Earlier in the week, Russian publisher Nomoc, together with developer Qplaze, announced their MMOG Age of Heroes Online had reached 111,000 subscribers in Russia and Europe.
The game, which is cross-platform and can be played either on mobile and PC, relies on micro-payments for its business model, so with an iPhone port planned, we sent some questions over to Qplaze's Ivan Konstantinov to find out more about how the system worked.
Pocket Gamer: How do you make money in Age of Heroes Online?
Ivan Konstantinov: There's an in-game currency called Divine Grace that can be bought for real money. $1 is the equivalent of 100 DGs. You can do this via SMS, WebMoney or credit card.
This is used to buy special in-game abilities, which speed up the playing process. There are more than 35 abilities in the game, and the cost of most of them is less than $1. (You can see a full list of the available services here.)
What's the cost of the most expensive services offered?
That's would be the Player versus Player experience multipliers, which are used for rank building. These are $24 a year.
Is there also a subscription fee?
You must use the micro-transaction to pay the subscriber's fee which required to continue playing after the starting three-week trial expires.
You have a revenue share with your distribution partners, so how does this work?
Participants of our affiliate program receive personal links for the registration of new users in the game and also private codes that allow to them to identify users who have registered via links from partner web sites.
Participants of the affiliate program get 25 percent of all transactions made via SMS and 50 percent from all transactions using Web Money.
Participants of the affiliate program gain also access to the private cabinet on the statistics site of Age of Heroes Online with listing of registrations from their site and transactions made by user
You're planning to bring Age of Heroes Online to iPhone, so how will be model work then?
Yes, for iPhone, it will handled with its in-app micro-transaction system.
Thanks to Ivan for his time
You can find out more about Age of Heroes Online here.
Interview
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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