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You’re running an MMO and charging a monthly fee, you’re down 600k subscribers, about 9 million fewer coming in per month. The pressure is on. What do you do? *cough* Blizzard *cough* WoW *cough*
A) Charge the same
B) Charge more
C) Charge less
You select A)
You have one big problem: and you leave the fee as it is... you lose another million, until the next expansion, which you see a burst of players. Then start losing more players.
*Sound of Pacman Dying*
You select B)
Raise the monthly fee. It pays the bills! Then you start losing a massive amount of players in protest, as they will not be happy to pay more per month. In the end they will leave or shop around for a cheaper rate for entertainment. No go.
Ok, how about hiding the extra charges? There is one industry that has been doing that for years: the airline industry. It’s working great for the airlines... right? As you add extras to the game then you charge for them. Because they’re extras, the base price is the same. How about a legendary weapons for $4.95? Faster mounts for $3.95? Insta-Kill a raid boss for $35 dollars? Now the players are happy, right?
The Outcome... Nope. Only a small group of players are the one that pay to be happy. Other slowly stop playing and then stop their accounts. Worse, they start trying out other MMOs.
The people walking away lose connections with their guild and online friends and don't seem to come back. Guild lose critical mass, and more people feel out of touch in your game, and more leave. In the long run, month after month, your numbers go down. And one day you have to merge servers to keep enough people on a server to prevent the whole server from feeling like a ghost town.
You’re eaten by a Grue... Good job.
You select C)
You just lower your subscription cost for players that have played for more than 2 years over the lifetime of their account, including those with currently inactive accounts. Even go as far as a 50% discount. This way you counter the psychology of people thinking you’re dying and doing an out of business sale. Positively spin the cut as rewarding your highly invested fan base.
Wait, is this cost effective? Yes. Now you have players coming back to the game, rebuilding connections with your existing players. Connecting different level of game understanding with players trying to learn, reforming community. Guilds start getting new and old members. More important, you restore the fan base that help make the game so popular in the first place.
More important is doing it now, before the expansion comes out. Getting your old players back, and building communities now will help that surge from the expansion to last for years. Without those players, it would be a few months.
All of a sudden, losses stabilize, and you don't lose a critical mass of people in the coming months. Players that have been gone for awhile start coming back. Soon you have more players than ever before.
You win! Great Job!
The secret choice D)
Double whammy! Add more value to the current subscriptions right away! Linking the buying of Diablo 3 with a year of WoW was genius. Now take it to the next level.
Hearthstone is a great product to start this trend. So give your WoW players free cards and card packs for playing WoW . Plus your chat tools allow players to keep in touch with their friends outside of the MMO game client. More importantly, they keep in touch with their friends, even if they aren’t logged in, making it tempting to play and join group activities.
*Final Fantasy Victory Music*
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