World Of Tanks Monthly Profits Hitting “Double Digit” Millions

Paying and concurrent users, employee numbers and Asian growth plans all revealed by CEO Victor Kislyi. Free-to-play MMO World of Tanks is generating “double digit” million dollar profits a month, according to Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi. As the game has grown to reach over 20 million registered users, developer Wargaming.net has scaled with it – 18 months ago the business consisted of 120 employees primarily based in Minsk. Today it is approaching 800 staff around the globe.

This is the first paragraph of an article found on Gamesindustry.biz. It contains some interesting insights that fit the consumer and business insights focus of our blog. The article continues….

“If you count the last year and a half, we might be the fastest growing company ever, headcount wise and revenue wise,” Kislyi told GamesIndustry International. “When you see the numbers of Twitter, Facebook or even Google for a year and half we probably outperformed them.”

Of the 20 million registered users, Kislyi is proud of the number of players actually paying for content in the game – figures that are among the highest for any free-to-play title.

“We probably have one of the highest payment ratios in the industry, it’s around 25-30 per cent,” he revealed. “Because people love the game.”

Kislyi, like all execs in the free-to-play space, is guarded when asked about profits from the MMO, but is happy to talk numbers in a game that doesn’t have a high barrier to entry or pester the player to spend cash at every turn.

“Those would be millions of dollars [of profits] per month,” he said of. “Many millions. I’m not going to give you the exact number, but double digits. Not high double digits.”

“Ironically the game is not squeezing monetisation, it’s not rough. There’s no velvet rope over the gates and you have to buy a key to open it. Some MMOs are like this but we are not. It’s smooth and non-intrusive,” he insisted.

“For casual gameplay which most players do most of the time, people don’t usually use gold or expendables. Of course if you want to win a tournament, if you’re competitive, if you play clan wars, if you want to be at the top, we think it’s appropriate to expect a little bit of money from you because you already spent hundreds of hours in our game and that’s much more than the value of any $50 box. But it’s still a micro transaction game, you would have to be very creative to spend $1000.”

…..

Read full article on Gamesindustry.biz