From next year's Call of Duty:
You were killed by L33TGUY37. You are out of lives for today, would you like to:
- Purchase 5 more lives for $2.99?
- Spam your social media for life requests?
You were killed by L33TGUY37. You are out of lives for today, would you like to:
- Purchase 5 more lives for $2.99?
- Spam your social media for life requests?
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has Supply Drops (http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Supply_Drop ). At the game's release, you get Supply Drops every few multiplayer games, which have chances of dropping cosmetic gear for your character, or weapons with statistical modifiers. (naturally, you mostly got cosmetic gear). While the weapons w/ modifiers were technically balance, some weapon modifiers synergize a little too well with a given weapon and they became the most-used weapons in the game.
Then Infinity Ward added the ability to buy as many Supply Drops as you want for $1.99 each.
(Later, they did implement daily challenges for a bonus Supply Drops along with Prestige challenges for the good weapons, in order to make things more fair.)
My estimate is that Blizzard will make this money back in less then 5 years. They just need to put the proper money-milking free-to-play model into their next big game and all the "core" gamers will shell out the money.
After that, we will see the entire industry shifting to free-to-play and the way games are currently monetized on mobile will dominate PC as well.
If I were Google, I'd start developing AdSense plugins to Unity, Unreal and other game engines.
Just wait for Overwatch.
The best part must be the claim that they own all Accounts, which means everything you buy using online transactions is not yours.