Star Wars Galaxies

I know this thread is old, but I just thought about something...

I don't think the purpose behind microtransactions is to get more money out of each subscriber than would be gained via subscription plan.  I think the purpose here is to gain more subscribers.

Let's say today EQ2 gains an average of $15 a month from 200K subscribers.  That's 3 million dollars, which is certainly not chump change.

But compare that with a game that has a million subscribers that pay on average $4 per person, per month.  That's 4 million dollars, even though each subscriber pays less.

Even if a million subscribers only pay, on average, $1 per person, that's still 1 million dollars, but the advantages to a million-subscriber game go beyond the mere subscription revenue.  There are opportunities available when a game can boast a million person audience that aren't available to games with less than that.  Now you can go to businesses who want to reach the tech-savvy demographic and say, "by buying ads with us, your business will reach an audience of millions who log on to our service."

See, SOE doesn't have to worry about revenue as much as some others.  It has a stable of revenue generating games, as well as their own in-house corporate financing.  What it does need is WoW-type numbers, which may help to explain why Smed is trying all these schemes to get more people to play.

Somebody said once that "attention is the new currency."  When you see things like Facebook, Second Life, and MySpace (free services) making ungodly amounts of bank simply by harnessing the attention spans of so many people, it's no wonder why Smed is trying to get numbers more than anything else.  It's part of the "get big quick" mentality that allowed things like Amazon to lose money quarter after quarter, but still remain viable.  Numbers of users are a sort of currency in themselves in this digital age where everybody is trying to get the attention of people like us.

Still, I wish that SOE would just try and gain subscribers the old fashioned way by making good designs and sticking with them.  But since they are apparently unable or unwilling to restrain their live teams from tinkering with the designs, I guess they have to resort to schemes like this to get people to play.

More users paying less still require more resources and bandwidth to support. 

This is a grab to get more $ per user and not more users at a lower rate.  Smed even talked about it in an article when discussing what a success the online card game (psuedo RMT) they introduced in the EQ series.  He was talking about how they upped the average subscription rate of their users overall due to it.  You could almost hear him rubbing his hands together and laughing like some sort of Disney villain. 

As I see it they are somewhat abandoning the subscription market where they are struggling to compete against companies that have finally caught up.  They are also giving up on adult gamers who they have a very hostile relationship with.  It is easier to target the console market and younger generations than it is to work towards repairing reputations.  The younger crowd is also more apt to try RMT as a mainstay than many older gamers are.  Also they want people to try the game so not charging a fee to get the client will attract more than would wager on an SOE game in the first place. 

I don't think he will pull it off considering the complete failures of SOE to market where RMT is very well accepted in Asia.  He can't make games that people will RMT for where it is accepted, but will somehow convince a subscription based culture to give up unlimited access for pay as you go content?  Didn't that already fail in EQ2? 

At least with the Agency.  I suspect free realms might be a success considering the kid market and it looks like the timing is right much like EQ was.