MEN I’ll try to give a more detailed explanation to why we’ve decided to stop the relatively-free business-mode of the game. I won’t say much about technical reasons like the need of unified standards of work in different markets and concentrate mainly on economical reasons which are understandable to most of you.
The decision to stop Free-to-Play mode was hard for us and we tried to delay it for as long as possible, as we tried to apply some action which would help us to provide economical efficiency of Free-to-Play realms and avoid such radical measures. Unfortunately, we couldn’t succeed and below I’ll give a more detailed explanation. The understanding of impossibility of Vitronomics development on the basis of relatively free game-mode became finally clear about half a year ago and can be explained by the following reasons:
1. Vitronomics is quite a hardcore project which is strictly applied to its niche, which leads to the limited amount of its potential audience in comparison to most of other typical online games.
2. This specific character of the Vitronomics determines a much lower “website visitor – registration – active player” conversion (this is where the difference between the 500 000 of registered users and the amount of current active players takes place), which naturally determines a rather high price of attracting one active player. And this number is relatively invariable.
3. The “active player – payer” conversion (a “payer” is a player who has bought at least one game point within the whole game period) is standard for most of the free-to-play games, the particular number is 10-20%, although the understanding of a “payer” is different for different projects. In 2009 this index in the Vitronomics is minimal despite of the appearance of new paid services like artifacts etc. It might be explained by the economical crisis.
4. Every attracted player needs 3-4 months only to fulfill the advertising expenses for his/her attraction.
5. The average period of a player active presence in the game is 4-5 months, and by the 4th or 5th month has payments become close to zero.
6. Considering that for now the expenses for attracting clients are not more than 50% in the project’s expenses structure, it’s not hard to count that the project’s income is far from covering its expenses. Very far.
7. Where in this model is the room for increasing efficiency of the project? The efficiency of attracting clients? – Yes. If we are speaking about the industry rates and acceptable periods – the maximum is 10-20%, that is for how much it is possible to lower the cost of more or less target clients. The rate of optimizing is approximate to the rate of the growth of advertising costs. The percentage of players attracted via “100 friends” and partners is no higher than 7% so far, but we keep developing our partnerships. Speaking about the “registration – active” conversion – its rate has increased. There appeared quests and other features. It has increased from 10% to 15%. The period of a player’s active presence in the game has also increased thanks to quests and other features again. Within the last year it grew approximately from 3.5 to 4.5 month. There are still many things to improve, including gameplay which will give us the rise of efficiency by some percents but not by times. And the latter is what we need.
8. The main sourse of income for Vitronomics is the increase of paying players amount while keeping the average month payments the same. Throughout the year the Vitronomics has faces quite many changes aimed at the solution of this task. Among other innovations there appeared the possibility of creating government enterprises, artifacts, additional features in personal office, new payment systems etc. However, not any of these innovations separately or in complex with others has given an increase for “active gamer – payer” conversion rate. As I mentioned above there is a graduate decrease in this conversion’s rate.
9. Some time ago we conducted a research (in the Vitronomics and also in some other friendly projects and businesses). One of its results made us draw a conclusion which might seem questionable, but also quite obvious. This conclusion is valuable for me now, because it is not just speculative, but is statistically supported and experienced by myself in my work with Vitronomics. Shortly it can be defined as follows: “If a person has a choice between paying for a service and getting it for free, but with the quality reduction and some restrictions in 85% of cases he/she will opt for the latter”. The price (1$ or 10$) does not greatly change the percentage. And the subjective estimate of the fair cost of a new service varies a lot among the payers. If to keep the same offer the same group of people the percentage of choosing the second option increases. So, in dynamics the effect is cumulative.
There are two main reasons for this kind of behavior:
a) The existence of the choice between to pay or not to pay itself. Humans are lazy and do not tend to make an effort without any strong need. The need to choose is already an effort, not speaking of the payment procedure itself and the moral tension when parting with money. And in most cases the price itself does not really mean anything.
b) The “crowd effect”. That is “if the majority uses this service for free why would I pay for it?” And, as people tend to embroider the motivation for the action or its absence, the reasoning of the refuse to pay normally is quite dramatized – “principles”, “unfair game” etc.
These two factors together give us a psychological barrier of change of group behavior which is very hard to overcome.
The only way to change the group behavior is to eliminate the possibility of choice.
Besides, there is another factor, not that fundamental, but quite tangible considering the amount of money that we lose. At the moment there is the whole business of reselling accounts and other “assets” parasitizing on the game and depriving the project of serious money. Used and upgraded companies are massively resold to new players by the users who do not want to play any more or by those who specializes in collecting companies of the people who leave the game. This phenomenon has recently became quite popular. Many accounts have already changed more than a few owners. Sa a result, there is a decrease of payments by new players. However, I repeat that despite the significance of this phenomenon and direct damages which it leads to, it is not the main reason why we decided to stop the old business-model. The main reason is described above.
Why the free-to-play mode is working and economically reasonable in other games? This kind of model can only be reasonable for mass projects where the critical amount of users is quite easily achieved and the cost of attraction a client is much lower. The amount of payers and the period of active playing is comparable to Vitronomics’, although the average period of active playing in many games is higher than such period in Vitronomics and reaches the number of 9-12 months. Besides, the costs of maintaining and developing an average online game in the same language segment is often much lower than the same costs for the Vitronomics.
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