[oweqruiowe]

It recently dawned on me, in light of the Elastic / AWS battle, that Elastic's business model is kind of like GGG's 'free to play' game Path of Exile. Where the base game is free, but as you get more serious you end up spending money on quality of life things, stash tab upgrades and what not. That business model has proven to be very successful (in gaming), versus the buy once model with games like Diablo. Hopefully, by sharing that here doesn't result in a 'gray-at-the-bottom-comment'.

[sanxiyn]

Yup. Open-core model and freemium model are two different words for the same thing.

[clarry]

You mean games like Diablo weren't very successful?

[sanxiyn]

Freemium model is vastly more profitable. There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

[nostrademons]

For some numbers - Diablo 3 was one of the best-selling AAA titles with 12 million copies sold in its first year, about 30 million within the first 3 years. The entire Civilization franchise has sold about 40 million copies - Civ 5 & 6 each sold about 8 million copies. At $50/copy, that's about $200M per game, ranging up to about $1.5B for a bestseller over multiple years.

By comparison, Wargaming (a mid-level F2P publisher of World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes) made about $600M in 2015. Fortnite (a bestselling F2P phenomena) made $2.4B in 2018. Pokemon Go (also a huge fad, but one now passe) made about $795M in 2018, and roughly $2B since launch.

The playerbase for these F2P games is more than an order of magnitude bigger than traditional AAA titles, so even though a large percentage players never pay, they still pull in roughly 2-4x what the traditional business model does.

(This is also what's driving the sky-high valuations of Twitch and Discord - all these players use related services even if they don't pay for the game itself. It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential.)

[isostatic]

> It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential

This is nothing new, but it's still shocking -- at least for those like me that still remember the days of the ZX Spectrum, where blockbuster hits were programmed in bedrooms

[YayamiOmate]

I think you mean micro transactions. Freemium is base for this.

I don't think its something bad. Even more, it can be absolutely voluntarily and vanity. Skins in LoL dont give you nothing except aesthetics, yet they cash in pretty hard.

Imho the success of micropayments is based on two things. 1. It alows to adjust spending to capabilities, I.e. is easier to scale. 2. it drains wallet slowly, so it's easier to spend more. Like credit services.

[macspoofing]

>Freemium model is vastly more profitable.

Is it?

>There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

Are they?

[clarry]

> >There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

> Are they?

No they aren't. It's more like a new market that has some overlap with the traditional offering.

There are tons and tons of people who will never be interested in freemium games, just as there are tons of people who aren't interested in mmorpgs or multiplayer in general.

That market isn't going away.

Just like the market for workstations and laptops didn't go away, even though people boldly proclaimed that mobile is eating the world and you can do anything on a phone.