David Braben, Once Angry At Used Games, Now A New Business Model Embracer

from the good-decision dept

If all you knew about David Braben was what you found via a search on Techdirt, you might think he's someone unprepared for the future of his craft. There's only one article, featuring him many years back in a story in which he appeared to be very angry about the way retailers promoted used-games sales instead of pimping new games. But, as most truly hardcore gamers will know, Braben is so much more than that. Sometimes called "The Godfather of Gaming", Braben was one of the chief creators of Elite, the breakthrough game produced in the 80's that was both wildly successful and still serves as the unacknowledged inspiration behind many present titles.

And now he appears to be recognizing the importance of new business models, while also realizing that piracy isn't the all-out evil many claim. In a fascinating interview with The Telegraph, Braben spoke about Frontier: First Encounters, the latest iteration in the Elite series, which Braben's company funded through Kickstarter.

The project was launched on US crowdfunding site Kickstarter in November 2012 and aimed to raise £1.25m. “Take a ship and 100 credits to make money legally or illegally - trade, bounty-hunt, pirate, assassinate your way across the galaxy,” read the pitch. The project smashed its funding target, raising over £1.5m, and the subsequent media furore saw a further £700,000 (and rising) added to the pot by eager investors. It is the most successful British game ever to raise funds on Kickstarter.

While I wouldn't dream of losing sight of what a sign of the times it is that a legend like Braben is turning to new business models for his company, allow me to highlight the importance of that last bit about investors. As I've suggested in the past, embracing platforms like Kickstarter is wonderful, but it doesn't have to be the first and only step. Building up interest through Kickstarter is also a wonderful way to prove the marketability of a product to investors, whose money and backing can then be used to build up a blockbuster-style budget. This is the answer to the question of, "How is Kickstarter going to fund the next AAA game, or international record release, or $200 million movie?" It isn't, in and of itself, but it can be a demonstrative step one in the process, far more open to the general population than the antiquated process of submitting ideas to traditional gatekeepers.

While that would be enough for a hearty "Huzzah!", no interview with a video game producer would be complete without questions about piracy. Here, too, Braben finds himself looking on the bright side.

“Piracy, while frustrating, can contribute to game evangelism,” he said. “It can also help you reach new territories. For example, we are huge in China now. In the old days of silver discs, it would have been impossible to break the whole country. We would have needed an office in every province but through piracy, our games are circulating and fans are now seeking us out.

“Piracy goes hand in hand with sales,” he continued. “If a game is pirated a lot it will be bought a lot. People want a connected experience, so with pirated games we still have a route in to get them to upgrade to real version. And even if someone’s version is pirated, they might evangelise and their mates will buy the real thing.”

This is the kind of thinking that can create massively wealthy businesses. He acknowledges that, from his perspective, piracy of his games is irritating. I can understand that. Who couldn't? But his ability to put that into its proper perspective while also strategizing a way to turn pirates into customers is a beautiful thing. For it to come from the Godfather of Gaming only makes this more important. It'd be like the largest record labels flipping their script completely and attempting life in the new world for once.

The game, as noted, is already funded, so we're getting it. Here's hoping it proves to be an even bigger success than it is already so it can serve as a beacon to other creators.

Filed Under: business models, crowdfunding, david braden, used games, video games

Artists Embracing, Rather Than Fighting, BitTorrent Seeing Amazing Results

from the good-for-them dept

From pretty much the beginning of this blog, we've been talking about how artists who embrace what new technologies allow seem to see much better results than trying to resist the future. Last year, we discussed examples of how both Moby and Tim Ferriss were embracing BitTorrent and its "bundles" offering to amazing results. BitTorrent has now published some data on the amazing ability of a variety of artists to use BitTorrent Bundles to drive tremendous attention and revenue their way.

Moby, for example, got an astounding 8.9 million downloads of his offering -- with 419,000 of them agreeing to join his mailing list and 130,000 of them going over to iTunes to the album (many of which likely resulted in sales). And, of course, the thing Moby himself said he was most excited about was the ability of fans to remix and reimagine his works. So it's another bit of good news to see that 68,000 remixes were created. As for Ferriss, his bundle of additional material that went with his book turned into an amazing promotion. His book was published by Amazon, but banned by Barnes and Noble (because, apparently, Barnes and Noble is petty). The material got 2 million downloads, leading an astounding 880,000 of those people to go check out the book on Amazon... where the book became a best seller.

The link above provides a number of other case studies about ways in which a variety of artists are learning to use BitTorrent and BitTorrent Bundles to help gain widespread attention, and then are able to turn that attention into fans and revenue. And this is a program that only recently started, so we're excited to see where it continues to go in the future.

Filed Under: bittorrent bundles, moby, tim ferriss
Companies: bittorrent

Vodo's Big Brother Bundle Shows How Bundles Can Improve The 'Pay What You Want' Concept

from the a-step-up dept

You may recall Vodo, the website that was set up a few years back to help promote indie films by letting indie filmmakers promote their content for free with a "pay what you want" model on top of it. For a while, they'd either do things like release content episodically once enough money had been raised, or go with a more straightforward "give it away and pray" type of model. Over the last few months, however, Vodo's founder Jamie King has been revamping the service, taking obvious inspiration from the folks over at Humble Bundle -- and the result was recently launched: the Vodo: Big Brother Bundle. If you're familiar with the Humble Bundle, you'll get it right away. A bunch of different content is offered together as a bundle in a pay-what-you-want setup, with some content only available if you pay above certain levels to "unlock."

One neat little innovation is that the Vodo bundles are curated by someone well-known -- in this case, former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Also, unlike Humble Bundle, this bundle crosses over different types of content. In the Big Brother Bundle, there's a video game, a film, a book and music, all somehow built around the concept of "big brother" and surveillance. And for the first 10,000 buyers who beat the average price, they also get a free month of the iPredator VPN. There's some good stuff in there, so check it out.

I spoke with King a bit to see how the Bundle is going, and it sounds like it's off to a great start. He notes that, with the previous more general pay-what-you-want model for a single offering, the conversion rate was understandably low: around one out of every 2,500 to 3,000 visitors to the site paid. However, with the bundle, the conversion rate is massively better: one out of every seven visitors are paying something. As with Humble Bundle, if you pay more than the "average" price, you get extra content, and that continues to drive the price people choose to pay steadily upward as well. Vodo has added one more feature, with a "premium" price that's a bit higher, to get even more content, and King tells me about 10% of all buyers are paying above the premium level. One interesting tidbit: you can pay in Bitcoin, if you have some lying around.

King also notes that it might not just be the setup and the model itself that gets people to buy, but the content. He told me that with this model, not only do users of the site appear to like it, but content creators are much more interested in working with Vodo as well under this model, meaning that they can source higher quality content, which in turn, makes for a better experience for users as well. In the first few days since the Bundle launched, it's already brought in over $15,000.

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of what folks over at Humble Bundle have done, and I've been surprised that we haven't seen others do more similar things. Whereas there are tons of crowdfunding sites, we haven't seen the same explosion of these kinds of timed-bundle offerings -- but perhaps that's starting to change. I look forward to seeing where Vodo goes with this. Oh, and as a teaser, Vodo notes that its next bundle will be the "Surveillance Survival Bundle," which already sounds interesting...

Filed Under: big brother, bundles, business models, daniel domscheit-berg, jamie king, pay what you want
Companies: humble bundle, vodo

Price Elasticity Can Work: Dropping Ebook Price To $1 Catapulted Year-Old Book Onto NYT Best Seller List

from the look-at-that dept

Last month, we wrote about continuing confusion by the major publishers about ebook pricing, and how many wanted to keep them artificially high, because they still think that's the best way to maximize profits. However, in that post, we also noted that Rob Reid's funny sci-fi novel about aliens wanting to destroy the earth over our copyright laws (they owe all the money in the world to the record labels because they've been infringing), was being price-tested for a while at $1. The book had been out for over a year, and apparently Random House was willing to do some price experimentation. The result? The book that came out 15 months earlier jumped back in the NY Times best seller list, coming in the 22nd spot on the ebook fiction list.

Of course, anyone who's followed Gabe Newell at Valve knows all about how price elasticity works. Dropping your price significantly doesn't always mean a decrease in revenues or profits -- and can actually mean an increase due to significantly greater volume. So, again, this isn't revolutionary, but it's still quite amazing how resistant so many publishing companies are to this idea that selling for less might actually be a good idea. For all the talk about "devaluing the book," who is actually going to complain if lower prices bring in both more readers and more money?

Filed Under: ebooks, price elasticity, rob reid, year zero
Companies: random house

The Good And Bad In Chaotic eBook Pricing

from the ups-and-downs dept

For years we've discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) makes sense, despite the lack of printing, packaging, shipping and inventory costs. And, of course, we won't even get into the question of the price fixing debacle. Art Brodsky recently wrote a fascinating piece over at Wired about how ebook pricing is an "abomination," because it's designed to price people out of reading. He points out that we should think more about ebooks like we think about apps, since that's a much more direct comparison than "books." And then he gets into a discussion of how publishers are going crazy with their library pricing:

Take the example of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymous book, Cuckoo’s Calling. For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 from book distributor Baker & Taylor — close to the consumer price of $15.49 from Barnes & Noble and of $15.19 from Amazon. But even though the ebook will cost consumers $6.50 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through library ebook distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same thing.

Somehow the “e” in ebooks changes the pricing game, and drastically. How else does one explain libraries paying a $0.79 to $1.09 difference for a physical book to paying a difference of $71.50 just because it’s the electronic version? It’s not like being digital makes a difference for when and how they can lend it out.

In another wrinkle: Random House jacked up its ebook prices to libraries 300 percent last year, and HarperCollins limits the number of check-outs per ebook. This means libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold … as if the ebook had died or something. In fact, that’s the problem some authors have with ebooks — not just that they earn less money on them, but that “They never degrade. They are perpetual. That harms writers directly,” as historian and novelist David O. Stewart has observed.

As Brodsky notes, this whole situation is ridiculous, and it harms pretty much everyone. Also, it seems to be in direct contrast with others, even within those very same publishers, who realize that crazy high prices for ebooks are a really bad idea. You may recall Rob Reid, the author of the comic sci-fi novel Year Zero. If you don't remember, it's the story of a world in which aliens want to destroy the earth to avoid having to pay all the money in the universe for a prolonged bout of copyright infringement, thanks to their love of Earth music, which they listened to without realizing the copyright implications. Last year, we published an excerpt of the book along with a fun video conversation between Rob and myself.

This week, Rob has a really interesting blog post about how his publisher, Random House, (yes the same one mentioned above for jacking up its library rates) is running an experiment by offering the ebook for his novel at $0.99, and he rightly applauds this decision to embrace and experiment with prices like that, rather than screaming about how low prices "devalue" the book. After saying "hats off to Random House for testing out pricing tactics that some would view as kamikaze lunacy," he compares how publishers are willing to do this with how the record labels acted back when Rob ran one of the earliest online music services (which became Rhapsody):

For years, we pleaded with the major labels to at least experiment with selling downloads for 99¢ a song. We were always told that this would “devalue” music. As if the only way to properly honor that one Chumbawumba song (yes, it was that long ago…) was to charge $15.99 to get it glued to eleven other songs in a full-length CD. Wrong. What truly devalued music was requiring the downloading public to pirate it rather than purchase it for five long years.

He further notes that while some wish to blame "piracy" for the problems the industry faces, the real problem is the industry responding incorrectly to that new digital world:

A convenient fiction that still makes the rounds blames music’s gruesome decade on Napster-abetted piracy. This is like saying that the outsiders commonly called Barbarians caused Rome’s collapse. Rome conquered the Samnites, Carthage, Hellenist empires, and countless other well-oiled foes. But Rome ultimately fell because it reacted to the Barbarian threat in wholly self-destructive ways – not because the mere existence of Barbarians magically doomed history’s greatest empire.

So, indeed, it's great to see Random House willing to experiment with $1 ebooks -- and it could be quite a successful experiment. Last year, we wrote about how Paulo Coelho had tremendous success when his publisher, Harper Collins, agreed to sell his ebooks for $0.99 as well, leading to a massive jump in sales. This isn't a guarantee that people will pay that amount, obviously, or that such an experiment is a sure-fire success. But it is at least somewhat encouraging that these publishers are willing to experiment on that front. Now, if they weren't so damn afraid of those crazy "public libraries"....

Filed Under: business models, ebook pricing, ebooks, economics, libraries, pricing, rob reid
Companies: random house

Game Creator Finds That Knockoffs Can't Match His Awesome Game

from the winning dept

One thing game developers have always had, and will always have, to deal with is the dreaded copycat clone. It's something of a success indicator when you create something entertaining enough to breed like products. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or, instead of being flattered, you can go the Zynga route and sue folks using IP laws rather than compete with them directly. Or, if one were so inclined, one could take a page out of the Namco playbook and threaten a kid for making a Pacman clone. Defenders of these actions will claim that they're necessary. After all, a great amount of work and development went into those games and it seems unfair for a copycat to come along, use similar designs, and reap the benefits. How could the original creator compete with that?

Here to show us how the original creator could compete with that is Rami Ismail, developer of Ridiculous Fishing, who was just a tad late to the iOS market compared with copycat Ninja Fishing. Instead of going legal, or even crying foul, however, Ismail just concentrated on making his game freaking awesome.

"When we released the game, we promised people that for $2.99 (£1.79) they would get Ridiculous Fishing without any further in-app purchases or anything," he told Digital Spy at PC and indie games expo Rezzed.

"We're going to keep our word, but we want to emphasize that point that we were really serious about that. The plan we have now, if we pull it off the way we want to, we're going to double the content and add a completely new narrative arc, and explore that world a bit further."

The result? Well, Ridiculous Fishing got real big, real fast. Ninja Fishing did okay as well, but Ismail's game has the kind of cachet that only comes with a tightly developed game and a loyal fanbase. Built largely off of his promise to refrain from in-app purchases and his passion for his customers, the whole thing exploded on iOS once it was released.

"Then what happened, that bubble just exploded. Elijah Wood played Ridiculous Fishing and tweeted about it. That's mind-blowing. That's not something that happens. We didn't expect it to be this big - we hoped it would be this size. We really hoped this would be the definitive statement about creativity will always win, because obviously the whole cloning background is still there for us, right?

"We still want to make this statement that Ninja Fishing did well, but Ridiculous Fishing wins because it was the better game. Better games win. That's what we hoped people would get out of it, and I think they did."

A ton of downloads and one Apple design award later, Ismail serves as the perfect example of what the combination of fan loyalty and well-designed products mean in the war against game cloners. Instead of focusing on being angry and going the legal route, Ismail won because his game is better. Something to which the rest of the developer community should probably be paying attention.

Filed Under: competition, innovation, ninja fishing, rami ismail, ridiculous fishing, video games

The Value Of Kickstarter: Connecting With Fans On-The-Fly

from the free-market-research dept

As we've discussed before, one benefit of crowd-funded programs like Kickstarter is the massive amount of market research you can gather from potential customers. Whether the project is unsuccessful, or whether you're the ridiculously successful Double Fine, the feedback you get can assist with everything from wooing other investors to building new ideas into your product. Making the latter even more useful, Kickstarter-style projects can actually let you do this kind of thing on the fly, building in features based on backer feedback, resulting in an ultimately more appealing end-product for the largest number of customers.

Speaking of Double Fine, that's exactly what happened recently with their newest Kickstarter Project, Massive Chalice, a tactical strategy game set in a fantasy realm in which players first fight the ever-present demons, then grow older and start families within the world, so those families can continue fighting the ever-present demons. It's an interesting concept on its own, but feedback from potential Kickstarter backers raised an interesting question: y u no allow gay marriage? Double Fine's response?

“One of the cool things is we have the opportunity to think about it and address it because we brought it to the community,” says [Double Fine's Brad] Muir, suddenly grinning. “We brought it to a broader group of people, and then there were some people who brought it up and wanted to talk about it. There’s a raging thread on our forums.”

So hurrah, hugs and well-muscled sexytimes for all. This, Muir figures, is the optimal outcome. Everybody wins, and then they all get married.

The coupling of Kickstarter's platform and Double Fine's actions is the very blueprint of CwF+RtB. If you can manage to check any ideological feelings about gay marriage at the door, from either side of the debate, this is pure market feedback resulting in a product more potential customers desire. Muir notes that they didn't preclude gay marriage in their game consciously. It simply never came up. Comments on their project alerted them to this, as well as providing a clear desire from many gamers that this kind of option be included, so they went back and put it in. More notable, Muir seems to think this all would have gone much differently under a more traditional, game-publisher route.

“If we had gone with a publisher on this, I really think [it wouldn't have ended well]. Because you sign the deal, you go underground, you start working on the game, you don’t talk to the community or anybody, and you get so focused on all these other aspects of the game. Just making it work – and all the tactical combat and mechanical things. We might just overlook something like same-sex coupling all the way until we announce the game. And then people say, ‘Hey, what about gay marriage?’ And we’re like, ‘Fuck,’ because we’ve already worked on it for more than a year.”

In other words, this is a direct result of connecting with their fans. And, by being proactive about it, they avoid the kind of mess that other games have had when their stance on the subject is vague. So, regardless of your politics, we should all be applauding Double Fine's ability to listen, engage, and react to the feedback they get from their customers. Is it any wonder they have been so massively successful?

Filed Under: connecting with fans, crowdfuncing, fans, massive chalice
Companies: double fine, kickstarter

Massive Growth In Independent Musicians & Singers Over The Past Decade

from the the-numbers-are-in dept

We've discussed in the past a favorite talking point of the RIAA, claiming a 40% decline in employment for musicians over the past decade or so, which simply isn't supported by the numbers. We've been seeing a lot of people claiming this again lately, so we decided to take a look at what the numbers actually showed, and can't seem to figure out where that decline is coming from, because the numbers show a very different story -- one that suggests things are actually much better for independent musicians than in the past, just as we would expect. In fact, there's been an astounding 510% increase in independent musicians making their full time living from music in just the past decade.

It's important to note, of course, that very, very, very few people get to make a living as a professional musician. That's just the unfortunate reality of the market. But understanding where that employment comes from is important. The RIAA, rather bizarrely, relies on the top line numbers for "musician employment" to make their case, but nearly all of those musicians are not musicians who are associated with RIAA member labels at all. Let's dig into the numbers a bit and see what we find.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Data is available on their site, though they don't always present it consistently, and so we see some people cherry picking some numbers (what the RIAA did) to distort things and then, sometimes, they're just bad at math (again, RIAA is guilty). So, if we look at overall employment of musicians and singers over a 10 year period, we can go back to the numbers from May 2003 and then the numbers from May 2012. Take a look at some of the key data points here. Let's start with the top line numbers, which is what the RIAA and others have been using. From May 2003:



From May 2012:

The top line there does show a decrease in full time musicians and singers, overall, but it's a drop of 16.7%, nowhere near the 40% (or, even higher) numbers some claim. Anyone claiming a bigger drop from these numbers is doing something wrong. Because when you compare the same numbers a decade apart that's the drop you get.

But the top line numbers aren't that interesting, really. Let's look a bit deeper at what makes up those numbers above, and you discover some very interesting things very quickly: From May 2003:



And From May 2012:

If you look at what the jobs actually are in this industry, the largest chunk, by far, are musicians employed by "performing arts companies." These are theater orchestras, symphonies and the like. They are musicians (very, very good ones), but they're not the kind of musicians the RIAA is talking about when it talks about musicians. That industry (performing arts companies) is definitely dealing with a bunch of challenges of its own related to continued funding, getting paying guests for shows and the like, but those are very different from the challenges that the internet creates for recording artists, which is what most people are talking about when they have this discussion. A big part of the "decline" in full time musicians comes from these performing arts groups, however, going from 27,860 down to 22,500. The second biggest chunk of this number is also not what people generally think of in this area either: religious organizations.

So, let's look at the kinds of musicians that most people think are being talked about when discussing musician employment: musicians in bands that record/release songs/albums, perform and tour, and that kind of thing. Remember, these numbers are very, very small, because the BLS is only looking at full time musicians, and there just aren't that many people who make a full time living as a musician outside of working for a performing arts company. Back in 2003, the "sound recording industries" (i.e., the labels) employed a grand total of... 880 musicians. Across the entire country. Note, too, that this was the high point of the industry. The idea that the RIAA is some huge supporter of musicians when at its peak it didn't support more than 1,000 musicians really says something, doesn't it? A decade later that number is, indeed, way down: 190. The major labels aren't supporting very many full time musicians at all.

But, much more interesting is the corresponding explosive growth of independent musicians. Back in 2003, it was a mere 300. But, by last year it was 1,830. In other words, over the past ten years, there's been decided growth in full time musicians of the type that we're normally talking about -- those creating and releasing music. In fact, it's grown 71% from 1180 in 2003 to 2020 in 2012, and the massive growth is seen in the area of independent artists who have much greater choice and control in their careers. And, it seems worth noting that the equivalent mean wage of an independent artist is significantly higher than one employed by the labels -- $35.41 vs. $26.38. Mean numbers are a bit meaningless since all sorts of things can be hidden in the mean, but on the whole, the numbers look pretty good.



Now, there are plenty of caveats to go with this, since many, many musicians who release music are unable to do so full time, so they don't show up in this chart at all. But by all indications more part time artists are also earning more money than ever before as well, with thousands of artists now being able to make some money, whereas in the past they couldn't make any.

Of course, it would be great to get even more artists making a full time salary, but the argument made by the RIAA and others that now is a bad time to be a full time, performing musician, making and releasing music, just doesn't seem supported by the numbers. It sure looks like there are many more full time, performing musicians now, it's just that many of them are independent (and making more).

Filed Under: bls, bls data, independent musicians, music industry, musicians, sky is rising
Companies: riaa

Cool New Platform For Supporting Artists: Patreon, From Jack Conte

from the nicely-done dept

I'm obviously a big fan of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, but I've always argued that it's just one of many models that content creators can use to succeed today. In fact, for a long time, I've felt that the biggest thing that was missing from Kickstarter was any sort of ongoing payment system. It's entirely project based, and thus it's not the best tool for ongoing revenue. For many years I've been interested in ideas for more ongoing revenue streams, and even proposed the idea of "subscribing" to a band's output nearly a decade ago. So it's good to see that some folks are exploring some of these ideas in much more detail.

I met Jack Conte a few years ago, after having written about him and his band Pomplamoose a few times. I'd always been impressed by Pomplamoose's ability to really connect with their fans and to build a way to support themselves via that strong connection. But in my brief interactions with Jack, it quickly became clear that he thinks deeply about different ideas for revenue models, and so it's little surprise that he's now built what seems like a pretty cool platform for ongoing support for content creators. It's basically a platform, like Kickstarter, but rather than backing a project, you back the production of certain types of regular content. So, for example, you could promise that you'll pay $5 every time Jack releases a new video (and you can put limits on how much you pay, so he doesn't get away with suddenly releasing 1,000 videos at once). It's called Patreon, and it's got a nice, simple video explaining how it works: I'm sure some will argue that this is just a "paywall," but it's actually the opposite of that. People aren't paying you to get access to the content. The content will be available elsewhere (often for free). They're paying to support your continued production (i.e., supporting future production, rather than paying to access past productions) and they can get extra benefits (added value) as supporters, such as Google Hangouts with the creators. Some of this is quite like a few of the popular subscription options in our Techdirt Insider Shop, though rather than monthly, the amounts are triggered per creation (I'm not sure that would work for a blog like ours that produces a bunch of content every day, but I could see how it would be quite cool for less frequent types of creative endeavors).

Either way, I'm glad to see some new platforms popping up like this. For a little while, it had been getting kind of annoying to see just how many Kickstarter clones were popping up (including a new one from Donald Trump?!?). You never know, of course, if Patreon will catch on, but conceptually the model makes a lot of sense for many types of content creators. In some ways, it seems like a better model for connecting with "true fans" than something like a Kickstarter. While Kickstarter has the appeal of "this is a big event, join us!" it would be nice to see some more ongoing, sustainable model platforms become popular as well.

Filed Under: business models, jack conte, patronage, support
Companies: patreon

A New Hope: How Going Free To Play Brought Redemption To Star Wars MMO

from the the-light-side-of-the-force dept

You've heard the rumblings before. Free doesn't work. Or perhaps it was that free doesn't work for big time franchises. More specifically for video games, you may have heard that when a game goes from paid to free it's a sign that it's a dead game. The mantra persists, despite examples like The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons showing the exact opposite can be true, where going free results in a significant uptick in revenue. There is still this fear in the hearts of game producers and, as we all know, fear leads to doubt, doubt leads to anger, and anger leads to the dark side of gaming.

Yet redemption can be had, if there is still good inside a game. The latest example of this is Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO that was once fee-based but is now free and has realized massive revenue returns as a result. EA Labels Emperor Frank Gibeau took time away from misunderstanding what DRM is to remark on the success of the new model.

“Since it was induced in November, we’ve added more than 1.7 million new players on the free model to the service,” said Electronic Arts president of labels Frank Gibeau. “And the number of subscriptions has stabilized at just under half a million.”

“The really interesting thing that’s happening inside the service right now is monthly average revenue for the game has more than doubled since we introduced the free-to-play option. And as we look forward, we’re going to continually invest in new content for the service and for players every six weeks or so.”

Oh, look, you give your customers what they want at the prices they want it, build up a massive fan-base, and a years-old game still ends up putting money in EA's pockets. It's a shame they haven't tried a similar strategy with other EA games like SimCity, instead choosing to lock the game up tighter than Han Solo trapped in carbonite with an always-online requirement nobody wants.

Still, it's nice to see that EA isn't above experimenting with better gaming business models, even if they did so in this case with an older game in which they had very little to lose. Here's hoping the company translates this success into a wider philosophy.

Filed Under: free, mmo, star wars
Companies: ea