Micro-payment, a Korean reality

January 11th, 2006 Jun Sok Huhh

Micro-payment(MP) is one of promising ways to get more money from players. By the lessons from economics, price discrimination which based on extracting information from potential buyers is always good to sellers. The service called ‘Marketplace’ in Xbox360 Live is a sort of strategic arrangement for accomplishing this.

In Korea, MP has been a serious pricing method for some of MMO games. Especially, MMOGs based on simple arcade-like style, these are called “casual games” in Korea, have been designed for this business model from their scratch. Kart Rider by Nexon might be the most important one among them. It swiftly rose up to ‘national’ videogames that only games like StarCraft, Lineage in Korea had reached. Kart Rider is just a sort of Mario Kart style battle racing games, but its business model for MP is really unique one.

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Sometimes, market tells us much more…

January 7th, 2006 Jun Sok Huhh

Sometimes, the crowded market with large number tells us more preciously than the wisdom of small experts. The level structure of a game is not so easy to comprehend or describe, for experiences can be totally different across players. Some in-depth investigations of experts could shed considerable light on the matter, but we could not be sure that their opinions reflect actual experiences of players.

What if the information through collective decision making might be possibly attained? Usually, Market is one of best devices for this kind of information collecting.

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