Back at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, there were a few major topics/buzz words being tossed around at the time. One of them was “emergent gameplay,” which actually inspired the name of this website, and the other one was “micro-transactions.” When I say micro-transactions though, I don’t necessarily mean the flood of downloadable content that has become available for purchase for many games, but rather for the use of them in MMOs. (Yeah, shockingly I attended most every MMO-related session.)
Following that announcement, I hadn’t seen anyone actually use a micro-transaction model, except for games coming out of Asia, which had been using them for some time already, and were the reason it was such a big deal at that GDC. Still, very few of those games were very high profile, nor did they capture much of a Western audience. Plus, an awful lot of them were not fully featured games with a lot of polish and content. Basically, most weren’t up to “subscription-level quality,” so to speak.
Then Runes of Magic launched recently. It is an Asian game, coming out of Taiwan originally, but it was made with an awful lot of Western influence. In the first two months of launch, the game has gained a million accounts in North America and Europe. Props.
However, Sony just demolished them.
While Sony certainly has its roots as a Japanese company, games developed by Sony Online Entertainment come out of the United States. While every major title under Sony’s MMO selection thus far has been subscription titles, they’ve changed that with the launch of Free Realms – an MMO designed for a younger audience. There is certainly a market for online games amongst the younger crowd, as well evident in the success of Club Penguin. SOE was able to tap into that market quite successfully, gaining an impressive one million accounts in just 18 days.
That, of course, speaks absolutely nothing about how profitable the game actually is – we aren’t likely going to find that out for quite a while. It does show that the concept of something having a ‘Free2Play’ (god, I hate that term) model isn’t going to scare everyone away. While Free Realms does have an optional, low cost subscription, they are pushing the idea of being a free game pretty strongly. I mean, its in the name of the game after all. So, I expect that they’re hoping to get quite a bit of their revenue from micro-transactions.
It will be interesting to see how these games develop, and how many other games with micro-transaction models we will see popping up.
