wfz said:
But yeah, League of Legends has definitely made money. It's pretty much the most played "core" game in existence right now. From what I understand, Tribes: Ascend is doing great as well (although there are no released revenue numbers from them as far as I'm aware). |
I expected this. And all I have seen released are huge $$$ figures for capital investment into the company, and huge playerbase numbers. If F2P was a commercial success in profit they'd be releasing those figures as well, but they aren't.
In an interview I found, Tribes developer dodged the profitability question. That's the only mention of its cashflow I can find; again there are big player numbers but no evidence of success.
All in all I think F2P is a huge bubble attracting venture capital in increasingly large amounts before it folds.
I do believe F2P works as a lifetime extender to games, when the dev costs have been paid off like TF2, but no amount of $100 vanity monocles can make up for every player putting down $50 on release.
The one concrete example I know of is that despite the LoL tournament viewing figures being 4-5x what SC2 pulls, the SC2 market is far more valuable to sponsors as they know each person is willing to spend money on what they enjoy.
