Sony Online Entertainment pres John Smedley has got plenty to be happy about these days. After taking a risk with their newest offering, Sony set out to change the way the mass population of both gamers and non-gamers alike view free-to-play titles. Launching only last April, SOE’s Free Realms is quickly becoming the poster child for free-to-play success. Having garnered 1 million registered users in a blistering 10 days, the company hasn’t been short on celebrating it’s own success, with a press release coming out what seemed to be every few days indicating that yet another million users have past through the Free Realms doors.
Keeping right in line with this rocket to the moon success story, SOE President John Smedley announced yesterday at Comic-Con International in San Diego that the title was now close to having 5 million registered users participating. Obviously, Sony’s gamble with a free-to-play/microtransactions supported business model is starting to pay off. And it seems that the finance department has taken note as well, as Sony has now officially sanctioned the introduction of microtransactions into two of it’s oldest, and perhaps best known MMO titles: EverQuest and EverQuest II. Smedley comments, “We now have 34 percent of our EverQuest II users using microtransactions.” He also noted that fans of the original EverQuest are making microtransaction purchases at only a slightly lower percentage.
Free Realms’ success may be a great story in it’s own right, but the timing of the release couldn’t have been better. DFC analyst George Chronis, who served as a moderator of the panel that Smedley revealed these stats at cites, “right now, 33 percent of revenue generated by games in the United States is generated by people playing MMOs.”
“When something gets popular, like Ultima Online did and EverQuest did, everybody rushes in,” said Chronis. “And World of Warcraft added a lot of interest, but MMOs are changing,” he said, referring to other MMO models like the free-to-play approach taken by many Asian publishers.
Speaking to the Asian influence, Nexon’s Min Kim was also on the panel and describes the companies Asian games market as “truly massive.”
“When people started talking about it back in 2003 or 2004, people said Western games would never want to do this, to play a game for free and then buy and items. And now everybody is saying, ‘We’re going to have microtransactions as part of our business model.”
If the expression is something akin to, “the proof is in the pudding,” I’d say Nexon’s been in the kitchen for quite a while now, but it looks like SOE may just be the ones bringing the dishes out to customers. Close to 5 million of them.
Tags: comic con international, free realms, George Chronis, john smedley, microtransaction, President John Smedley, soe, Sony Online Entertainment
