When I ask my players what they think, the most common response I get is that they prefer subscription model because it's more fair. They hate games where the person who spends more money gets an advantage. (Of course, my sample set is biased.)
The advantage of the item-mall category is that you get great price discrimination, and you also get a much larger player base than you would on subscription only. But it's seen as cheesy and unfair, so works better with casual games, and I think that's the key.
If it's a casual game, go for item mall or freemium. If it's a more serious or competitive game, then go for subscription. I think we're seeing a lot of item mall games coming out these days because we're also seeing a lot more casual games.
That's a good point about fairness and casual vs serious, it makes a lot of sense.
It's hard to say how sensitive the game is to critical mass, since the game has grown over the last 7 years with the number of people playing it. When it first started out, there were only a dozen or so star systems and it was a much smaller game in scope. Now we're up to about 6000 systems. Basically I keep growing the game / universe as more people join.
Pretty much. You still get gamers that riff on the subscription costs of MMOs, services like Xbox LIVE or PlayStation Plus, etc. and most-recently Call of Duty Elite—where I’m betting it’s subscription model and the general distaste for it is talked about more than the actual benefits and features of the service.
With the kind of hate console/PC games and services get, where you arguably get a richer experience compared to web-based games, I’m not really surprised that web-based games tend to err on the side of caution for generating revenue.
I’m not necessarily saying that gamers hate the subscription model enough to not buy a product solely because of it. But it’s enough of a touchy subject on console/PC that I believe a web-based game would have to work much harder to convince the typical gamer to pay monthly for it. If given the choice between a subscription model (WoW), freemium (Global Agenda) or microtransactions (TF2), I think gamers would greatly favour freemium or microtransations over subscriptions.
I never tried WoW because it pissed me off that you paid $60 for a game you essentially couldn't play.
I paid.
At least I guess we're talking about browser games? Because if web-based includes MMOs then of course it's different. (well a lot of those are freemiums too, but many aren't).
Oh and I myself have once paid for premium features on tribal wars and paid for my friends too, so make sure it's easy to buy stuff for other people, they like doing that :-)
Gifting is interesting, I first noticed it with reddit. If you don't mind me asking, why did you pay for your friends on Tribal Wars?
Why did I pay for my friends? Well some were not even friends. I was basically a leader of a "tribe" there and made an "invitation contest" (every member could invite people to the tribe, top 3 inviters would get the "premium points from me". But let's be honest, the true underlying reason is "oh look how cool I am, I gave you a gift", in fact that little contest of mine was somewhat a scam, I made sure the right people won :-)
But generally speaking browser games and MMOs are very different in almost all aspects. Revenue models might be getting similar but everything else is fundamentally different. I guess that doesn't need explanation.
As for the money making potential I think MMO market is definitely over-saturated, competition is very fierce and barriers to entry big.
Web browser market is very saturated too, but mainly with low quality stuff, as in it's no sooo hard to build something better. But the downside is that most games really struggle with profits there.