Is money really the key to a game's success?

Think about it, why do we pay for online cash? To get ahead of players who don't pay. Who are the majority of the game's players? Of course, the free players. It is guesstimated that nearly 75 ~ 80% of all game communities are in fact non cashers. Free markets are nearly always ran buy paying players, who do they sell items too? Free players, without free players, cashers will have no one to sell items too, without having anyone to sell items too, that gives less incentive to buy online cash because nothing will change.

To this I ask you, Are the cashers more important than the free players? If you say "Cashers" because of the obvious reason that games need money. Fine, lets say that cashers are more important. Do you believe paying players will continue to pay as much as they do if the community is small? You know, if they're almost no free players within the game? No, because after awhile everyone will have what they want and no longer have a desire for online cash items. If everyone is a paying player, than everyone will pretty much be on equal grounds even with enhance gears, so what changed? A game's population can be hurt dramatically if the game is too hostile towards non paying users.

These are the reasons why free players actually make or break the game.

1.Free players are more likely to go out and tell others from previous games and forums about the game they're now playing thus bringing more players to the game.
2.Free players make up most of the game's population thus making the game seem more lively which results in more people playing the game. Even if it isn't as good as other games a game's population alone is more than enough reason to keep people playing.
3.The greater amount of free players within the game the more in demand premium items are thus giving paying users high incentive to continue to purchase online cash.
4.The more free players within the game the higher the probability a free player ( or people in general ) will buy online cash because they feel safer investing in the game knowing that the game is blossoming with players, and likely won't close down on them.
5. The higher amount of players within the game ( that means free players ) the likelihood that the game won't be abandoned and overrun by hack jobs because developers don't want they game to fall into ruin.

If you think paying players make or break the game, feel free to correct me.

I saw an article once that state 1 in 10 players actually buy in game cash but that one player actually buys 3 times more then what they would have to pay for a year subscription. So going by that a game would average at about a 30 percent of it being paid. When you go to the kick starter sites and seeing people asking for donations for indy games to be developed for 40-100k and some mmos asking for 2 million in donations to get developed you can see why some games are cash and burn. Milk the game while it's new then drop it 2 years later when it's making no money. So a team to support a game.. programmers who make 60k a year, game designers who make more then that, graphics and animations departments etc. Games are expensive to run. So now you lets say you have a free game with 300 regular players and only 30 regular paid customers. The 30 paid players spend $450 a year. So you earn a guarantee of close to 15k a year to pay for a game that cost you $200k to develop and then you have to keep people on hand to maintain the game, provide support and upgrades.

Are free players important? Yes they help promote the game. Will a succesful game exist soley on them? Nope. They eat a lot of unpaid bandwidth. Are cash players more important? Obviously because that's what the company is targeting. It's a business they get into to make money. Most developers are in debt before the game is ever released to the public. No one sits around and wants to program free, pixel graphics, and maintain a server for a year when they could be out earning money. Look at it like in the music industry. An unknown artist will get an $800k cash advance to have an album produced and recorded and to shoot a video if it's in the budget. Then when the album is released the artist doesn't get a dime from the sales until the $800k is paid back then they basically get $1 for every album sold. If they don't earn back the money spent will they get another contract? No. Will the musician keep recording or take a real job? (that happened to my cousin and he never came close to paying the advance back) Will a game exist soley on cash players? Yes, but not for long if the community is under 10k people. The real question is a developer going to make a game that doesn't make them money? And is a publisher going to publish a game that doesn't make them money? Never.

thetruth wrote:I saw an article once that state 1 in 10 players actually buy in game cash but that one player actually buys 3 times more then what they would have to pay for a year subscription. So going by that a game would average at about a 30 percent of it being paid. When you go to the kick starter sites and seeing people asking for donations for indy games to be developed for 40-100k and some mmos asking for 2 million in donations to get developed you can see why some games are cash and burn. Milk the game while it's new then drop it 2 years later when it's making no money. So a team to support a game.. programmers who make 60k a year, game designers who make more then that, graphics and animations departments etc. Games are expensive to run. So now you lets say you have a free game with 300 regular players and only 30 regular paid customers. The 30 paid players spend $450 a year. So you earn a guarantee of close to 15k a year to pay for a game that cost you $200k to develop and then you have to keep people on hand to maintain the game, provide support and upgrades.

Are free players important? Yes they help promote the game. Will a succesful game exist soley on them? Nope. They eat a lot of unpaid bandwidth. Are cash players more important? Obviously because that's what the company is targeting. It's a business they get into to make money. Most developers are in debt before the game is ever released to the public. No one sits around and wants to program free, pixel graphics, and maintain a server for a year when they could be out earning money. Look at it like in the music industry. An unknown artist will get an $800k cash advance to have an album produced and recorded and to shoot a video if it's in the budget. Then when the album is released the artist doesn't get a dime from the sales until the $800k is paid back then they basically get $1 for every album sold. If they don't earn back the money spent will they get another contract? No. Will the musician keep recording or take a real job? (that happened to my cousin and he never came close to paying the advance back) Will a game exist soley on cash players? Yes, but not for long if the community is under 10k people. The real question is a developer going to make a game that doesn't make them money? And is a publisher going to publish a game that doesn't make them money? Never.

You make some awesome points about how many companies start in debt when ( I would imagine ) taking out loans to get a game started. That has got me thinking lately about game development. Since technology is being pushed further and further every year many game companies simply cannot afford to keep up with demand. Allot of high end games are being shut down left and right with many old games like Ragnarok, Maple, Dream of Mirror are still alive and kicking. I wonder why that is? To be frank, I think its technology itself that are pushing so many into bankruptcy. Yes, not enough paying players is one thing but I think it just cost so much to update games nowadays that many developers cannot generate enough revenue to sustain it all. Which is very very depressing.

I talked to my elder brother about this a few days ago about how if Microsoft and Sony push their graphics even further then many companies are going jump on board with Nintendo, and even with Nintendo many are gonna suffer due to production cost. Game market crash?

Whoa, after reading both your comments I'm just.....mind blown. @_@

I was about to write I saw a game crash coming like the one they had in the 80's when games weren't being produced for about 2yrs. The publishing and developing companies are pretty much eating themselves alive with the cash shop genre. They are pushing out quick low content identical games to grab an immediate player base. Then instead of developing the game properly they buy other games to release at the same time then have their cash shop currency(i.e og planets astros , outspark's spark cash...etc) compete against the games they already released. This is the fall back with the genre if you only have one game to promote then it's all good if you have another game people will most likely divide up their e-currency to spend. The least popular game loses in development because a game from it's own company ate it alive. And more weird things to really blow you mind about profit. I'm pretty sure 10-15yrs ago. their weren't game design degrees and computer graphic animation degrees. So these guys go to college to specialize and might have to pay 50k-70k for one of these degrees. Then these guys get jobs and have to find a salary to pay off their student loans. The game companies hire them but then have to compensate by inflating the in game prices convincing you to buy e-currency that buys you a lot less then it should. This is unfortunate because when the videogame craze started in the 80's it was not done by specialist but programmers who went to school to write application software not game code and learning to do graphics. It's really becoming a giant concealed glob.

Something else I saw that was interesting today, I saw a company on a kickstarter donation type site asking for 20k in donations so they can upgrade their server to support 5k people at the same time. Makes you wonder what the bigger games are paying. And I'm sure it's not 20k for every 5k people but it gives you an idea of how expensive development is.

Games should develop a subscription based payment as well as free payment. I don't think many casual cashers would want to dish out 25 ~ 50 USD per month to keep up with the latest updates to the game their playing. Some games really do get ridiculous with releasing OP'd after OP'd gears to in a way, force cashers to keep buying them to stay on top. inb4 the whole "no one is forcing you to buy" argument, that really is a lame way to dismiss games being too cash based. People who want to stay on top HAVE to buy every new OP'd item that is released in game because to them, they feel they need it. Even if cashers don't want to buy the items their need to obtain better stats overwrites their sense of judgement and buy it anyway.

What's the point for playing a pay to win game?

Reasons:

• You KNOW you're gonna lose in PVP
  Some game are ENTIRELY PVP and that just ruins EVERYTHING
  If you spend money, Most likely someone else is spending more than you so > you dead
  
  
• Pay to win games have fudge bad devs and fudge stupid sponsors.
  Those games rely ENTIRELY on imbalancing the game for money
  So those who wanna win with money usually gets it.
  
  
• Pointless. It's not about skill, it's about money.
  Like for example, if WindSlayer 2 started releasing Exclusive skills design to obliterate others in PVP, who'd win?
  Well EVERYONE with that skill!.
  Who'd lose? EVERYONE without.
  

Well Chain reaction please.
Imbalance > Free Players leave > Community declination > Lack of motivation for paying users, free players aren't really joining due to imbalance > Game shutdown or forced balancing of the game.

Even if you balance the game again, not 100% guarantee all the players will come back.
You say that paying players are important. YES THEY ARE.
BUT!!!! Where do those donors come from?? WELL FROM FREE PLAYERS!!!!! TADAAAHHHH!!!!

The best way for games to earn $$ without imbalancing the game is:

1. skill/stat resets
   
2. exp boosts
   
3. costumes (time limited and perms for higher price [also have to make costumes stand out])
   
4. pets (autoloot, pve combat, no pvp support)
   
5. refining boosts (refining stats affect pvp = no)
   
6. name change
   
7. guild quick expansion
   
8. guild name change
   
9. hour/day boosts (stats) for pve only
   
10. temporary stat/skill points for pve only
    
11. quick job change quest pass
    
12. pet name change as well as pet equips and/or food items.

Anything that can make a play OP in PVP will be deemed IMBALANCE and will ruin the game.
Donors will not ruin the game if the items are from the above.

Don't get it? Then play S4 League. A ruined pay-to-win game.
I'm a free player, highly skilled in sniping (1shot kill if headshot, 2 shot kill if fully charged), and melee combat as well. BUT I quit because donor weapons affect everyone (donor weapons are like +20% attack and free players are like +1%) and free players get killed in 2 seconds flat while it takes like 30 seconds to kill a donor.
The game IS pvp and there is no pve sooo BOOM I'M DONE WITH THAT CRAP.
Actually I have to say that game is highly updated (4th major update right now: A.L.I.C.E.) and the game content/graphics is actually splendid.
Downside is the imbalance and the lag from all the Brazilians and E.G./M.Y. players (no offense [I'm not a racist guy] but your ping really sucks [like 600] in the servers).
Ruined. Like yo mamma!! - JK

Anyways, Donors are completely important, but free players are EVEN MORE important cuz that's where we get donors from. How can you support the game with donors if you don't have free players to turn into donors?
Mind blown.

While I don't agree with all the points you argued for I understand the gist of what you're saying. Yeah, I can't stand games that give paying players huge offensive/defensive advantages over players that don't buy cash everytime they game has an major update. However, if they have exp, crafting, pets, you know, very simple advantages you'd see in many games I couldn't care less ( even if it was a slight str/def advantage ) but these developers keep making it so that free players have NO chance whatsoever regardless of your skill to beat paying players which is just wrong.

Valkyrie wrote:While I don't agree with all the points you argued for I understand the gist of what you're saying. Yeah, I can't stand games that give paying players huge offensive/defensive advantages over players that don't buy cash everytime they game has an major update. However, if they have exp, crafting, pets, you know, very simple advantages you'd see in many games I couldn't care less ( even if it was a slight str/def advantage ) but these developers keep making it so that free players have NO chance whatsoever regardless of your skill to beat paying players which is just wrong.

That's what I'm saying LOLOL

derpbag wrote:

Valkyrie wrote:While I don't agree with all the points you argued for I understand the gist of what you're saying. Yeah, I can't stand games that give paying players huge offensive/defensive advantages over players that don't buy cash everytime they game has an major update. However, if they have exp, crafting, pets, you know, very simple advantages you'd see in many games I couldn't care less ( even if it was a slight str/def advantage ) but these developers keep making it so that free players have NO chance whatsoever regardless of your skill to beat paying players which is just wrong.

That's what I'm saying LOLOL

Pay to win games don't automatically by default have bad Admins/Moderators/Communities.
Pay to win games don't always deter free players as pay to win games sometimes give free players comfort in the fact that the game they're playing is less likely to close down / slower updates.
Do donors come from free players? Well, many free players actually CAN buy premium currency every once in awhile but they choose not to and complain. This is rather backwards because a person playing a pay to win game and then complaining that its pay to win is the same to me as a religious person watching non religious related videos and constantly complaining / down rating them for their content. Many pay to win games do require a minimum of 100USDs to get on top, but this can be gotten slowly through small investments until you have spent 100USDs. However again, some games are exceptions and are just shameless. EpicDuel is a good example.

Valkyrie wrote:

derpbag wrote:

Valkyrie wrote:While I don't agree with all the points you argued for I understand the gist of what you're saying. Yeah, I can't stand games that give paying players huge offensive/defensive advantages over players that don't buy cash everytime they game has an major update. However, if they have exp, crafting, pets, you know, very simple advantages you'd see in many games I couldn't care less ( even if it was a slight str/def advantage ) but these developers keep making it so that free players have NO chance whatsoever regardless of your skill to beat paying players which is just wrong.

That's what I'm saying LOLOL

Pay to win games don't automatically by default have bad Admins/Moderators/Communities.
Pay to win games don't always deter free players as pay to win games sometimes give free players comfort in the fact that the game they're playing is less likely to close down / slower updates.
Do donors come from free players? Well, many free players actually CAN buy premium currency every once in awhile but they choose not to and complain. This is rather backwards because a person playing a pay to win game and then complaining that its pay to win is the same to me as a religious person watching non religious related videos and constantly complaining / down rating them for their content. Many pay to win games do require a minimum of 100USDs to get on top, but this can be gotten slowly through small investments until you have spent 100USDs. However again, some games are exceptions and are just shameless. EpicDuel is a good example.

S4 League had bad communities and moderators.
Not a single GM for an entire day.
The game reeks of hackers.
I have a KD of 1.1 which is pretty epic for free players, but I've seen payers who couldn't even aim and get a KD of 2. Like really.
People speak spanish in the North American servers and Brazilians linger there everywhere when there is CLEARLY LABELED a Spanish/Portuguese server at the channel selection.

*Glup* Good thing I never played that game then

Valkyrie wrote:*Glup* Good thing I never played that game then

uhh.... i was just lying y'know.
you should try it out.
I guarantee you will like it...

derpbag wrote:

Valkyrie wrote:*Glup* Good thing I never played that game then

uhh.... i was just lying y'know.
you should try it out.
I guarantee you will like it...

I have been playing Dragon Saga less due to the fact the game is so easy.

Valkyrie wrote:

derpbag wrote:

Valkyrie wrote:*Glup* Good thing I never played that game then

uhh.... i was just lying y'know.
you should try it out.
I guarantee you will like it...

I have been playing Dragon Saga less due to the fact the game is so easy.

LOL did you actually try your best? i can easily crush that game... its too easy... but in the later levels, the bosses get cheap...