Free-to-play online games
published: Friday, 18. September 2009
Free-to-play online games are set to be more popular, according to a panel of game company executives from Asia and Europe here at the Games Convention Asia (GCA) in Singapore.
Shailesh Naik, CEO of Matchmove, a game commercialisation company in Singapore, said he expects the ARPU (average revenue per user) for these free-to-play games to reach about US$6 a month for Southeast Asia, and possibly up to as much as US$14 in some areas where it operates.
He also suggested that companies that offer these free-to-play games can also recoup their investments through advertising.
Other executives on the panel estimated ARPU to be about US$8 to US$14 a month for places such as Taiwan, China and the United States.
The good news, according to the panelists, was that costs are coming down. For example, the costs for bandwidth and servers are coming down fast.
Said a Chinese company executive on the panel: "Infrastructure is really not expensive - just thousands of dollars to pay for bandwidth. You don't have to buy IBM servers, you can use DIY servers. It's harder than it seems sometimes."
Agreeing, Shailesh said: "The games business is sometimes made to look too difficult. Infrastructure is not that difficult... the biggest cost is marketing."
Indeed, in a country like China, where there are 170,000 Internet cafes filled with gamers, getting a game out to the masses is key. To make things even harder, there are as many as 200 to 300 MMOs competing in China.
So, what can a small developer making a free-to-play game do to get ahead? Some developers are working with media partners to put their games on their Web portals. In exchange for exposure, these developers give their games free to play, boosting the traffic for the media company.
This helps "balance" the marketing dollars that big firms can use to put out advertisements in mass media, say, in newspapers or buses.
Another way, pointed out the panel at GCA, is to turn to word-of-mouth promotion. For example, game companies can let hardcore players keep playing for free on an MMO, so that they eventually bring in more players who end up spending on items or other premium content.
