Kyle Orland’s Workblog

Making money in the video game business is usually a pretty simple proposition: you make a game; other people pay to play it. There may be some middlemen like producers and retailers in there, and the actual payment could be a purchase, subscription or rental, but when you boil it down, the pay-to-play model has defined the business of video games since the days of the arcade.

But the world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown this business arrangement on its head. This is partly because it had to. People have been trained by sites like Hotmail and Google to expect web services — even good ones — to be free to use. The New York Times recently abandoned its Times Select online subscription service, possibly after realizing that people weren’t willing to pay good money for the kinds of opinions that were available for free on hundreds of blogs. Similarly, any online game site that starts charging money for content risks losing players to the myriad free alternatives.

(full article)

If a patent is filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and no one is around to enforce it, does it make any money?

This somewhat zen query actually hides a serious business question about the best way to extract value from a patent. Sure, there’s some prestige associated with publicly staking your claim to an idea before anyone else, but prestige doesn’t pay the bills. It takes a significant investment of time and money to get a patent — between 18 to 30 months and thousands of dollars in filing fees on average, according to PatentInfo.com. In the business world, the point of such investments is usually to make money.

(full article) 

Charles Bellfield is the Vice President of Marketing at Capcom, USA. In this Gamasutra interview, freelance journalist Kyle Orland sits down with Bellfield to discuss Capcom’s stance on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science’s ‘pay to play’ model, the success of downloadable console demos and the feedback loop it creates between developers and consumers, Eastern influences on Western games, Okami, Phoenix Wright, and more.

(full article)