Free2Play Game - Profit ?

[ImAqTpiE]

Eng:
Hello, is there a way to make profit of Free2Play games ? My latest game did about -10mio...
Used latest engine with all features, maybe that's the mistake ? I made 8$ per month and had 3 sad smileys, hope you get what you mean. Had about 1,2mio/2,2mio active players and about 200k ingame purchases...

Any suggestions ?

Ger:
Gibt's eine Möglichkeit wie man mit F2P Spielen Gewinn macht ? Habe mit meinem neuesten (und ersten) 10mio Verlust gemacht. Denke das liegt an der teueren Engine und den Servern...

Habt ihr Ideen ?

[PolecatEZ]

Don't charge for ANYTHING until you hit 15-20 million active users at least. When you hit your magic number, turn on everything and publish 2-3 updates right in a row and have your marketing boost it back to 100 hype. For best results, wait until November for the big cash-in.

You'll be rolling in money for the next year or two this way after losing a few hundred million.

[VeteranXT]

Had 75Mill users, done 32 Updates. Earned 500+ Mill of cash

[Justa Guy]

I know they updated F2P not to long ago to not pay out quite so much, my last game I was making billions in just a few months, not to mention F2P games pretty much never die unless you end them. So I'm not sure exactly how much they pay right now but yeah it's still an overly profitable game method. In fact since you don't have to worry about expansions or selling phsyical copies of the game like MMO's it's argueablly the most profitable method of making games.

The thing is you usually about break even if you turn on half hte profit making measures, and then rake in tons of money if you turn them all on. However your player growth will be much slower the more Pay to win incentives you activate. A good tactic as the other poster have saids is to make the game entirely free for at least a few weeks, however long you can really afford and then turn on profits. Even with profits on from day one though it will generally continue to grow and earn money.

The thing with F2P games and MMO's however is your servers have a cost every week/month to consider. More servers you have the more potential players you can support. A potential that could be wasted if you don't have that many players. Unfortunetly you can't turn them off partially as it stands. It's the entire room or none of them. A good way around this is to just build a big room but leave it mostly empty and add servers as you need them or make several small rooms that you can shut off when their not needed to save cost.

Generally don't focus to much on building up a F2P game imo. Just make one, update it a few times, market it as much as you think is cost effective and move on to the next game. It's much easier get a couple games with a few million subscribers than one with 10mil+ on it's own.

[ImAqTpiE]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, i'll try it out.

[busby_96]

I don't make profit....Am I Missing something with free to play?

[Justa Guy]

Well I haven't hit legendary yet so I'm not sure with the price hike of everything if you can still make a profit on F2P easily but it works up to hard. The main thing is you need a pretty good game, F2P with a poor score is pretty much a waste of time.

Eventualy though every F2P game should make some money since the game basically never goes offline, it will always have a few active players and you can keep updating it now. I suppose the biggest thing to consider is to not waste too much money on marketing. The 500k TV ads can really add up if you keep pumping it out, and after a point it doesn't help that much if the game has been out too long.

Other than that you might have to many active servers for your player base. Don't focus so much on a single F2P game and perhaps make several to fill out your player base.