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Comparing MMO earnings for major free-to-play titles.
Meowhead
Member UncommonPosts: 3,716
http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/mmo-arpu/
This is sort of interesting. It's a link where superdataresearch (Using how accurate of methodology I don't know) takes a lot of major F2P MMOs (Though apparently they think shooters count as MMOs...) and has a list of the top ten games for average revenue per user.
Things I've learned from this: Hats make a lot of money. Shooters and MOBAs count as MMOs to these people. People REALLY love tanks.
Comments
That was an interesting read. Thanks for the link
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I think they mean MMO as in MMOG, Massive Multiplayer Online Game, but even MMO is just a shorted version of MMORPG.
So is that average revenue per player per month?
If so, seems to me having 100k or 800k or 1.2M people paying a $14.99 subscription is still better, along with supplementing that with vanity sales.
I like to see what WoW or SWtOR average is per subscriber. Hell I'd like to see what SWtOR is per user subscriber and F2P. I bet either of those are pretty impressive.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
I know they meant MMO as in all MMOG games, but I'm not sure Team Fortress counts as that massively multiplayer. Oh well.
And yes, that's average revenue per player per month over a 12 month period.
And yes, a subscription is quite a profitable method if you can stay over 1 million subscribers or so. Just 100k subscribers, I think every game on the list (or close to) beats that amount of money.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Well I would think once you capture a subscriber you more or less have them. Im personally curious about ESO and if they can hold onto a decent amount of their numbers after three months.
There are some great advantages to having a sub based game over an itemized F2P.
One, you can get people to pay in advance for their subscription. Thats a nice influx of revenue.
Two, you can still itemize and pad your sales.
Three, unlike a F2P game a sub based game does have to then use that revenue to create more items in the shop just to create more revenue. A good example look how long Wow goes in between expansions and it still still generates revenue during that time.
Four, the F2P market is flooded crap. I think ESO is showing that there is a majority of people who would prefer to pay a sub as long as theyre getting quality back in return. WoW and EVE are to prime examples of that.
Five, the F2P market is flooded. Meaning a F2P game has to work harder to keep its revenue vs a subscription game. And like that article said there can be some serious fluctuation.
I'm not really trying to argue the advantages. Its just how I see its advantages subs once the I think about the figures.
On a side note but what I find relevant to these facts.
I think SOE is kinda shooting themselves in the balls with this whole "our games all are free to play". I think they'll sell great, like GW2 did. But then when there isnt a good meaty expansion I think they are going to start losing people just thru basic boredom attrition. There are just to many F2P titles, there not enough butter to spread on the bread.
Which means they'll have to spend more money on the "hope" of re-attracting peoples attention, which really just amounts to adding items in the item mall, or handicapping the game so that you force people into premium services. And that in itself runs the risk of alienating people even more by making them feel "nickeled and dimed".
You can point at D&D Onlines success. But I think the truth is, if D&DO had released into this market we have now, it would have tanked.
SOE you have some ballls, lets hope you didnt just place them in a vice.
Oh and if I didnt say so,
Thanks for the link.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
I agree, the bad thing about a sub is when you lose a person because they thought what was being provided wasnt worth the $15 a month its even harder to get them to justify re-uping that sub again. But then again some people may try and get their $15 worth and may end up enjoying the game or making friends before the sub runs out.
F2P is a very much revolving door. Its ease of commitment is both a boon and a bane.
So what would you guys guess is WoW revenue per subscriber with all the charges for names changes, transers, buying max characters, pets, mounts, and other vanitiy items?
I'm thinking maybe around $17 per subscriber...maybe $16.40ish may be more realistic tho. I have this feeling SWtOR is very high per subscriber. Plus they are generating itemized and premium services revenue from their F2P crowd, and the rumor is its damn good.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Those numbers are insane, when you consider that the majority (80-90%) of players in those games aren't spending ANY money at all.
The players spending money are spending ridiculous amounts on those games, those World of Tanks numbers suggest the average amount spent per month by paying players is between $22 to $45!
I've worked on free to play MMOs before, I know how the numbers work, but I've never seen ARPPU for a month that high before.
About one and two, any P2P MMO that is NOT WoW and has no free option (E.g. SWTOR) WILL tank hard. Just look at the uproar for the ESO's imperial race bullshit. I think it hurt the game more than it did help
About three, are you implying that the developers of F2P games are not working once the game is released? Because that's stupid and biased opinion that can't be further than the truth.
4) EVE is really a bad example for P2P game and WoW is the default game of many people and you see that WoW's numbers diminish. No game can ever do what WoW did. I mean sure, League of Legends has more users and is probably making higher revenues but its another genre.
5) Every MMO developer has to work hard to retain paying customers, what is your point? Do you think ESO or any other P2P MMO could retain subs without introducing content? From the looks of it TESO is having bumpier launch than SWTOR and is just about the same game, with decent PvP. It will convert in year or two. Would it be F2P crap then or you will whiteknight it hell?
One word for you .. whales.
Where whales choose to spend there money says something (aside from how much money they are spending. which may influence their averages).
This is an interesting read so far (just woke up a while ago so still going through it). I'll probably reply later with further thoughts.
also this: http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Helleri/042013/24908_What-is-an-MMO-vs-an-MMORPG is something I wrote on here in regards to the whole MMO/MMOG vs. MMORPG thing.
I see MMO not as MMOrpgs but all of the various MMOs. People should use MMORPG when they mean MMORPGS rather than MMO. It is more clear and direct.
I too would like to see the numbers on wow and swtor. Surprising they aren't included.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
I think this goes without saying since most games try to launch P2P but fail to meet expectations so convert to F2P so they can cut development costs to reduce overhead. With a constant, consistent money stream you can develop regular content updates. When you have a model that has a wildly unpredictable amount of income every month, your development platform is designing services and items that people will want to buy and content hits the back burner until you have enough in your budget to put towards that.
A lot of publishers going forward are just going to make their game with F2P in mind from the start because they know they don't have the pockets to fund some 50M game.
So, I read this thing a few times. The sourcing for the information is a little vague. It says they collect this information from "Publishers, payment service provide[r]s, and other industry sources". I take this to mean in some instances the publishers were forthcoming with the information. And, in other instances they had to talk to CCC's? And. then what ever "other industry sources" is supposed to mean. Seems like this info is scraped together. So, I doubt the reliability for two reasons:
1) If they are getting information from what ever sources they can (that being, many and diverse, apparently). Then consistency is going to be an issue.
2) They may only have a top 10 populated by the ones that are on the list because those may very well vbe the only ones they could gather this kind of information on.
Which is all to say, they are taking a bit of a stab at it, and this may not consider things that really should be there but simply aren't due to the circumstances. I have to take this as an incomplete guesstimate (unless clearly shown other wise). Also, I would much rather see a top 100 list as other types of MMOG would likely appear on it which would give us a hierarchical look at where things like MMORPG, Social MMO, and the like sit in respects to shooters and MOBA.
That said....This seems to be as good of footwork as can be expected. And, we can take more from it then 'who makes the most'. It also helps us get a better idea of overall player population in these types of games. For instance:
Top of their list is World of Tanks. This makes sense. World of Tanks has won best online game at GJA two years running, is relatively new on the scene, is widely accessible, and is making massive improvements lately due to competition from War Thunder. And, this information tells us World of Tanks has 9.1mil users per month. We can assume (fairly) that this is not based on login sessions but unique traffic (which I am not necessarily equating to new unique traffic for these purposes). Other wise it would be near impossible to fairly calculate.
What this can be taken to mean. Is that an f2p shooter which has an average of 35k users on at any one time has around 9mil users per month. Now this is almost pure guesstimating. But, it follows logically based on empirical evidence. Which is better then saying "I bet they have about X amount of users."
I don't think we can use it to say f2p shooters and MOBA are automatically more popular then f2p MMORPG. Because again. They may not have been able to gather enough information on those specifically to be able to include them in the list.
If the game is built right and the payment model is integrated well (you would be surprised how many people are willing to bypass grind and how few are willing to buy power) then the amount isn't wildly unpredictable as you claim but indeed may in fact be more than what would be possible with a sub. Is this nickle and dime-ing the customer/player? If there is no pay to win and the only thing the player is bypassing is a time investment and maybe some vanity items then no, you can always choose to grind or to pay granted this has to be balanced just right so there is no forcing to pay to skip impossible grind or use the World of Tanks method: 50% regular - 100% premium, same destination different speed.
F2P is the future but right now is the time when it is maturing out of the freemium/p2w/endless trial disguised as f2p buillshit the old guard publishers/developers are trying to peddle and moving towards a system which you , as a player, feel no need to pay to have fun or do so because you gain fun little vanity extras (anything from visual only item effects to character haircuts to customized tabards for your armor and anything in between) which cost 0.5-1 USD a pop and which you could do perfectly without if you so chose (this isn't nickle and dime tactics and vanity extras do not detract almost anything from development).
Interesting data.
if we take the number unique log ins + revenue and convert for generic 15 dollar subscription equivalency
basically:
"shown: average dollar amount spent by a player in the last twelve months" <---taken from the graph grey text
WoT: $4.51 dollars per person per year, 9.1 million unique log ins per month
LoL: $1.32 dollars per person per year, 58.5 million unique log ins per moth
WoT: 4.51/12 *(9.1) = $3.42 million per month in net revenue
LoL: 1.32/12* (58.5) = $6.44 million per month in net revenue
next lets see what number of subscriptions these games would need in order to have an equivalent revenue as a subscription based game.
sub = $15 per month per person
3.42 million dollars per month /15 dollars per person per month = 228k subs
6.44 million dollars per month/ 15 dollars per person per month = 429k subs
Note these numbers wouldn't reflect Net revenue but gross so we can assume that an additional percentage of subs is need to meet the net values.
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what this data tells me is that 500k sub number the developers/publishers throw around for p2p to be profitable might ACTUALLY BE A THING.
As for the p2p versus f2p which is the better model arguement.....
the graph really doesn't tell anything
There are too many factors such as cross game log ins, disparity in how the fan bases of the sub genres spend money, development costs based on sub genre, is gw2 counting box sales in their value, the overall value of fun provided by model, etc
It's actually 4.51 and 1.32 per Month, not year, if you read the part under the graph in the link...
its net revenue per year
"shown: average dollar amount spent by a player in the last twelve months" is a direct quote from the the grey box under the graph. basically march 2013 to march 2014
Thanks for sharing this and Pemmin for doing the math
Something to note: PS2 still hasn't opened it's market to other countries but will soon. Will be interesting how this data changes over the next year.
Right. I misunderstood the part where it said "...based on monthly transactions..." My bad...
It doesn't need to, the only thing that we need to see is all the p2p games going f2p. They would NOT be doing that if their p2p model was raking in the cash. I don't need a graph to see where the real money is coming in and neither do you.
absolutely agree.
people tend to infer broad sweeping things on this site, and i was just making a point that their is no value for said argument from this graph. also i had to throw that cheap shot at gw2 somewhere in my post.
Sorry to grab just one little snippet of it. But, when you said that specifically...I realized how terrible that graph is. And, I don't mean the information it presents us with. But, the way it's presented. It is basically an image of text...that they could have just represented with text, hehe. No colored bars, curve, or wheel. There doesn't even seem to be an alternate for text based browsers or if the image fails for some reason that describes what should there...which again could all be in text to begin with. Just saying. That is a really odd and kind of funny choice they made.
Okay. You win btw, and youre 100% right.
(just so you know those were talking points, not arguing points)
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
I'd like to know how you came up with those numbers, of $8 to $10 including all the amenities that Bliz charges that I mentioned and on top of the $15 sub price? Not saying youre wrong since we're all dealing with speculation. But could you explain your logic?
And I thought about trail players. They cant be included for or against the ARPU. Yes, they are playing the game free, but not the whole game, at some point they have to decide to either become a subscriber or to re-roll a new toon and play just levels 1 thru 20.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Nothing wrong with that for the publisher, it is smart business.
I dont particularly like it though.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."