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?
Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...
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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.