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1) People that don't pay are just leechers and just cost the game money.
They aren't. In multiplayer games, other players are part of the content. In several ways:
- As social element. You make new friends (or enemies) and this keeps you attached to the game. You come for the Stompy Robots, you stay for the people.
- As a game element. Other players are allies or enemies in combats. In some games, they are people to trade with (MW:O doesn't have that, though).
So, it's totally okay if you really never spend anything on the game. The only bad F2P player is the F2P player that doesn't play.
2) People that only checked out a game because it's free won't ever pay anything.
A subscription or a purchase price for the game disc are barriers to entry. The game behind this barrier might be the ultimate perfect game for you and if yo had known, you might have been willing to sell a kidney for it. But now the game is free, you checked it out, and you like it. And you can even spend money on it. Maybe not now. Maybe later, when your Vice Admiral could really use that cool space ship that you always dreamed of...
3) People that claim they would never buy anything in the item shop never do.
This is wrong. If they play long enough and get invested enough, even people that were certain they'd never buy anything for real money end up doing it. The trick is to keep people playing.
4) Prices shouldn't be lowered, PGI wouldn't make money otherwise.
They can work quite well. A low price for something makes it more likely for people to risk buying it. And once they made their first purchase, the next one is so much easier... Even better - there's a sale! Normally you wouldn't consider buying it, even though it's cool or at least nice to have, but damn, it's on sale!
(Sales, in fact, seem to work particularly well on same platforms. Valve reports that sales rise the volume of sales considerably more than the price drop itself would imply. 50 % doesn't mean twice as many purchases - it can mean 4 or more times as many purchases.) The only caveat here is -constantly low prices won'T get this result. Sales are important. We already see PGI doing it, and I bet it's working for them. (At least better than single-use colors.)
5) Giving stuff away for free is bad for the game and only people that need instant gratification and everything for free suggest it.
No, it's a pretty clever trick. Imagine you'd have 500 MC for free for some kind of achievement. It might be enough to buy one color... But to really make the perfect mech build, you could use a 2nd color... Maybe buy some MC to do this?
Heck, imagine one extra mech bay. What are you gonna do with that? Of course, you gonna want to put a mech inside. But a mech costs millions of C-Bills... And there are now 3 open slots, at your current pace of advancement it will take months before you can fill them all. Or you just buy a few MC...
Part of it is the same principle as the stereotypical drug dealer does -the first taste is free. Except repeated in several forms.
And the other trick is- basically give the people half of something they could have - so they either have nothing, or they shell out money. When they had nothing to buy that something, they might have had no reason to buy it. But now they "worked hard" inside the game to get an achievement - but all that work is for naught if you don't buy the other half.
The best thing about it may be - it's not an evil thing. You are actually giving people something they want, and in the end, they pay you for it. At least it's no more evil then selling chocolate chips and soft drinks.
Edited by MustrumRidcully, 17 February 2013 - 10:09 AM.
