Video: Combat Arms postmortem: The art of selling guns

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[Note: To access chapter selection, click the fullscreen button or check out the video on the GDC Vault website] While free to play games are commonplace throughout the industry today, Maple Story publisher Nexon was one of the first companies to really push this business model in the West. The company's 2008 shooter, Combat Arms, was one of its biggest hits in North America, and it taught the team quite a bit about tuning and ...

"First, you have to identify user needs," Lee said, adding that "you need to guess and go through trial and error. It's pretty simple." With Combat Arms, Nexon experimented and sold a wide variety of virtual items in a number of different ways in hopes of honing in on what players want most. Next, the team had to optimize its marketplace to make sure the game could actually bring in some money.

The question is: What do MapleStory players want most?
Other than free cubes.

The answer was apparently cubes, period.
At virtually any cost.

Glad to know Nexon uses more than random guess work. Oh wait...