MMO Gaming

Games are expensive to make. Getting back that money isn’t easy. Let’s do a few examples to show this.

Ten million dollars. That’s how much it costs you to get your game out. That means you have to sell two hundred thousand boxed copies (at $50 a piece) to make back that money…and that would be assuming you actually received all $50 of that money, which you probably don’t (at least not for the majority of the boxes.) If your game costs more than that (and most do) then you have to sell even more copies.

Now, for MMORPGs or any MMOG you may be thinking you can get away with a continuous charge. Maybe you feel you can charge the typical fifteen dollars per month to play the game. Doing that you have significantly cut down your possible player base. The amount of people willing to constantly pay $15/month is significantly less than those people willing to pay a one time fee of fifty dollars (or a few dollars more.) So how do you go about getting back the money you spent on developing the game and actually turning a profit (so that you can not only continue to pay the people already working for you, but hire more people and start working on new titles) if you want to maximize the number of people who will play your game?

At times it comes down to simple mathematics. The first step is to define your target market. If you have a strong target market in mind than you probably can reasonably estimate what you can will sell based on other, similar games. With that target market in mind you can look at whether your game will benefit more from the extra box sales you will get with only a one time fee or whether the continuous payment each month will better satisfy your needs. Sometimes one will be the clear winner, other times it won’t.

What do you bank on? If you do not expect to make back the money in box sales for your development costs what do you do? How do you continue to get money out of your game? Alternative models in MMOGs are becoming more common. Micro-transactions for items in the game, or perhaps a more GW-esque system where you pay for the content you want is better but charging a monthly fee isn’t getting anyone anywhere. Let me use myself to showcase that very thing. Just a few hours ago I wrote about debating whether or not I should pay for the boxed copy of Fury, a game that only requires a one time investment to play. I can’t decide if a (relatively) small amount of money (for the time that could be spent in the game) is worth it. Isn’t that just all the more so for the occasional gamer or the casual gamer?

And this almost completely ignores the plight of single-player games. What do you do then when pretty much all you have is the box? What alternate business models will we be seeing? Anyone have a model they’d like to share that hasn’t been tried yet?

money, game industry, business, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming