World of Warcraft is the most successful subscription MMORPG of all time, producing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. However, [a]list games general manager Steve Fowler notes that the game could possibly make even more with free-to-play.
“As a marketer and business person, I believe that free-to-play offers what is called 'perfect pricing.' It lets players pay as much as they want,” said Fowler. “Take the biggest subscription game success of all time, World of Warcraft. For all of the money it’s making, it’s hard to believe it’s not leaving some on the table when casual players are paying the exact same amount to play as hardcore ones. For marketing, the model has a whole other upside, putting many tools at our disposal to try and leverage that we just don’t have with a box product. What we're doing with [a]list games is financially responsible marketing; it is basing our spending on analytics that we gather over a longer period of time than just the launch window, as you would do in a traditional retail model. A traditional release is like a blockbuster movie - you spend a lot of money over a short period of time then you have the publisher come back to you later and tell you whether or not it worked.”
Speaking of the “financially responsible” marketing for APB: Reloaded, Fowler described, “We're running multiple pieces of ad creative for APB: Reloaded. There will be three different banner campaigns, each with a unique virtual good offering and message. We're like a direct response campaign in that we place the ads in media outlets where the low hanging fruit may be, and we get data on how it does at various sites; it's a great partnership with GamersFirst. It's different from when the Ayzenberg Group does paid work for a traditional client, where they hire us and tell us what to make, and they send it out and we don't have access to the data. Now, we can see what's working and not working, where high quality users are coming from. For instance, we can spend on IGN and Kotaku; with Ayzenberg I know what click-through I have, but with [a]list games you can look deeper and see which ones are monetizing well. Maybe there's more people clicking on IGN but the people on Kotaku are spending more; that sort of data allows us to be much more performance oriented in our game marketing. It allows us to do more with our marketing spend.”
Read the full interview at [a]list.
