This game is a cash grab. Thank god.
Whenever this game introduces anything new, the same complaints are lodged against it. It is unnecessary, it is dated, it is a slap in the face. And of course, it is a cash grab. Of all of these, calling everything a cash grab is the most nonsensical to me. For one thing, in the sense that we used to use that term, almost nothing in this game is. But in the sense that people seem to use the term nowadays, then yes, everything is a cash grab. But that's not a bad thing. In fact, that's a good thing. It is a very, very good thing.
To see why, let's ask this question: how many people play MCOC, and how much money would it take to support a player population of about that size? From this, we can then ask the question: does MCOC ask too much from its players, and what do the players get in return.
So first, how many people play MCOC? This is actually a complex question, and one that has confounded game operators themselves for decades. Consider this hypothetical. Imagine a game in which one player signs up, plays for one day, then quits, never to return. Every day, a new player signs up, plays for a day, and then quits. Over an entire year, 365 people sign up, play for a day, and then quit. How many players does this game have? It seems absurd to say 365 players, because at any one time there's only one person playing. If we look at unique players per month that number averages 30. But if we look at unique players per day, that number averages just one. But now imagine a game in which thirty people sign up to play, and every single one of them never quits once they sign up. However, they all play on different days. In every month, every single one of them signs in at least once. If we look at average players per month, that number is thirty. And obviously, in such a situation there really are thirty players of the game. But the average player count per day is just one.
I mention this just to highlight that "how many players play the game" is a complex situation, and one beyond the scope of this post. We always have to make simplifying assumptions whenever we talk about how many players play a game. We get into how you define concurrent players, we get into the discussion of the difference between a "player" and an "account" and so on. We're not going to settle that here. But with that out of the way, let's try to estimate the playerbase for MCOC anyway, assuming number of accounts is a reasonable proxy for the estimate for number of players. First of all, I can say with 100% certainty it is more than 214,776 players. I know this because I know more than that many players participated in the last Battlegrounds season. I took a UC alt of mine, played exactly one match, scored 375 solo points, and then waited for placement rank at the end of the season. That's where I placed. When you consider that you must be UC or higher to participate, and BG cannot possibly have 100% participation, that number alone points to the game having on the order of at least 500k active player accounts.
We can try to cross reference that with another data point: the total number of participants in Alliance War. We can't measure this directly, but we can estimate it from the number of alliances that earn any season rewards. That number hovers between 25,000 and 30,000 alliances, more or less. They are not all full, but if we assume an average of 15 members per alliance (which seems conservative) that implies between 375k and 450k players participate in war. Again, it seems unlikely that Alliance war has full participation, which means if anything the alliance war data implies an even larger playerbase.
The last data point we have is that back when the Rocket button was a thing in the game, Kabam released the total number of accounts that chose to push the button: it was 1.3 million. It is possible that the current playerbase is smaller now than it was then, but this gives a ballpark estimate for the order of magnitude of the number of active player accounts the game has had in the past. Between the lower bound of about 500k and the upper bound of about 1.3 million, it would be a safe assumption that the current number of active player accounts in the game is between 500k and 1M.
How much revenue does a game of that size need to be sustainable? Well, we can guestimate that as well. Once upon a time, most online games of comparable complexity (i.e. MMOs) were supported by subscription revenue, in the days before microtransactions and the F2P model. Subscriptions for online games typically ranged from about $12 USD to $20 USD a month. Let's assume those numbers worked out to the reasonable scalable revenue for a large online game. The fact that the range was relatively consistent regardless of the genre or complexity of the game suggests that this revenue number is more strongly correlated with supporting the large player base than the type of game being managed.
So we'd guess that a game like MCOC, if it existed in the days of subscription revenue, would be generating between $72M USD and $240M USD. In the subscription days that revenue would be going directly to the game operator.
How much money does MCOC actually generate? Well, we can estimate that from Netmarble financial disclosures. In the calendar year 2022, MCOC generated approximately $223M USD, based on the total revenue of Netmarble and the reported percentage of that revenue accounted for by MCOC, plus a guestimate for foreign exchange. This is within the estimate range for what MCOC would be collecting in revenue if they were charging everyone a sustainable subscription price. Per user, MCOC is not actually making a lot more than they would be making if they simply charged everyone a subscription comparable to the standard for the days when subscription MMOs were the primary game in town. And this is before factoring in the fact that developing and operating games is, in many ways, more expensive now than back then.
What is different is where that money comes from. Once upon a time, that money came from everyone. Every single player was paying between about $150 USD and $250 USD per year, every year. Now, only a fraction of players pay anything. How many players actually spend in MCOC? The industry average for mobile games is on the other of three percent. Just three out of every hundred players. I've never been told what MCOC's IAP conversion rate is, but I have been told by people who know that MCOC is not atypical for the mobile game industry. So let's be generous and assume MCOC's IAP conversion rate is between 3% and 5%. So between one in 20 and one in 30 players spend. If the average player would have been spending between $150 USD and $250 USD if everyone was spending exactly the same amount on subscriptions, actual MCOC spenders must be averaging between $3000 USD and $7500 USD per year.
$3000 USD to $7500 USD per year.
Now of course, not all spenders are spending that kind of money. Many spenders spend less. But there are other spenders who spend more: lots and lots more. It is the average that matters here. The average spender is spending thousands of dollars a year. And why? Because they have to make up for the twenty or thirty other players who are spending zero. If you're a spender and you're buying two or three Odins a year, you are actually just breaking even. You're paying for what your own account needs to generate and that's it. Anyone spending less is, in effect, still playing somewhat for free: they are paying less than what their account would need to generate in revenue for the game to be sustainable.
This game grabs a lot of cash. And for the most part, it grabs it from the players most willing and able to pay. Thousands and thousands of dollars. The big spenders are each paying for potentially hundreds of players, the whales are paying for thousands of players each. And for this game to survive, and for those hundreds of thousands of players to continue to play this game completely for free, the game must convince a few thousand players to part with millions of dollars of cash. It must convince them that even though they are surrounded by players who spend nothing and still get to play the exact same game as them, and will even get everything they have eventually, it is still worth spending all that money.
Champion crystals are a cash grab. Rank up materials are a cash grab. All the hard content is a cash grab. And yet, pretty much all of it is also completely free. Everyone eventually gets tons of champions. Everyone eventually gets tons of rank up materials. Eventually, the rewards in Everest content show up in the login calendar. This game is a give away to the free to play players and it is a cash grab to the spenders. The game makes it worth it to the spenders to spend, and it makes it worth it to the free to play players to not spend.
But yeah, the game is a cash grab. It is a very successful cash grab so far. It has to be, to support so many free to play players. And the primary benefactors of that cash grab are the non-spenders. The spenders get a ton of in-game stuff that will eventually become free, just earlier. The non-spenders get a game experience that would have cost hundreds to thousands of dollars before the F2P model was invented.
Who do you think is getting the better deal here?
There is such a thing as being a cash grab in the derogatory sense, in the sense of sacrificing good game design for quick profits. But to really judge that, you have to be good at judging game design, and good at judging the economy of the game, unless the game steers itself into obviously absurd directions. So far, the game has never done that. It does tend to offer the most valuable stuff for extremely high prices to convince the highest spenders to spend a lot. This is often portrayed as a bad thing, because the rest of us "can't afford it." But by convincing the highest spenders to spend a lot, everyone else has to spend less. Spending is directed upward, towards the highest spenders. This is deliberate, and a continuous part of the overall design of the monetization of the game to allow as many players to play for free as possible, and as many small spenders to play the game as possible, and as many moderate spenders to play the game as possible. Most of the spending is concentrated at the top, which is another way of saying everyone spends less than they would otherwise need to, in order to support the game. Except for the whales.
Next time someone accuses the game of being a "cash grab" be thankful that it is. If you're a free to play player, that's why you get to play the game. The game grabs cash from the whales, so it doesn't have to grab any cash from you. If you are a moderate spender, be thankful you are getting more for your money than you would be getting if this was a subscription game and everyone was spending what you are spending.
And if you're a whale, tell them yes it is, and it is your cash the game is grabbing, and you're welcome.
