my first submission for the mmoblurbs.com thing cuppy is starting.
Freemium MMOs are a Catalyst for Metaplace World Domination on MMO Blurbs:
a really awesome (i think) and pertinent bit:
while all this “free” love (heh. i said “free love”.) is a great step for accessibility, it’s not the end-all-be-all. they’re only half-way to accessibility. and when i say half-way, i mean they’ve shed the biggest pain point of wide-scale adoption — a subscription. for example, people think world of warcraft’s 10 million subs is awesome… maplestory has 92 million. now, compare even further with wow’s $11 monthly arpu that of maplestory’s estimated $5 monthly arpu.
what do you have? the free game makes about 4x the cash that the largest (by a long, long, long, long, and very sad way) of the subscription mmos makes.
that being said, you can’t win on being free alone. afterall, free is just a price. it just shifts the battle from one kind of “value per scarcity” — value per subscription dollar — to another kind of “value per scarcity” — value per megabyte.
something i haven’t seen written about as a consequence yet of all these free games is client-side capacity. and by client-side capacity, i’m really talking about two things:
- physical file storage.
- available bandwidth.
you’ve heard the old saying “there’s only so much time in the day” — well that applies to the freemium mmo market too. well. really any “free” market. for web sites that offer free services, it’s more of an attention economy: “there’s only so much of people’s attention.” in “you have to download a massive 6 gig client” freemium mmo land, “there’s only so much bandwidth and hard drive space.”
m3mnoch.
