Posts Tagged ‘subscription fee’

ROSE Online goes free to play

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

GravityInteractive’s popular Korean Developed MMO ROSE Online will be switching to a free to play model starting July 29th.

Since 2005 ROSE Online has been available via an $11.99/month subscription fee.  Direct from the ROSE Online news page:

Rose Online has been a part of the Gravity family suite of game titles for several years now. We are going to update ROSE’s subscription model to attract more users than ever before.

On July 29 we will be turning the servers over to Free to Play where all accounts in good standing may log in.

On July 15 we have removed the subscription page from the Website. From July 15 through July 29 new subscriptions creation will be unavailable.

It is advised that all Players who utilize the paypal re-occurring subscription model, login to paypal and cancel the re-occurring payment. We will automatically be canceling all remaining re-occurring payments (to not re-occur), around the 22nd.

Any Remaining Subscription time will be credited 60 Mileage points per day (1800/month) that is left of the current subscription Figured from the beginning of the Tuesday maintenance, 10am PDT July 29, 2008.

If you have friends that want to play ROSE but were concerned with the subscription cost now is a great time to invite them to join you on your adventure!

This will be a bright new beginning for ROSE online, come and join us!
Thank you,
Gravity Interactive, Inc.

Given that ROSE will be issuing in game currency credits for remaining subscription time, they’re clearly moving towards not only a free to play model, but a micro transaction one as well.  If they’re going with a micro transaction based model, who programmed the transaction module, and did the game development suffer?  We’re wondering if GravityInteractive is watching the growing trend, and taking cues from Nexon’s popular MapleStory and Kartrider along with their most recent addition: Combat Arms?  It would be the right time to test the waters of free to play micro transaction based titles, with not only Nexon blazing the path, but industry titans like EA dipping their toes in the micro transaction pool with Battlefield Heroes.


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Fatfoogoo goes b2b with bbq flava

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Focusing not only on the needs of the player alone, after careful research and consideration, your favorite foogoos are now opening the doors to partnerships with individual game publishers. No worries, the current state of fatfoogoo isn’t going anywhere, and we’ve still got your back for all things trading. We’ve simply added another dish to the menu.

We took a long hard look at not only the technologies that we’ve developed in house, the experience and knowledge that we’ve gained, but also at what players and publishers across the world are looking for in a gaming experience. Combine that with the current state of the industry and the tremendous interest and revenue streams in the micro transaction field, adding the fatfoogoo partnership program was a no brainer.

In a recent interview fatfoogoo CEO Martin Herdina sites, “The trading and selling of virtual assets is truly the future of online gaming. It is an important alternative business model to the classical subscription fee-based programs that are currently dominating the industry. Fatfoogoo looks to fulfill a demand for this market. Our new Partnership program enables us to provide the best of both worlds: Primary Market trading, i.e. Publisher to Player and Secondary Market Trading, i.e. Player to Player trading. With the incredible growth of both primary and secondary trading markets, most major publishers understand that there is a need for an independently operated, fair and secure marketplace for virtual goods and services.”

And what a demand it is. The secondary trading market for virtual assets alone is currently growing at astonishing rates, going from revenues of approximately $1 billion in 2006 to an expected $7 billion in 2009, according to Nielsen.

This model has already been proven in Asia with Maple Story and Kartrider, both published by Nexon games. Research has shown that 8%-30% of all players purchase items via micro transactions. This in turn results in a higher revenue stream for publishers as opposed to the traditional subscription fee model. According to industry experts, on average, ‘Free to Play’ games generate anywhere between $15-$20/month. In the April edition of Fortune Magazine, senior writer Devin Leonard weighed in on the future of gaming:

(Game Publisher) Nexon pioneered this business – hooking players with a seductive free game while urging them at every turn to purchase extras using prepaid debit cards sold at retail outlets like Target. Nexon collects ad revenue in overseas markets, but in the United States the big money so far is in these microtransactions: $1.6 million a month. John Chi, CEO of Nexon America, says that the Nexon card is the second-best-selling prepaid card at Target – after the iTunes card. (Target will say only that Nexon cards are “doing really well.”)

Our experience in the virtual world micro transaction field is unparalleled. Not only have we created a multilingual platform, currency, taxation, and support system, but also gained real life experience and have weeded out a lot of headaches. As with anything in life, nothing is 100% certain, but here at the foogoo, we’ve already dealt with a whole number of things that could go wrong, have fixed them, and have learned from them. No other system in the world can match our level of multi national experience.

Back at the top-secret underground foogoo labs, our partnership engineers are already hard at work developing solutions for clients. Stay tuned, as we’ll be announcing some of our exciting partnerships soon!