Goblinworks, the MMO developer behind the recently Kickstarted Pathfinder Online, believes in the stability of a subscription model. CEO Ryan Dancey took to a blog on MMORPG to defend products like The Elder Scrolls Online for sticking to a monthly fee, while explaining how MMO subs are estimated to bring $100 million to the West every month.
“If we consider the MMOs that generate the most revenue in the Western market (North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia / New Zealand) a sizeable majority of the revenue being generated is in the form of monthly subscriptions," he claims. "The era of MMO subscriber transparency has ended but we can still make some educated deductions about these revenues and subscriber totals."
We don’t know how much games with microtransactions make every month. Finding that type of data is a bit more difficult, but Dancey argues that it can’t be half the estimated $100 million figure for subscriptions.
"It’s even harder to estimate how much revenue is being generated from microtransactions (MTX), but it is extremely difficult to imagine that the revenue even approaches 50 percent of the amount being paid as subscription fees,” he continues. “Half the subscription revenue is coming from World of Warcraft and Blizzard has just begun to dip its toe in the MTX revenue stream.
"MTX revenue will clearly increase over the next several years but until and unless there’s a major shift in the market, it will remain a junior partner to subscriptions in terms of revenue generation.”
Even full-priced games are instituting microtransactions, and we’ve likely only begun to see how they’ll be incorporated in video games. For now, though, that monthly subscription reigns supreme.
