Extracting money from players

Blizzard is said to have very good marketing, and maybe the recruit-a-friend action mentioned yesterday is an example of that. But why are they so bad in extracting money from me? I played WoW for a year, stayed in their world for 1,500 hours, and what did they get? A measly $200 for the box plus the monthly fees. That is only 14 cents per hour of entertainment!

How often did I spend $50 for a game which didn't even occupy me for 50 hours? A book, lets say the latest Harry Potter costing $16.99 at Amazon, did certainly occupy me much less than 100 hours. And if you compare to cost per year, I played Magic the Gathering in both paper form and online for 10 years, at a cost of about $1,000 per year.

My April fool's joke this year was a fake review on Grimwell Online which described a non-existing game I had written about here earlier. While real examples of games based on real world cash, like Project Entropia, or the upcoming Roma Victor, don't look as if they would become smash hits anytime soon, that doesn't mean the business model is flawed. I hear there are already several successful virtual world games in Korea where you buy stuff for real cash.

It is only a question of time when a first successful MMORPG with a real cash based economy is going to hit the western world. Trading card games proved that people aren't principally opposed to games in which you can buy your way to victory, as long as skill and luck also play a role, and the game is fun. One could even argue that the much discussed RMT, buying virtual items for real money, is due to the desire of players to spend more money on their games. After all, the demographics of gamers shows that the average gamer is getting older, and that invariably means that the average gamer now has more money and less time. Games which reward you mainly for time spent are just bound to go out of fashion.

Besides selling you virtual stuff for real money, what else could virtual worlds offer for more money? I think Everquest once tried offering "luxury servers", but I would be hard pressed to think of anything I would be willing to pay for on a WoW luxury server. Since I found out that most lag is caused mainly by lack of RAM or graphics power on the client computer, I don't think Blizzard could sell special lag-free service to anyone. I wouldn't pay for in-game GM-run events either, as those would require me to be online at specific times. Out of game events like BlizzCon I would pay for, but only if they happened somewhere I could travel to in not much more than 2 hours, which unfortunately doesn't include Anaheim. WoW merchandise I wouldn't buy, because outside a gaming convention there isn't a place where I could reasonably wear a WoW T-shirt at my age. So I'm waiting for Blizzard to come up with a better idea to extract money from me. Their current efforts are just not sufficient.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link