D3 RMAH as testbed for Project Titan RMAH

[chriscowart]

Are there any micro-transaction based games for the PC that are actually successful in US/EU (not China/Korea, which I know do have some micro-transaction games that are successful)?

League of Legends appears to be wildly successful. Its a MOBA game, similar to DOTA, where the micro transactions are typically to unlock champions or skins that are purely cosmetic. At any one time, there are over 1 millions players online, with 4 million different players online every day. An upcoming prize pool for their Season 2 tournament is 5 million dollars! I got this from an "infographic" they published a few months ago.

(interesting note: League of Legends was created by a North American company, Riot Games, but now over 90% is owned by a Chinese company)

Another game that is similar, Heroes of Newerth, has converted to a microtransaction model. I believe they're still successful, though not as wildly successful as Riot Games with League of Legends.

I would guess Maple Story is popular among the kiddies. It has, AFAIK, purely cosmetic micros. Its also big in China, so it may not count :P

Team Fortress 2 is another successful microtransaction-based game. Valve sells cosmetic-only hats, and also weapons for use in-game. All weapons can be "found" for free (given enough time), traded, or crafted. Item "drops" occur during regular intervals while playing with a limit of about 13 per week to prevent dilution of the prices found in their store.

Battlefield Heroes is yet another successful microtranscation-based game. Its based on the Battlefield series with an accessible cartoon style. I believe this is popular among the kiddies as well with micros for regularly late-game weapon unlocks, skins & clothing, and other things.

As you can see, there are some successful microtransaction games in the US! There are probably some other really big ones I missed, but these came to mind.

[galzohar]

The games might be successful since you can access the important stuff for free and probably the games not being too terrible on their own right, but is the micro-transaction-based portion really successful as well? I mean, how many people would actually buy a skin for LoL/TF2? And how many parents would buy their kid one?

[chriscowart]

The games might be successful since you can access the important stuff for free and probably the games not being too terrible on their own right, but is the micro-transaction-based portion really successful as well? I mean, how many people would actually buy a skin for LoL/TF2? And how many parents would buy their kid one?

Whether micros themselves are successful, thats a good question. However, I know for a fact Riot Games was purchased for $230 million and their only IP is LoL. In their financial report, they also stated after the acquisition they would be "hiring aggressively". So, even though no revenue or profit figures were disclosed, its clear they're worth a large pile of cash to someone.

As far as LoL purchases, you'd be surprised! LoL skins range from about $3-$20, but I still see 1-4 skins nearly every game. I'd say I see a legendary skin, one of the $20 ones, about one out of four games. Also, they sell champion+multi-skin bundle (~$20) when a new champion is released (every week), and its not rare at all to see the new champion with the new skins every other game.

TF2 purchases... they're somewhat similar to LoL purchases. Once new weapons/hats come out, folks jump on the discounted bundles and they're everywhere for a while. TF2 activity is somewhat fueled by cross promotions as well (i.e. buy Skyrim, get a hat and weapon for TF2).

Overrall, micros seem to demand a bit of creativity to reach their market, but invariably, and surpsingly enough, a market does exist and they will consume.

[galzohar]

Anything with a large user base is worth a lot of money, even if it currently generates 0 revenue. But yeah, I'm definitely surprised you actually see those skins often!

[Archeon]

Interesting perspective regarding parallel development of the RMAH vs Project Titan / SC2 maps etc.

However I think one point not mentioned so far is key to the financial model that is likely being pursued by Blizzard. The revenue steams from Project Titan / Diablo 3 etc would *not* be meant to 'replace' or 'be bigger than' WOW - but instead to be a supplementary channel.

In other words, diversity and grow their income - I'm sure a lot of the discussion went along the lines of 'how can monetize another AAA MMO without cutting WOW subscriptions'.

[Kelrist]

There is a ton of money in microtransactions. I used to play Runes of Magic which has a fair-sized playerbase and tons of people spent a minimum of $50 per month and many of the upper tier players spent $250 per month or more. I played a simple browser based game called Nodiatis and multiple people spent $100's per month for leveling and character perks. I currently play the Tyrant card game also and I see a lot of people spending $100's in cash for cards, promo cards, and for war perks so they can defeat enemies in battle simply by spending RL cash. Hell, I was just in a Tyrant war when a single person single handedly defeated a top 3 guild by spending RL cash so that they could play non-stop for hours. I suspect he spent about $60 in about 3 hours just so he could say he won the war.

The microtransaction market is huge and in a properly constructed system that motivates players to desire cash only items, players will pay more than they do for WoW. I played Runes of Magic for about 1.5 years and averaged about $35 per month in microtransactions and that was conservative for a top tier instance runner.

[Loriku]

'Microtransactions' are popping up everywhere now (I remember it just used to be chinese and korean mmo's I played a bit). Even in FPS games they're cropping up, look at the latest BF3 patch, players can now purchase to unlock all weapons for all classes, purchase a pack to unlock all loadouts for vehicles or purchase them both together in a pack. I don't really care cause I unlocked just about everything ages ago but I know for sure all the kids that get wasted by my superb jet flying will buy the packs to give them a better chance.

The thing about microtransactions in all games is they aren't targetted at every single player, someone will always want to play catch-up or be better than someone else that progressed 'normally'. Look at D2, if you imagine that all the item shops were actually blizzard owned (just try to imagine), then the amount of people that bought top end runewords were actually paying microtransactions. Now it's obvious Blizzard would rather want this cash revenue for themselves, hence the RMAH and the cut they take. There will be a huge amount of people paying for things with real cash, if they can apply that system to something as big as WoW (which I played extensively in a very top end hardcore guild, had multiple characters gold capped and controlled the AH on several realms) then they will surely make a huge killing, even if the game isn't F2P, they can make the monthly subscription a lot lower than WoW. A lot of players will always pay to catch up and others will always pay for vanity items to look 'cool', people that don't have the time to play so much usually.

Not everyone will be chucking money into it but there will be 3 types of players:

#1 Those that NEVER chuck money in because they have enough time to acquire items normally
#2 Those that make the odd one or two transactions for a vanity item or such
#3 Those that constantly chuck money in because they don't have the time or they're just hooked on looking flash

Number 3 balances number 1 out and I'd say number 2 is the majority of players, however number 1 creates more drive for number 3 to buy to be just like them or better, it's a concept that will be (as the OP said) trialled and tested in D3, another big plus (for Blizzard) is that there isn't multiple realms so the market can't be deadlocked by a few people (as was the case on WoW with limited players per realm), there will ALWAYS be someone undercutting, the economy will be mostly fine and what does that mean? Low real cash prices for items equals more people buying, more transactions, more cuts for Blizzard, it's a simple business model but it works really well. I hope I put my point across clearly, it makes sense in my head and books anyway!

Microtransactions are big money, whether it be from buying an item from another player or just getting some vanity item, theres a lot of people out there that will pay far over the subscription fee of WoW to buy certain items.

[galzohar]

As soon as prices become low enough to make the Blizz cut significant, people will switch to pure gold trading and then sell the gold for $. Since selling gold only has a % fee, the extra transactions caused by item saturation won't give Blizzard any noticeable amount of additional money. Therefore I do not believe Blizzard has a real financial interest in allowing item saturation. Most likely they simply haven't found a working solution to prevent it that won't ruin the game.

[Torian]

If a project made you more money than it cost you (in total, taking everything into account), it was worth doing.

not necessarily - perhaps you could have invested your money in an even more profitable project - it's called opportunity cost ;-)

[galzohar]

Well I said taking "everything" into account. That includes lack of profit from other projects you didn't do because you chose this one.