Pay-to-Win Alive and Well

November 23, 2011 LHStaff General 5

Bigpoint, the social gaming company who’s titles include DarkOrbit, Battlestar Galactica Online and Zoomumba to name a few, is known for their pay-to-win business model. Now while many gamers, including myself, wouldn’t touch a pay2win game with a ten foot pool, it seems over 215 million players world wide would.

Today via GamesBrief it was revealed that Bigpoint recently sold 2,000 in-game items that were prices at €1,000 or $1337 each. That’s $2.67 million dollars from two thousand players.

What virtual item could possibly be worth that much? It turns out it was a drone. In the image above you can see that players can add drones, up to 10, to their ship for added protection and abilities. Well it seems the 10th drone is extremely difficult to obtain, so Bigpoint decided to make it available in their store and players have been jumping at the chance regardless of the price.

The first thing that comes to my mind is who has $1337 to spend on a virtual item? and second is how does that not ruin the game? If I was a regular player of DarkOrbit who spend a few bucks here and there each month, this would just piss me off. How could you possibly compete with players who have thousands of dollars to spend?

5 Comments

  2. It sounds like your just knee jerk assuming thousands of dollars == great advantage.

    If you can get 9 drones by normal play, buying the tenth only gives you 11% more power.

    And 200% more satisfaction if you beat the guy who dropped a K on this, regardless!

  3. 11% is a pretty big advantage, all things being equal, the person that has that 10th drone is going to win every time.

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