I’m not surprised that a game publisher would try this; I am surprised that such a brazen tactic has worked:
In China, a new MMORPG with a very aggressive business model, entitled ZT Online, has gained significant popularity. With an ARPU of $40/quarter spread over one million paying users, the game has made its publisher, Giant Interactive, one of the most profitable online entertainment companies in China. Like many Asian games, ZT is free-to-play (F2P) and focuses primarily on player-vs-player gameplay. Not only can players steal from their defeated foes, but weaker characters can even be kidnapped and held for ransom, locking their owners out of the game.Access to equipment in ZT is very limited. First of all, there are no loot drops from killing monsters or completing quests. Further, all items in the game are completely bound to the owner, so there is no way to trade for better weapons with other players. Instead, the primary way to gain equipment to empower one’s character is by paying real money directly to the publisher to open “treasure chests.” Essentially in-game slot machines, these chest have only a small chance of producing something useful, and finding the best equipment often requires opening thousands of chests. In fact, each day, the game confers a special bonus to the player who has opened the most chests, meaning the player who has spent the most real-world money to obtain better items.
This innovation came about in Asia for a reason:
ZT Online’s complete embrace, at every level of the game, of real-money transactions (RMT) may be appalling to some in the West, but the game is in many ways at the vanguard of a trend to develop games that take advantage of the players’ appetites for spending money to gain in-game advantages. Ironically, the F2P-with-RMT model traces its origins to the challenge of getting Asian gamers to buy boxed, retail games, most of whom preferred the free ride of easy and widespread piracy. In response, Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft built server-based online games which could not be pirated and would require alternate business models.
Designing free-to-play game is more complicated than designing traditional games:
In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future. Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content.
Thus, Soren Johnson points out, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry.