Last week and again last night I was talking to people about trying/playing ddo. It was funny as both of these people were asking about ddo but were more focused on the cost and less on the play. As a player of DDo that is less about the cost and more on the play I felt behind the curve on talking from their pov. And I just want to get some of these thoughts out and see that you think.

I was told that at least 10-15% of any player base that has a F2P model is totally f2p. This shocked me as a concept. Could there really be that many people that play ddo for free? I mean ddo has some real good perks for just a few dollars. Why wouldn’t you spend like 5$ and move to Premium at least?

How long would a game with those limits be fun? Which brings me to the next thought: Most players are transient players.

Now I agree that going from game to game is fairly common. But to me that is like having alts, play one when you want but you know there is one you love more then the others.

Now I know lots of people that wonder the game spectrum but I thought most of my friends have a core or a hand full of core games they play. But a quick poll of my friends and that is just not true. Most of my friends have a type they like to play more then others, but not any one game. Granted most of my friends are console players, so that might tweek things in the move around favor. But when I played mostly on my console I feel I was more of a one game man. Shining Force… But in retrospect maybe that was my version of a MMo but totally solo???

Also among my friends a new game gets heavily played for a month or two at most then it gets set aside. How do people that complain about 10$ a month afford a 60$ every month or two? 20 is less then 120 right?

I think that there is an “Oh Shinny” moment among some gamers and by some I mean my friends. Where they want the new thing. Then they get the new thing and it is not all they wanted it to be… And it gets put aside. You know I know some Non gamer people that do the same thing in dating now that I am thinking about it. Wonder if that is a thing…

So I did what anyone that had a dev’s personal email would do. I asked some questions. Which said dev replied, “You know I can’t talk about DDo like that.” Doh! But the reply did say some things about games in general that I knew about “in general” but didn’t really think about. Like what is the cost of a player to the company; Bandwidth, Server load/space and whatnot? Not to forget new content dev time.

I deal with some of those issues in my day-to-day work life (as a web programmer) but for some reason I never thought about them in my game. As if the rules of commerce are different for a completely online thing… Wait lets just think about that for a moment…

Anyway my head spins just thinking about the possible numbers and ARPU for something like DDO where you are dealing with ARPPU Average Revenue Per Paying User.

From now on I will suggest at least spending 5$ or whatever the lowest TP point pack is when talking to my friends about DDo. Seems like the least everyone can chip in to play.

<3s