This week on the MMO Investor we look at Webzen - a South Korean developer and publisher of free to play MMORPGs world-wide. They're definitely a lesser known company compared to Nexon, which we looked at last week, but they're still pretty big! How big? Well, as of August 22, 2015, they were worth ~$800 million and they generated ~$61 [...]
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Some background info: I've been playing League of Legends since Season 1. I started playing ranked in Season 2 and ended the season with 3 accounts in the top 100 ladder (all ~2400 elo). Ended season 3 with all my accounts in Diamond 1. Played season 4 on one account and ended in Masters. I've helped friends improve in the [...]
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Flaming, trolling, and flat out harassment have been part of online gaming for as long as online gaming has existed. When the MMO genre was young, small, and largely filled with the D&D nerd elite, what we now consider toxic behavior was considered a normal part of the online experience. The largely male, tech savvy audience was either happy dishing [...]
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While most users don't spend any money in a game's cash shop, some do. How much is a free to play user worth? How much money does the average user spend on a free to play game? Well, that depends on the game! The chart above is quite interesting; it reveals that World of Tanks and Team Fortress 2 are [...]
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Interviewer's notes: As we were playing the game at the time and there were long periods of random chatter and silence, I have attempted to condense the interview down to the most important parts. Some transitions won't make much sense but the important information is all there, intact, in the order it was in. Questions are primarily answered by Thomas [...]
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I remember when I first started playing free to play MMOs, I was super excited to get a chance to play these games without having to buy them. The concept of microtransactions seemed really novel – play for free, but make small purchases along the way to enhance the experience. My first free to play MMORPG was Maplestory and the [...]
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Nexon is one of the largest free to play game developers in the world with numerous iconic franchises including MapleStory and Dungeon Fighter Online. They were one of the first companies to launch free to play games in the West with the launch of “Global MapleStory” in 2005 and are considered market leaders in the free to play space, but exactly [...]
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Interviewer’s note: Minor grammatical changes have been made to improve readability. I recently had the chance to sit down with Robert Basler, the sole developer of the upcoming MMORTS, The Imperial Realm: Miranda. We talked the game, its inspirations, and the challenges of being a solo developer as he gave me a tour of the game in its current form. [...]
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The MMORTS genre is largely a niche. MMORTSes are impossible to balance, unfriendly to newcomers, and have to be exceedingly complex in order to keep people around for an extended period of time. The modern concept of an MMORTS is far from what it originally was. Whereas most modern MMORTSes are casual affairs that lead to money pits, such as [...]
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The MMO Investor is a weekly column on the state of the MMO industry when it comes to business. Get a quick weekly glimpse at the real life auction house that is high finance in the MMO Industry! As the size of the MMO industry continues to grow, there's a relatively new, but massive shift taking place. Big traditional game developers are starting [...]
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