Thread: Pocket Fantasy

Originally Posted by Bruceski

And now the server's closed again. What's the Facebook/Chinese business model?

Long version:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016417/-100-000-Whales-An


TL;DR:

Monetizing almost everything heavily. If it exists, you can pay to speed it up or to get more of it.

Also making everyone get into money fights against each other both directly and indirectly. DIrectly, note that one of the events has a ranking meter for who spends the most. Indirectly, there's an arena and guild wars and whatever else where, given how nearly EVERYTHING ELSE is monetized, will be primarily based off of who pays the most money.

Also, constant pressure to spend more from events. Note the event which gives you rewards depending on how much you spend in total for a week.

Hell, they even have an event where you're rewarded based on how much you spend each DAY (and it's not a small amount).

Also, constantly releasing new servers so the whales jump to the new one hoping they can be top dawg because they failed to be top dawg on the older server, and being at the top basically makes the strong get stronger from the hefty arena awards given out (which are hefty to encourage people to spend to beat each other no matter what the cost because of the rewards at stake). Sure, they only have one server NOW but the fact that there's a server selection screen at all shows their intent on the matter. Of course, while this makes whales constantly restart over and give the company more mone, it's devastating to the player base because it ends up dividing them all over the place across multiple servers as time goes by.

I'm pretty sure Facebook took that monetization model from China and it originated there from what I recall (I've been tracking this sort of thing for as long as F2P existed, but my memory isn't flawless). The F2P businesses at China have become absolute masters at psychologically getting people to spend money with various designs that are detrimental to the game itself (and as per the R2games presentation in that link, which is an actual investor presentation made by a company that uses this as a business model, they are aware it hurts the game and player base retention and game life span but don't care because it makes them more money in the short term).