Hacker News Reader

Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Virtual goods are a small byproduct of the gaming industry. You can’t expect to make serious money from them. Even World of Warcraft with tens of millions of dedicated hardcore gamers makes little money from virtual goods. And those are people who pay to buy the game and also pay for a monthly subscription, not the average freetard user of Zynga.

If they had created an MMORPG or something like Eve Online which would evolve through time then maybe they would stand a chance with this model of income. But then again you can’t make that kind of games on Flash.

View on HN

What makes you so sure about that? Until recently I used to work on mobile games with in-app-purchases. There are a small number of users who pay absurd amounts for virtual goods. Making your game free increases your downloads such that even if only 1-5% users pay anything you could be making a lot.

This opinion is pretty behind the times. Like, two or three years behind the times.

Just a few examples of games that make the majority of their funds from virtual goods:

League of Legends(the most played game worldwide right now) DotA 2/Team Fortress 2 Maple Story Planetside 2

It's actually generating a huge amount of cash. WoW just wasn't ever set up for it, and still to this day sells around a total of 15-20 virtual goods products IN TOTAL. Most services that rely on it for revenue have that many at release, let alone years down the road and long into maturity.

Indie game Kingdom of Loathing is entirely supported by optional item purchases (a new unique, powerful, funny item every month).

Riot games is making over $100m/year off virtual goods.

WoW never had tens of millions of subs. They peaked at 12m. They made over 100k in the first day of selling their first virtual good (the infamous star pony). Their next MMO is rumored to be virtual good based model, based on the success they have seen in WoW and DIII.

is team fortress profitable? they only sell hats (in-game goods)

IIRC yes, but a bigger part of it, I think, is that it gets people onto Steam, which is one big funnel for Valve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com