2013-09-17, 10:13 PM
Jazeon Wrote:Do you think they would be able to maintain the game if it was indeed like that and turn out a reasonable profit to pay all of their employees and profit enough to re-invest?
Farmville does it. Lemme explain in Maple terms...
Okay, there are NX-only items. But most of them are not actually anymore helpful than regular items. You basically get better looking animals/buildings/decorations. Paying cash for items you can't normally get doesn't really make you any better.
The other use for NX is to accelerate/skip tasks. That's just the easy mode way to get what you can already earn. You get forward faster, but it doesn't really make you that much more powerful. Usually, if you're gonna bother with those options, you're just falling behind anyway. The only time it gets you somewhere is "early unlocking" new lands and getting a jump start on developing a new area that everyone else can't access. But ultimately? Farmville isn't competitive anyway. Someone may have more money, cuter decorations that you can get, more experience levels...but it's not like they're doing anything that you can't.
In the end, you don't pay to join, you can get as far as you want without paying, and there's no real ceiling to what you can accomplish due to your lack of spending. The game is still profitable, to the point where the company made a Farmville 2 that runs separately. So it is possible to make such a format work.