You want me to toss in a couple bucks for a sweet mount in your F2P MMO? Sure thing. 10 bucks for a huge content pack? No biggie. Over a thousand dollars for one little drone-- wait, what? It may sound crazy to normal folks like you and me, but Bigpoint's Dark Orbit , a browser-based F2P spaceship MMO, recently sold 2,000 of their in-game drones in just four days, priced at 1,000 Euros each! The sales net Bigpoint around two and a half million dollars.
You're probably asking yourself, "What are these drones and how can they possibly be worth 356 copies of Orcs Must Die (which is on sale for only $3.74 in today's Steam sale )?" Dark Orbit is a spaceship MMO and players use drones to help aid their ships during interstellar combat. The most powerful drone is the level 10 Zeus Drone, which is extremely rare and difficult to make, making it a hot commodity for anyone seeking a top position in the game. So Bigpoint decided to sell them at a ridiculously high cost, to see how many would bite--and way more than I would've guessed went for it. Pay-to-win may not be an endorsed strategy for many gamers, but sales numbers like these show that people are more than willing to pay for the extra power to step up their game.
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