The Casino Model of Virtual Worlds
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 8:57AM
Casinos make money when you gamble. Everything else is there to make your gaming experience more fun; free food, free drinks, free entry, couple of chips to get your started, maybe even free accommodation. It's about keeping punters at tables.
The last thing a casino wants is for you to leave because you're hungry. Worse still, leaving the premises to try that new restaurant down the block. If that happens, they know they've lost you for the night. So they give you free food. It doesn't even have to be very good, just free. Who can turn down free food!
This same approach can be applied to virtual worlds. Throw away the subscriptions; make the games, content, everything free. No pay-walls. There are hundreds of thousands of free Flash games. Trust me, your players have no shortage of places to have fun.
Your games are the free food. The food keeps the punters in the casino and your games (not to mention quests, adventures, and narratives) keep the players in your world.
So if your players aren't coming for the games, what are they coming for? Everyone gets a kick out of creating something from nothing. Creating an avatar, creating a virtual house, and creating new friendships. That's fun, it's rewarding, it's anthropomorphic.
Virtual worlds are about giving players space to carve out a little bit of themselves, a little dent even, in your virtual universe.
Of course, players want to create all this right now; the biggest house, the coolest avatar, the most friends! The only thing standing in their way, virtual currency. Without it they can't buy more clothes, furniture, or attend parties.
So they play games; games that award virtual currency. And now we see the real purpose of games, to slow your players down. It takes time to earn virtual currency.
Some of your players will happily play games for hours, others want to get there quicker. So let them, let them buy virtual currency for real cash. No subscriptions to scare players or parents, just a simple $3 for 3000 credits.
The secret to this model; encouraging players to associate themselves with their avatar.
The more we invest time in something the more we care about it. It's no different for your players. When you give players the chance to create, they're investing their time. All that content you give away for free keeps players investing their time. When you've invested time, its easier to start invest money too.
It turns out that, most young people spend most of their discretionary income on their identity - their clothes, the societies they're associated to, the brands they choose. So when players feel like they've invested a bit of themselves in their avatar they're happy to spend some of their identify budget on virtual clothes, you know, to just make sure they look right.
This is the casino model. Make the world fun and free. Sell virtual currency to impatient players.
In a follow up post I'll explore some of the challenges with this approach - making free content cheaply and balancing the economy - as well an alternative 'theme park' model.
Matthew Warneford
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