Online Games and Revenue Models

I’ve played some classic “build a town and summon an army” games lately. As always when I play these games I remember playing archmage several years ago. It was the first webgame I played and they made their money by encouraging ad-clicks by giving bonus turns if you clicked a few of them. This, of course, isn’t a valid way of making money anymore.

Nowadays some sort of premium membership seems to be the most popular way for online game developers to make some cash. You get to play for free and then you have to pay for bonuses and added benefits. In some games these are almost required if you want to stay competitive.

The premium membership way of making money has its drawbacks. If you’re unlucky your players wont think it’s worth it and if you over emphasize the bonuses they might feel that the game is unfair and leave. So, there must be another way.

What is the next thing going to be?

What do i call these games?

There's a lot of confusion. When my girlfriend asks what I’m doing I have a hard time to come up with names to describe the different games I play.

Everything from a flash ping-pong game to a text based detective game is called any number of different names. There are web games, browser games, online games, adventure games, rpg's and a lot more.

What are the game creators thinking about? Why do they call a riddle game you solve in ten minutes an rpg? Why?

Someone needs to create some rules and make everyone follow them. I suggest that WC3 stops messing around with xhtml and starts caring for some of the real stuff.

This blog will be about games

The games I will write about will typically be multiplayer games that are played in your web browser. These are called browser games, web games or online games. I think I’ll discuss this naming problem further in my next post.

Programming games like this gives you a whole new set of limitations. I want to take a look at how some of the popular games today have dealt with these limitations and speculate in how they can be improved. I will probably also write about revenue models and the costs of running a game like this.

If you’re interested in such games you might want to check back here once in a while to read my ramblings.

Hope to see you again soon.