How does a video game company make money?
- Sell advertising space (banner ads, product placement or tie ins)
- Subscriber usage (getting new subscribers, retaining old)
- Company Merchandising (T-shirts, key rings, coffee mugs, mouse pads, etc)
- Virtual Store
- Other media content (Books, short stories, movies, etc)
- Expansion Packs
Jagex has done ads and subscribers for a long time. Bad news is the game suffers from a slow erosion of subscribers. Also, less players = less advertising revenue generated.
They've had a store for a long time, though this time of thing is not quite a money maker.
Jagex had never really followed games like WoW or Halo having tie-in novels. They could have done short stories on Amazon Kindle for $1-3 each. All they would need is some budding author like Church who wants to make a name for themself to work with.
Jagex hasn't forced expansion packs like WoW down player base to make them continuosly update the game. All updates are done by Jagex for all players to experience.
SoF is the virtual store atm. They could have introduced something sooner, but fortunately they did not. Remains tbd to see if the quick cash infusion from the spins compensated for any subs/ads lost from it.
04-Jun-2012 13:59:37
- Last edited on
04-Jun-2012 14:01:53
by
Deltaslug