making-money
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Updating doesn't help your iPhone app, but price drops do
Here are two different insights from Pocket Gamer about how developers can grow the profile of their iPhone apps. The first comes to us from the wisdom of Peggle, that game that I just can't stop playing. Apparently, they've coined the term "Peggling," which means lowering the price of your app, and seeing a huge benefit from it. Whenever a game drops its price down to 99 cents, much as Peggle did soon after release, it sees a significant bump in the charts. I'm sure there are many other factors at play here -- Peggle was a great game, so you can't sell more of a crappy game just by selling it for cheaper, and I saw a lot of Twitter and blog attention when the price dropped, so it pays to have people watching the price in the first place. But under the right circumstances, dropping the price can do a lot for a game that's already selling pretty well.But an update, apparently, won't. That's what the makers of Zen Bound told Pocket Gamer -- they say that when they released an update with new levels and new features, it didn't make a difference in their sale numbers at all. Games like Pocket God have made a reputation for themselves by providing regular and solid updates, and certainly it seems like those updates have at least spurred sales, if not made them blow up, but the Zen Bound guys say that singular updates on major products probably won't kick sales into gear.Interesting. We're at least a few generations into App Store sales at this point, and we're started to see trends and consumer behavior in better relief; developers are getting better and better ideas every day about how to price and service their apps and customers.
Jason Rohrer on going from indie to the App Store
We covered Jason Rohrer's Primrose when it first came out -- the creator of Passage, a critically-acclaimed indie game, had taken his first steps onto the iPhone with an abstract puzzle game, and in this latest interview with Edge, Rohrer says he's on the iPhone to stay. He says that when he first moved from strictly art/indie games to more commercial development on the iPhone, he worried that he was selling out: he wasn't a fan of cell phones at all or any Chinese-made gadgets sold by American companies, and yet the iPhone's platform seemed most "palatable" to him in terms of making games and a little money from them.And yet he says the iPhone still has pros and cons -- even in an "open source, free software" world, Apple's system offers a choice: you can buy a packaged-up version of the software and throw a little money back to the developer (not a ton -- he says you've still got a better chance at making a living from Vegas than you do from the App Store), or you can still try building and installing your own version on your iPhone. As an open-source developer selling apps on the App Store, he says, "you're charging for the service and convenience, not the content."Still, he echoes the sentiments of lots of other developers: "There is no quality filter, except for the whims of the masses." Apple's App Store offers up an intriguing system for many indie developers like Rohrer, who want to earn a little money for their games without setting up all of the complexity and burdens of a more traditional publishing channel, but it's still tough to keep from getting lost in the mix.
Activision conference call: WoW still at 11.5 million subscribers
The OC Register has a great breakdown of what Activision said on their earnings conference call today. Perhaps the biggest WoW-related stat to come out of the call is that the number of subscribers to the game has apparently leveled off: they're holding steady at 11.5 million. Which is nothing to cough at, but it's what we were told four months ago, and if, as Ghostcrawler claimed, the numbers are still going up, then they're going up very, very slowly. Morhaime says that numbers are growing everywhere, but that China will be a main focus of growth this year as Wrath of the Lich King releases there soon.In non-WoW Blizzard news, the Starcraft 2 beta will start this summer and will be the "final" phase of development for that game. The new Battle.net interface will be tested then as well, so keep an eye out for that. And Blizzard expects big things there in China also -- NetEase, the company that will now be handling Wrath's launch, is already set up to run both Diablo III and Starcraft 2 out there, so it'll all be under one umbrella.In short, there's no really bad news from Blizzard, but no really great news either -- the best news to come out of the call is that even in the slow economy lately, Blizzard is holding steady. Not a bad thing at all, but we probably won't see any spikes in player interest in Blizzard or WoW until they announce what's next on the content plate, whether that be at BlizzCon or before.
ATVI is a "conviction buy"
Well, The9 is going down in flames, but if you're looking to make some money in the stock market lately, you could do like BRK and buy some stock in Activision-Blizzard. Goldman Sachs has upgraded ATVI to "buy," and even marked them out as a "conviction buy" -- while the stock price is almost $11 right now (it jumped up about .75 on this news this morning), GS says it's headed to $14 eventually. "Conviction buy" just means that the wily traders at Goldman Sachs expect the stock to outperform in the future -- Activision is already saying it will do well, but GS thinks it'll do even better.Medievaldragon over at WorldofWar.net points out that there may still be trouble ahead: while Blizzard has gone with Netease for their service in China, they still have to make it past the Chinese government's approval process, and there may actually be service outages if things aren't approved quickly. But that won't affect Activision's business very much, and given that the company still has a bright future (even in a harsh economy), picking up a few shares is probably a relatively good investment.Please note: I am not a financial expert, and none of this should be taken as serious financial advice. You invest in the stock market and any other financial institution at your own risk. If you're getting stock tips from WoW Insider, it's probably better to keep your money in your pocket. AH tips, on the other hand...
Study: MMOs bringing in $1.4 billion a year
If America's bankers want to get back into Moneytown, apparently they could do a lot worse than designing a hit MMO -- a study by a group named Screen Digest says that the MMO market is hotter than ever. After dropping down to a total of $701 million in 2008, games like World of Warcraft are seeing their revenues rise again, up to a total of $1.4 billion. And not surprisingly, WoW is still leading the charge -- while their overall market share is dropping very slightly, from 60% of the market down to around 58%, they're still making more money than ever. And while other games are picking up some numbers, according to Screen Digest, they're not really stealing players from Azeroth -- they're actually pulling new MMO players in.Which is understandable -- during times of economic downturn, online games like MMOs are actually positioned to do very well. Why spend $15 on one night at the movies when you can spend it on a whole month of entertainment? World of Warcraft may have brought the MMO monster to the surface, but according to numbers like these, this is a game genre that's going to be extremely popular (and profitable) for a long time to come.
E-ON offers 100 million ISK reward for your best EVE Online screenshots
E-ON, the official magazine of EVE Online, is running a contest where your best screenshots could net you 100 million ISK for each shot they publish in the April issue. E-ON editor Zapatero, who we interviewed in November, said what he's looking for on the E-ON blog, 'Postings from the Edge': "What we're after are your screenshots. They can be of ships mining, travelling or fighting. They can be pilots tending to starbases, searching for wormholes or epic battles against Sleeper ships. In fact they can be of anything from inside New Eden, they just have to be good-looking images. The very best that we receive will be published in the edition of EON that's out next month."
WoW Insider Show Episode 80: Listen to your mom
We had a little bit of everything on this week's WoW Insider Show. We got down and dirty with Ulduar details, as Michael Sacco walked us through all of fhe bosses he'd done so far on the PTR. Turpster and I got a little silly for the fans (unfortunately, the song is stlll yet to come, but I'll reiterate: it'll be worth the wait), we told a kid how important it is to stay in school, and we even snuck in some good advice on how to make some money fast ingame.You can listen to last week's show, as always, on any or all of the links below, and be sure to send us an email at theshow@wow.com if you've got any feedback you'd like to share. Don't forget, too, that there is no show next Saturday -- instead, we're going to be recording the podcast live on Wednesday night at 9pm EST over on the Ustream page, so if you've never had the chance to hear the show before, this'll be your opportunity to tune in and listen live. We'll return back to our normal time on Saturday, March 21st.In the meantime, enjoy the show.Get the podcast:[iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes.[Ustream] Listen to the unedited recording in Ustream.[RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator.[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.Listen here on the page:
Time is Money: Selling your quest rewards
Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply).Today, I'm going to help you make the most out of your questing experience. The most gold, that is! Quests often reward hard-working Azerothians with items that are useless to them. The items are usually peddled off to a vendor at a price of their choosing. When given a choice of rewards, how do you decide which item to select? Some players pick at random, or because the item has an interesting name or looks cool. Some think that they have figured out the rules, and always pick plate over mail and weaponry over armor. What the average citizen doesn't know is that there's a complex, hidden system. It's practically a Goblin-Vendor cover-up, but I'm here to end all that. Goblin Rules of Acquisition, subsection K4, under the heading, Quest Rewards.
10 things I learned from a destitute alt on an RP realm
I have a few alts on an RP realm that I visit from time to time, and I remember thinking to myself at one point: "These characters are a bunch of deadbeats." I'd gotten too used to the alts on my main realm being a bunch of pampered brats, spoiled rotten by the presence of a hardworking main, so financial discipline had grown to be a thing of the past. Not so on another realm where you don't have a main, and I realized that unless I went back to a few monetary basics, my alts would wind up dancing naked on mailboxes in pursuit of gold. This is a fine tactic with a long and storied history, but when your most promising alt is a level 16 Undead Mage, you're up the proverbial creek. No one wants to see a rotting, naked corpse.So I started not being a deadbeat, and it was with surprise and delight that I logged on to find the little tyke sitting on a pretty respectable pile of gold by level 21 -- as in, he can afford to pay for his level 30 mount and training several times over, and still have enough left over to train himself all the way to 45 even if he doesn't make another penny.
Insider Trader: Finding your niche
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.In the World of Warcraft, just as in real life, your professional duties seem to extend beyond your job title. Perhaps most of your guild can cook, but are they all farming and contributing raid food? Which guildmate is the go-to-person for enchants, and who is donating materials instead of selling them on the Auction House for personal gain? Don't get me wrong, here. Personal gain is a perfectly legitimate pursuit. We all have to support ourselves, and we all have expenses as well as things that we simply want. Still, there is a difference between someone who has maximized a skill and someone who really works it. What is your niche? Are you the master of profits, a provider, or someone who brings the goods that no one else can? Today I'll be talking about how we practice our professions, and the roles and styles that we can adopt to enrich our in-game professional experiences.
The value of questing after level 80
I'm always amazed when people hit 80 and then start wondering how to make gold. Sure, there are all kinds of money tricks floating around (playing the AH is always fun, and everyone has their own tips they've picked up), but quite frankly, the easiest and most reliable way to pick up a ton of money at level 80 is just to do what you've been doing: go quest. Blizzard has made it so that there's no way you've hit all the quests in Northrend when you've reached the highest level, so odds are that you've got at least one (if not two or three) untouched zones of quests to do. And as folks have discovered on the forums, there's a ton of money to be made there.Given that after level 80, experience turns into gold, the return on time invested with leftover questing is awesome. You can pick up over three thousand gold easily just by clearing out the zones you haven't hit hard, and by vendoring off the quest rewards that you get for completing the quests, you can pick up even more. Sure, some folks will have AH schemes that will bring in more money, but Blizzard has done their darndest to make sure there's money in them there questgivers, so if you're slouching around at 80 wondering what to do, go finish up your quests.And of course if you really have finished up all of the quests in the game (and seen all the amazing storylines and character development that go along with doing so), then there's always daily quests to work on. While they won't pay out quite as much as one-time quests, when you break down the time you invest versus the gold you get out of it, they're often the best way to cash in your playtime as well.
Saving for that horse: a mid-level guide to making money in LotRO
Over at MMORPG.com, their Lord of the Rings Online correspondent Jim Braner has written a comprehensive guide to finding riches in LotRO entitled "Lord of the Rings Online: Making and Keeping Silver in your 20s." This is a great little guide, as it explains many of the common-sense nuances of the game that can be used to your pocketbook's advantage. For example, instead of paying for a ride from the Forsaken Inn to Ost Garuth, why not just run there? Sure it will take some extra time, but think of the drops and resources you'll be able to gather along the way. One of the most underrated points of this guide is one that I firmly believe, yet can rarely convince others to trust. Keeping up with new armor every 5-6 levels will actually help you save money. Of course this only applies if you are a Tailor or Metalsmith, or know one fondly, as buying armor from a merchant is a complete waste. As stated in this guide, that new armor is more durable, and with a higher armor rating, you'll die less. This will cut down significantly on your item repair bills, and ultimately keep more money in your pocket.While these suggestions are all great, I couldn't help but add a few more to the list. Check out some of my own tips on making and saving money in mid-level LotRO just after the cut below.
Making/Money: Auctioneer Wishlist
WARNING - MATH AHEAD! A few weeks ago, a reader e-mailed me with questions about some Auctioneer data that they have been collecting. Though the question was regarding trying to determine inflation patterns on their server, it got me to thinking about what Auctioneer actually captures. And what other data points would be most helpful in making evaluations of item pricing or looking into economic trending. While I'm not about to go through all of Auctioneer's algorithm rules, I would recommend that anyone who uses this mod check them out on Norganna's Wiki. They explain where the recommended prices come from. Basically, it's a comparison of the historical data accumulated from all of your auction house scans and the most recent snapshot data. The market value ends up being either the median of historical or recent data, flavored with the user-set preferences for markup or markdown.
The future of MMOs: Subscription vs. Free-to-Play
Have you ever wondered how so many of today's newer MMOs can go with the free-to-play business model? With the mega bank that Blizzard is making off of World of Warcraft, wouldn't the obvious plan be to make any new game subscription-based? Well, not exactly.According to an amazingly-extensive research post over at Matt Mihaly's The Forge blog, the decision for an MMO to choose between a subscription-based or free-to-play (with microtransactions) business model is not simply black and white. There's so much gray area in there based on more than just trying to reach the largest audience and making the most money. It's about developing a game that players will enjoy for many years. Market trends and long-term player interest is a difficult thing to predict, so new MMO developers find themselves experimenting with many different plans. Will these plans eventually evolve into the holy grail of online gaming payment, or will we eventually find that the best solution has been under our noses the entire time?
Making/Money: Conservation of Mass - Part 3
Once more with feeling! Welcome to the third and final (planned) installment of our series on closed-resource economies in MMOs. So far, we've laid the foundation of the system and discussed how starting out, leveling up, and gaining loot could work. Today we will be exploring how crafting professions could still be possible even when the law of Conservation of Mass applies and how banking might function. There's been a lot covered so far so if you haven't already, i recommend reading the first two posts. But since I know that gets into the TLDR length, here's a very quick recap. In order to maintain a constant level of stuff in the game, new items could only generate once old items leave the game. Money would function in the same way, except that it would flow from NPCs to monsters (meaning any monies collected by NPCs would spawn as loot) in order to recirculate. There would need to be additional gold sinks (some of which we will get to in just a minute) and limits on the number of characters per server. Each server would then "age" as the average level of characters on it increased.
Making/Money: Conservation of Mass - Part 2
Welcome back for Part 2 in our series on closed-resource economies in MMOs. Last week we discussed how starting out in this *completely hypothetical* system might work, what some of the basic rules of operation might be, and what it would take to keep money available to players. Today, we continue on our chosen path to talk about how loot and gear could be distributed so that raiding, quests, and all the other content we enjoy would still be available even through endgame. First, a quick recap of the groundwork we already laid out. Rule #1: Server character limits. Yes, this would create the need for more servers in the game. But it would also enable the developers to determine a starting point for the goods, resources and money available at server start. Rule #2: Items and money must leave the game in order to come back in as loot or gathered materials. That means that they must be consumed in some way, either by being dropped and deleted, or by being given to an NPC. Consumed items could return as they had left the game, as the resources used in their creation, or as another item entirely. Rule #3: More gold sinks. In order to keep the loot flowing, there would need to be additional, enticing or mandatory ways for the gold to leave the game. An example might be to have service-oriented NPCs, such as the Work Orders in Lord of the Rings Online or the Saw Mill in RuneScape. Mounts or housing are always popular ways to get money back from players to NPCs as well. Still with me so far? Excellent. On we go!
Three tips for the wacky world of AH pricing
I have a confession to make: I've been playing the AH pretty hard for a few weeks now (ever since I started grinding up to the 5000g for my epic, and yes I got it finally), and I've come up with a lot of good tips for you guys, but I've kept them to myself, because I was selfish and didn't want my sources of gold to dry up. But now, I've got pretty much all the gold I need, and I'm ready to bring these to the world. Lots of you will already know what I'm going to say here (some of you might even be angry that I'm telling everyone), but for those of you who haven't found these little holes in the AH, here you go.First of all: level up your First Aid to 325 right now, because I've got three words for you: Heavy Netherweave Bandage. Think all that they'll do is heal you? Think again -- they vendor in the game for a whopping 6g per stack, so every time you log on your AH alt, the first thing you should do is run to the Auctioneer and buy up all the Netherweave cloth you can find for less than 3g -- crafted up into bandages, each stack of cloth is worth at least that, so anything you buy for less than 3g (I've seen it as low as 1g 50s -- people are throwing away money) is pure profit. This is the biggest moneymaker I've found (you don't make much per stack, but after you've "processed" a few hundred stacks, the money adds up), and it made me regret selling Netherweave for anything less than 3g before I figured this out.Second big tip: don't ever buy anything on the weekends. Ever. Prices soar on the weekends, so much so that you'll often be able to take advantage of huge bargains during the week, and then turn around and craft or just resell those items on the weekends, when everyone else is playing. I know you really, really want that Primal Air on Sunday so you can finish off your profession leveling, but wait three days -- by Wednesday, all of the AH sellers will have seen their auctions expired and will be ready to lower the price.
The science of farming nodes and playing the market
How to make money in your MMO of choice; this is probably one of the most popular topics among players who want the best gear. Should you raid for rare boss drops? Should you buy low and sell high in the auction house? Should you farm for crafting supplies? Of course, each game's economy is different, but personal preference should dictate what you ultimately decide and how you wish to spend your time. Over at Kill Ten Rats, they've written a great article on the phenomenon of item pricing in MMOs. The example is centered around the economy of Lord of the Rings Online and how you can allow certain people to inflate auction house prices beyond belief, to ultimately lower the item's price for others. It's an interesting take on an MMOs version of supply and demand, which isn't really even based on supply or demand, but the perceived version of either.
Making/Money: Economic Equilibrium is MIA
When I first started playing MMOs I was in college. I'd bounced from major to major but ultimately settled on Economics (from a starting point of Medieval and Renaissance Studies - how'd that happen?). Like other economists in games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, I was thrilled to find a lively economy and interested to apply classical economic models in the study of it. The most basic of these models is the typical supply and demand curve. Any economic model starts with price and quantity. The higher the price, the more suppliers want to sell but the less consumers want to buy. As the price decreases, more consumers are interested in purchasing, but fewer suppliers are able to produce profitably. In theory, there is a magical level in the middle where supply and demand meet. That is equilibrium (see graph). What I have since found, which is furiously debated by other economists in the field, is that the typical supply and demand curves do not fit well with the economies of most MMORPGs these days. Depending on the game, add-ons used, and availability of additional market data, there may be sort of invisible caps to the price, and thereby the quantities, of goods traded. Furthermore, auction house fees and vendor sales act much in the same way as taxes or subsidies in real world economies.
Resources galore for new EVE Online players
Veteran EVE Online blogger CrazyKinux is on top of his game. He's put together a collection of resources geared towards new players of EVE, or for those who are curious about what the game entails. He culled roughly three years of his own content to select ten of his most useful posts, out of the hundreds he's written. The list hits topics ranging from the simple -- acronyms, mission running, and finding the right corporation to join -- to the more complex, such as exploration tips and faction standings. He strikes a good balance between content for new players and info for veteran players who could use a refresher on these aspects of the game. Also of interest there is the ever-growing EVE Online Blog Pack, which provides an easy way to keep up to date with what the EVE blogging community is up to. Check out "10 Posts for the EVE Online Newbie" and its related discussion on the EVE Online forums.
