/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/7358319/party_vs_fimbrilisk.0.jpg "tera rising game")
#Tera rising game free
Was this on your radar as you engineered the switch to free-to-play?Įven before we decided to change the TERA subscription business to a free model, there were many examples of subscription-to-F2P titles we could draw upon.
#Tera rising game for free
Recently, Star Wars: The Old Republic took a lot of flak for implementing a free-to-play mode which seemed to go out of its way to create a rather unfriendly user experience for free players. Instant gratification and the random aspect of Strongbox rewards has been a powerful draw to our players and is performing above my expectations. Players can acquire keys for free in the game, but they also buy them from the store to save time. These randomly dropped boxes require a Strongbox key to open. We also added ‘Strongboxes’ into the game which contain a variety of special items to help players. So far every promotion has worked well, but the discount promotions and free EMP giveaway for Founders have been the strongest. With the TERA: Rising transition, we have run several promotions, such as providing existing subscribers with 30 days of Elite Status, giving an in-game Halo item when players first purchase EMP (En Masse Points), providing free EMPs to Founders (previous subscribers) to help them experience the new item-buying process, running weekend discounts and so on. Once a player starts a free account, what strategies do you have in place to encourage them to become a paying customer? What has worked out best for you so far? Are there any specific monetization design hooks that have worked significantly better than you expected (or not as well as you had expected)? It is not meant to be a gate for exclusive access to game content. Elite benefits are designed primarily around providing convenience for advanced players who spend a lot of time in the game. Elite Status is a group of premium benefits with a monthly recurring option, and many of these benefits also available individually from the in-game store. TERA: Rising is now primarily driven by microtransactions, but players can also purchase an optional Elite Status.
#Tera rising game full
The core philosophy of the TERA: Rising transition was: “Free players shouldn’t feel penalized for being free.” Our standard players (free) have full access to all game content, while previous TERA subscribers were awarded a host of special benefits as Founders. Is TERA primarily driven by microtransactions, now? Or is the goal simply to draw players in and encourage them to convert to an Elite subscription? Walk me through a bit of the design philosophy involved in switching to free-to-play. TERA actually had a strong paying subscriber base, but we believed the gameplay and content could appeal to a broader audience if we removed the monthly subscription requirement.
Subscription-only titles usually get much more experienced and hardcore players than free titles which makes it challenging to acquire non-hardcore players as paid subscribers. I agree that a strong player base is part of the overall game content and experience for online games. Was this part of the reason you decided to make TERA free-to-play? In other words, was your userbase too small as a paid subscription game to sustain a quality MMO experience? Many free-to-play developers talk about how the not-paying players function as additional content for the paying customers - more people to play with, more people to buy/sell items, and so on. The strong performance of these item sales helped support our belief that TERA could succeed under a microtransaction model.īy taking a staged approach and analyzing our player behavior, we were able to implement a free model that I believe achieved a good balance for the needs of core players while also appealing to newer gamers. We also wanted to better understand what our players valued most in terms of game content.įor example, even though our players were paying for a subscription, they were also interested in purchasing additional cosmetic items through our web store. We chose to launch TERA as subscription-only because it was designed around this model, and we were confident we could deliver a great game experience. Was this what prompted the switch to free-to-play? Was this switch on your radar at all before TERA launched, or did this all come afterwards?Įven before we launched TERA in May 2012, we were discussing a potential transition from a subscription-only model. Subscription-based business models have been on the downswing recently. We spoke with COO Soo Min Park to see how that's going. Switching a subscription-based MMORPG over to a free-to-play model can be an effective way to prolong the life of your game – but it's hard to find the sweet spot between encouraging players to pay and making them feel nickel-and-dimed at every turn.Įn Masse's TERA: Rising recently made the switch.
0 kommentar(er)
