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The Daily Grind: Do players ask for too much free in a free-to-play game?
In a couple of decades, I imagine that telling people that playing an online game used to cost money will be met with some strange looks. These days everything is going free-to-play, with only a few games holding on to the traditional subscription model. As a result, though, I can't help but find more people complaining about how much a game gives you for free and what things should never exist in a free-to-play game, despite the fact that as little as three years ago the business model in its entirety was considered an also-ran. On the one hand, this is totally reasonable -- companies have found a lot of ways to monetize games of late, and some of those have become both ubiquitous and incredibly annoying. On the other hand, it's increasingly difficult to establish a baseline of what anyone "should" get for free in a game when the concept of "games are free to start playing" is fairly new. So what do you think? Do players expect more to be free in a free-to-play game than is realistic? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Third-party development acquiring monetization options from EVE Online
If you're running a service in EVE Online at the moment, you're running it for free. If you're developing an application for the game, you're doing it for free. This isn't unusual, really -- pretty much any fan-developed application or service is done free of charge. But that's soon to change for fans of CCP's cutthroat game, as a new developer blog outlines upcoming changes that will allow developers to charge for services, applications, and website access. For a $99 license fee, developers and service providers will be able to sign up and start charging money for their products while having full access to the EVE Online API. The entry itself goes into more details on the restrictions of the program and what it will mean for non-commercial sites (which will not be required to pay any sort of fee). It's an interesting move, one that means that the game will be able to develop a more robust real-world economy to complement the in-game activities.
Report: 40% of App Store game downloads are freemium
Xyologic is a company that analyzes mobile app sales and trends, and its latest report says that a full 40 percent of game downloads from Apple's App Store consist of freemium titles -- games that are free to download, but make money with ads or in-app purchases. Ngmoco made a big splash a while back by saying that freemium was the future of the App Store, and according to this report, that is turning out to be more and more true. Xylogoic says that there were 99.9 million downloads of free iPhone games last month, and 80.8 percent of all app downloads were of free apps. It's well known that free games have a wider audience than paid apps (just because the barrier to entry isn't there), and while some developers say that the free audience is always better, the question has always been how to monetize all of those users. In-app purchases seem to be working -- the number of free games with in-app purchases available on the App Store is rising every month, and of the top 150 free games on the store, Xyologic says that 94 of those (63 percent) are making use of in-app purchases. There are certainly still apps benefiting from other models, but there's no question that freemium is still growing as one way to put a successful app on the App Store.
