One US dollar per month per user is what the average free to play MMO makes out of the western user, a note-worthy figure or not?
Making one buck a month per user might not sound like a big deal, but many users quickly makes up for quite a lot. Just imagine having a free to play game which is played by millions of players, that’s going to be turning in millions of dollars then.
And this is exactly what the maths behind it shows, an estimated 84 cents per runescape player having 1 million members out of 6 million monthly players turning in 60 million a year for them whereas Habbo online does even better with a revenue of 77 million in 2007.
You might wonder whether free to play might be even more lucrative than subscriber only mmo’s these days, although probably far from accurate but if we’d believe the figures as shown on mmogchart there’s many mmo’s with around 250k subs for about 15 US dollars tops. Doing the maths that gives us 14*250k*12 a year, a “measily” 45 million.
Therefore it might also not be a total shock to see more and more mmo games to be released as free to play with membership options along or item malls, it simply offers better revenue for the company.
