ... and there is no need to be defensive. It is just a product. If devs let me play it for free, there is no shame in taking advantage of it. It is a free world.
You don't have to play any if you like them.
Given how well Sony is doing in f2p games, i don't think they will miss you as a customer.
The numbers are ambiguous, and it doesn't seem likely that a game would make enough money off of only 3% to 15% of the players paying money, but at the same time, more developers are playing around with F2P monetization systems. There is a financial advantage to it that they are able to take advantage of.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Community is the same in these games and they add content mostly via expansions just like every other game. There is no noticable difference between a good B2P or F2P game and a sub game.
Why not? Games have survived on smaller numbers.
No one says those 3-15% are paying equivalent of a sub fee. The whales pay a lot more. In the extreme case, it is known that there are those who would spend thousands or even 10 of thousands of dollars on a game. You don't need that many of those players to be financially successful.
I'm not a fan of F2P, but I think EQ2 has a good medium. The community is pretty good and I think it's due to it being almost 10 years old so most of the people have been there since it was P2P. Also, EQ2 adds a lot of content not just fluff in the cash shop. But most F2P games are not like EQ2.
No one pays to be on this site...it has a terrible community and you are part of it....something to think about huh ?
There used to be but you're right, today there isn't much difference. The only difference there ever was was how they collected your play tax... IE charged you...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
What do you mean? The "community" here is fun. People don't mind flogging the same dead horses years after years just to be a good sport, and you can find two factions (or more) in any question you can raise.