Friday
29J
June
2007
6:02pm
2

Play small with PlayOn

60-minute trials, $19.99 demos, $7/mo game subscriptions, in-game advertising…and now, pay-as-you-play.

Merscom, in partnership with Double Trump, recently announced they will be offering five of their games under a novel pricing structure: play as long as you want, for only $0.01 per minute.

“…users can download and play any game they want for as long as they want, and pay only for the actual time they have played. It’s like buying the game one piece at a time, with the ability to stop whenever they don’t want to play that game any longer. Their maximum charge per game is limited by the list price of that game, so they will never pay more than the original game price.”

Players may appreciate the flexibility, and publishers may hail the death of the 1% player, but is this a good thing? It would take over 2,000 hours minutes to recoup a single $20 sale. Compare this to the $0.25 to $2.00-per-play of your typical arcade game, who’s audience appreciates the high-intensity challenge required to keep them pumping quarters into the electric joybox. (And ignoring, for a moment, that brick-and-mortar arcades are crumbling like an alcoholic by noon.) Is this devaluation the shot-in-the-arm our industry needs to thrive and grow to mainstream acceptance?

Surely there are more constructive pricing structures?

[Update: Thanks to lexaloffle for pointing out that it’d take 2,000 minutes to recoup $20, not 2,000 hours. That’s quite a discrepancy!]

[Read More] [via GameZebo]

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Business, Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Play small with PlayOn”

  1. lexaloffle Says:
    June 30th, 2007 at 1:42 am

    I think you mean 33 hours to recoup a $20 sale. If it would have had a conversion of 1%, each punter would have to instead play for 20c worth of time on average, or 20 minutes. Seems about right.

    One good thing about this model is that it doesn’t have such a harsh impact on the game’s design. I would rather play a game designed to keep the player playing for a long time, rather than one which is mangled to fit around a 60 minute or feature limited demo.

  2. Daniel Says:
    June 30th, 2007 at 11:33 am

    Hah! Yes! It’d be 2,000 minutes, not hours!

    And I agree regarding the game’s design. It’d likely be a much more favorable result for the player, given this model. Unlike the method arcade games use to keep the player playing (extreme difficulty), I suspect the developer would simply(?) have to make the game very interesting.

    Of course, that’s ultimately harder to do, but that may help separate the poodles from the bloodhounds. And it could, in theory, even do a lot to eliminate cloners!

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