Perfect World's Belliss discusses free-to-play business model

by Rubi Bayer Oct 20th 2009 at 9:00AM

Filed under: Perfect World, Business models, Interviews, News items, Free-to-play

The concept of microtransactions is still relatively new to many of us in the western MMO world, but many Asian companies are already very familiar with it. That familiarity is opening doors for them to transition over to the western market more easily. Jonathan Belliss is the product manager for one of these companies, Perfect World International, and he spent some time talking about the challenges and advantages of the transition.

Belliss and Perfect World seem to stand out among the deluge of Asian based free-to-play games, and Belliss' outlook may well be partly responsible for this. He has quite a bit to say about game quality over quantity (especially given the current market saturation), player preferences in two very different cultures, competition for those microtransaction dollars, and the future of the free-to-play business model overall.

Belliss seems to have that all-too-rare ability to look at the pros and potential cons of a situation, to learn from others mistakes, and to see which direction the free-to-play/microtransaction model is likely to take in the future. It's an asset to Perfect World and makes the interview well worth the time spent reading.

Tags: f2p, free-to-play, interview, jonathan-belliss, microtransactions, perfect-world, perfect-world-international, pwi

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

bones said on 9:49AM 10-20-2009

My Family started playing PWI recently. I really like the fact that we can all play without a subscription fee. My wife is the only one that has spent any money in the game. My daughter actually purchased cash shop items via in game gold.

I don't get to play it as much due to other obligations and games. Not having that fee is nice for us casual players.

Zolyx said on 1:37PM 10-20-2009

Interesting. Perfect World sound like they aren't going to accept the usual rather poor quality F2P games that other companies have snapped up.

This bodes well for the Torchlight MMO :)

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