As one culture grows, it seeps into other media. On a personal note here, I’m a British citizen. I drink more tea than an average American automobile burns in gasoline. Whenever someone raises a Union Jack my right hand starts to lift slowly towards my brow in a salute. My teeth are also pretty bad, but that’s just a bad stereotype. Whenever I stick on the TV or jump onto YouTube, my senses are assaulted in a shock and awe campaign that rivals the alien attack of Independence Day. We don’t talk about British shows around the water cooler. We drink at Starbucks while talking about the latest episode of The Walking Dead or American politics.
Cultural influences flow through the power of media. That’s why so many people know about Halo. If you were to mention Forza or inFamous to a gaggle of people in my local area and ask if they knew what it was, an approving nod or two might appear in the back corner of the room. Mention Halo, and everyone knows that its a video game. They don’t necessarily know what happens or who that strange green dude is, but they know it’s a game. Innova Systems may have already had a game in the pipeline that was a free to play first person shooter. By bringing the Halo name to it, they stand to make a quick buck from the simple power of name recognition.
There’s also the question of infrastructure. In countries that could have once been described as being behind the Iron Curtain, western games consoles are not particularly easy to come by. Their prices turn them into high value luxury items which are thrust into the stratosphere by often-insane import taxes. The components to build even a semi-respectable computer though are easy to find. Thanks to their availability, PC markets in countries like Russia are much larger in relation to consoles than in western markets.
So that’s quite possibly why the game is coming to PC, why it bears the Halo name, and part of why it’s probably a free to play title. There is, however, a slightly darker vein that may run through the body of Halo Online. It isn’t free to play because it’s the most profitable monetization method in the Russian market; it’s free to play because it’s the only way to make money.
Piracy is rampant in the Russian games market. That’s not simply an assumption, it’s a fact. In 2011, a worldwide software association named the BSA investigated software piracy rates worldwide. Their figures only accounted for unlicensed software in the workplace it isn’t exactly a huge leap to assume that this is also occurring in the games market. They found that 63% of all software used in Russia’s workplaces was unlicensed, with 72% of those surveyed admitting that they used pirated software. At the time, that equated to over $3 billion of lost revenue for software companies.
Bringing this back to the world of gaming, that’s a pretty unsafe market to be throwing your expensive game into. By using a free to play monetization system, the studios working with Halo Online would be almost guaranteed any incoming revenue because microtransactions cannot be pirated. Those that are not willing to pony up the cash can still enjoy the game too, both shoring up the user numbers to keep paying customers interested while increasing the visibility of the game on social media. Increased visibility means more people intrigued. More people intrigued increased the likelihood of “landing a whale” and getting some income going through.
Still don’t think that makes sense? Well lets try to explain this with maths (yes I say maths because I’m British, God save the Queen and tally-ho and all that stereotypical nonsense). If you charged people $20 for your game in Russia, there’s every possibility that two thirds of people (that’s pretty much 67%) would get to play the game without paying for it. That’s only $20 in your pockets when you should have got $60. Make it a free to play game and ask people to pay $5 for a new helmet or experience boost and you’ve got the possibility of getting $15 from three people.
Yeah that’s $5 less than if you didn’t offer a free to play experience, but those who pay once are likely to pay again. All you need is one of them to buy a new helmet and an experience boost, then you’ll be breaking even. This isn’t saying that we approve of over the top and crazy microtransactional practices like pay to win, it’s just explaining how painful piracy could be.
Remember where we said you should get a tinfoil hat ready? Well now’s the time to put it on because we’re going into full on conspiracy mode.
