Staunchest supporter turned most ardent critic of Allods online Keane sums up his anger in a recent blog entry: None of us can afford to pay $50-$75 per month to PvE at level 40. If that really is the amount that would be required to sustain a serious end game player then the whole apoplectic furore over the Allods cash shop is naive in the extreme. We have always known that serious players of a free to play game have to spend more than the $15 per month sub typical cost of subscription games. This has to be the case because most players don't pay a dime so serious end game players need to pay substantially more. In a much quoted Gamasutra feature Puzzle Pirates head man Daniel James revealed that the average revenue per paying user of the free to pay verion of Puzzle Pirates is just under $50 per month. How could people expect to pay less for a full featured free to play like Allods?
I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p
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It seems a surprisingly high figure at first but it is really only 3x the normal subscription price. Given that (far) less than a third of players pay anything at all it averages out at mush less than a normal sub per user.
I saw the references to the auction house in Gpotato's communication but I didn't really understand the significance until I read your comment Tesh. Like you I don't buy it though - if every high level player needs cash shop items to survive then the prices on the AH are likely to be astronomical.
Heartless you make a very good point. Daniel James says that only 5000 of their millions of registered players pay anything in any one month an d the average spend is $50. I assumed it was the same 5000 people every month but perhaps it isn't. Perhaps a much larger group of people make periodic payments of £50 or so every few months. Obviously if more people pay something then the average spend per paying user can be less to keep the game viable.
One interesting number to note it that he feels $3 per month per user (including paying and non paying) would be enough to make a flash game viable. Allods feels like a bigger more expensive game than Puzzle Pirates though and it needs its own servers etc - so perhaps that number needs to be higher for Allods.
so, SO wrong. I play DDO as a 'freemium' player - I paid about fifty bucks in the few few months to buy content, and after that I've maybe spent $5 per month tops. And its a great game with a hugely growing population and regular new content.
Allods looked like being the same, and then they released a cash shop which actively drives players away because of the business model they use.