Post by Morreion on Feb 26, 2010 7:59:11 GMT -5
Player Perspectives: Fiddle of Gold - Also Available in Item Shop (Jaime Skelton, MMORPG.com)
Scott Jennings: Macrotransactions (MMORPG.com)
When microtransactions are mentioned, usually talk goes to accusing gaming companies of massive greed. Of course, gaming companies are businesses – by now, you've all heard that argument. Are they money-grubbing scum? Well ... maybe? To the MMO community, a gaming company is a giant, ambiguous entity with no distinguishable face or personality. Sometimes a great community manager or, rarer yet, a developer, steps up and offers a face of the company people can relate to; unfortunately, this human face often becomes separated as an individual on the side of the community, joining their side as a knight against the amorphous company blob. Point in case: I doubt many of you adore Mythic the way you adore Sanya.
...What's worse, though, is that the MMO community isn't sending a clear message to game companies. We say we don't want microtransactions in subscription-based games, yet we buy up just about everything a company offers to us when they go down that path. We say that we want the items to be available in game for virtual funds, but complain if microtransactions don't offer exclusive items, and if exclusive items are offered, complain there's no way to get those items in game. Quite simply, we are contradictory consumers.
...What's worse, though, is that the MMO community isn't sending a clear message to game companies. We say we don't want microtransactions in subscription-based games, yet we buy up just about everything a company offers to us when they go down that path. We say that we want the items to be available in game for virtual funds, but complain if microtransactions don't offer exclusive items, and if exclusive items are offered, complain there's no way to get those items in game. Quite simply, we are contradictory consumers.
Scott Jennings: Macrotransactions (MMORPG.com)
Item shops are how the great majority of free to play games actually make money. The idea is simple – start playing, get interested in the game, and then buy something that makes the game better, or easier, or whatever. This model is, to put it mildly, successful. Players generally don’t mind seeing “free to play” games as, more specifically, “free trials”. If they really like a game, many don’t mind paying a little extra to play it more. Not all players do – free to play games are especially popular with kids who simply can’t afford subscriptions or things in item shops – but enough do to make the scheme profitable.
...You see, for games that have item shops with, for better or worse, “essential” gear, it’s priced to be the equivalent of a monthly subscription fee. If a hardcore player purchases, say, experience enhancement or drop enhancement gear so that they can play the game as intended (instead of the radically slowed version available to free players willing to skew far into the time side of the time-over-money paradigm) then the game developer knows exactly how much that average hardcore player will need, and prices their gear accordingly. They don’t want to price them out of the market, because they need those hardcore players to make the game profitable.
Although there’s certainly room for high ticket vanity items (Simutronics, for example, sells developer-officiated player weddings in their text MUDs for quite a hefty sum of change) simply jacking up prices of items that are supposed to be impulse buys defeats the entire psychological purposes of a “micro-transaction”. If you have to think about it, it’s probably not really an impulse buy. A $2 backpack would be an impulse buy for many players. A $20 backpack, not so much.
...You see, for games that have item shops with, for better or worse, “essential” gear, it’s priced to be the equivalent of a monthly subscription fee. If a hardcore player purchases, say, experience enhancement or drop enhancement gear so that they can play the game as intended (instead of the radically slowed version available to free players willing to skew far into the time side of the time-over-money paradigm) then the game developer knows exactly how much that average hardcore player will need, and prices their gear accordingly. They don’t want to price them out of the market, because they need those hardcore players to make the game profitable.
Although there’s certainly room for high ticket vanity items (Simutronics, for example, sells developer-officiated player weddings in their text MUDs for quite a hefty sum of change) simply jacking up prices of items that are supposed to be impulse buys defeats the entire psychological purposes of a “micro-transaction”. If you have to think about it, it’s probably not really an impulse buy. A $2 backpack would be an impulse buy for many players. A $20 backpack, not so much.
