John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment in San Diego, said the game is scoring well with the intended audience of kids and families. About 75 precent of the players are under 17 and 46 percent are under 13.
The engine behind the success is the:
free-to-play business model pioneered in Asia, where players start playing for free and pay for virtual goods one at a time in micro-transactions.
Sony proactively took down the main barrier to early adoption:
Kids have been slow to adopt MMOs in the past because they don’t have credit cards to pay for subscription fees. But they can play this game for free and can buy Station currency cards to get virtual goods at five major retail chains: Best Buy, Blockbuster, Rite Aid, 7-Eleven and Target.
We can see how company have learned to cross "the chasm" by going beyond a typical free trial period. Now, the access to technology itself is, literally, free. Therefore, the main internet battle for consumer wallets shifted from acquisition to retention. It is no longer about entry costs, but, rather, about exit costs. That is, consumers can now easily cross the chasm in both directions (see the graph). The problem has shifted from how to get people adopt a technology, to how to prevent people from dis-adopting it.
No comments:
Post a Comment