TheWhistlingPig wrote on Oct 8, 2010, 12:30:

Creston wrote on Oct 8, 2010, 11:31:
It's amazing how, if you just drop your greed and give players what they want, they come and play your game!

The entire gaming industry only took like twenty years to figure this out.

Creston

Have you played LOTRO recently?

Monthly sub for LOTRO, excluding multi-month discounts, prior to F2P, was only $10 a month.

In order for an individual with a "free" account to actually get to have fun in LOTRO right now, if they're the type who detests absurd grinds (kill 120 orcs for 10 Turbine points here, complete a series of quests for 5 Turbine points there) is to buy Turbine Points.

So an individual on a "Free" account is likely to spend more than $10 a month to be "free".

Turbine didn't drop greed. They got greedier. It's just that their marketting did a fine job disgusing free-to-try as free-to-play.

Nah, I don't agree. Not everyone who plays these games needs to have access to all the areas, or access to all the quests, or access to all the items. There's also plenty of people who'd play games like these once or twice a month, and don't feel that the subscription fee is worth it, because they feel they wouldn't get their money's worth.

For these people, free to play is perfect, and once they're playing, they're likely to buy a few things here and there. So Turbine doesn't get the 10 or 15 bucks a month steady off them, but in the same vein, initially they weren't getting ANY money from these people because they weren't playing anyways.

It's just smart business. And obviously they're in it to make money, but by being smart rather than just keep trying to squeeze that monthly fee out of their users, they just doubled their revenue.

It doesn't seem that difficult, but greed runs very rampant in the gaming industry, so it'll take awhile before they all realize that, hey, you don't have to squeeze every last dime out of a customer to make money. You can offer them options and let them choose what to pay for, and then they'll actually gladly give you that money.

I reckon that by the year 2587 the TV industry will finally figure this out. The fucking idiots.

Creston