The Birth Of Free MMO’s – Ways Free Games Make Money
Before the start of Free MMO’s way back in the early 1990′s, the expenses needed to run an MMO to cover its servers and constantly needed game modifications forced developers to stand back and search for a new perspective on where this kind of cash can be gained from.
At first developers decided on top of purchasing the title, a annual subscription would also be needed to be maintained from its consumers for the mmo to continue to finance its constant wave of bills and developer wages. Some of the early subscription models actually had the consumer instead of paying every month like we have and know of now, but having them pay hourly!
This progressed into consumers concentrating on one mmo at a time due to them not caring to pay for another. Incomes the birth of “World of Warcraft”. This mmo swooped in and grabbed reigns of the market. Players where dragged in by its large array of combat and player grouping systems plus its ever expanding nature of new game enhancements and new content which left consumers with always having something new and interesting to do.
On this day World of Warcraft controls the online gaming market. If you’re going to pay for a mmo better off paying for the one that has the more content and players to talk to right? This was the kind of question that would have fired off the new era of payment options. Not paying at all!
The first Free MMO’s started to land not long after WoW announced its position on the pay to play market. At first these small developed tiny Free MMO’s were judged as being poorly made and a shadow compared to their pay to play brothers so were ignored by the general consumer. For most of the time this was a safe assumption.
Although with everything pointing in the way of failure these free MMO’s started to aim in the other direction. Raking in mass amounts of consumers from all over the world and with it a new payment market, the micro-transaction. In a nut shell Free MMO’s are for the most part free although hiding within these little gems usually contains an in game store.
These stores can be used to aquire all types of extras for your gaming experience. From items to help you level faster or cosmetics to make you stand out from the crowd, this kind of money market started to do just that and developers were seeing large amounts of income from consumers.
Now we are starting to see the larger companies take on the genre of Free MMO’s with big title games such as Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and Conan all making the change from pay to play (P2P) to F2P. And that’s just 3 to name, there are huge amount to decide from and with the added plus that they are free you can test them all till you find out which you enjoy without having to pay for a thing!
If you are interested in looking at more check out some of these Free MMO’s feel free check out this site http://planetmmos.com and read reviews and news about many Free FPS titles and many other top titles.