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Making money with Online gaming
By Chirag | January 22, 2008
Electronic Arts have announced that they will give away a free version of their popular title called Battlefield!
The whole idea behind this is that they will make money via advertising and also from gamers buying weapons and other virtual items. The idea of giving away free games seems to be quite new, but the idea of making money from online gaming is far from new! Games such as World of Warcraft have set a new standard which game makers now see as a benchmark. By 2011 it is expected that World of Warcraft will have up to 11 million users online!
This is quite a staggering figure, and the profits generated by Blizzard (the game developers of WOW)is a lot greater than any stand alone platform based games out in the market.
There is a difference however with the WOW structure and the gaming model that Electronic Arts is using for their Battlefield game. With WOW there is a monthly fee to play on the online servers around the world. These new casual games are free to play, but charge for accessories etc that people may want to buy online.
With a model like this, obviously you will get a lot of players who will play the games for free and never spend a cent with accessories etc, but there are always the small percentage of users who will spend their money on virtual merchandise.
I personally find it strange that people would buy clothes, shoes, weapons and the like for fictional characters that only live in cyberspace.
I have just been reading some very interesting articles on Virtual Real Estate in games such as Second Life. Where people are cashing in on Virtual Real Estate and making real world money from their virtue businesses! This particular industry is worth over one billion dollars!! Though this does not interest me in the slightest, I would be very interested to see what all the fuss is about, and how easy it is to generate money from these virtual worlds!!
You can read more about Virtual Real Estate in a few articles I have found:
http://realestate.msn.com/Buying/Article2.aspx?cp-documentid=5014212
http://idealog.co.nz/workshop/virtual-business
Also, if you want to check out Second Life, go to www.secondlife.com
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