Money spent on PC free-to-play games has doubled in the last five years.
That's according to research from Superdata - concerning microtransactions and EA's Star Wars Battlefront II woes - which says that $22bn has been spent in 2017 compared with just $11bn in 2012. The company predicts this figure will grow to $25bn in 2022.
Across PC and console, service-based monetisation has risen 146 per cent during this five-year period, while product based monetisation has risen 120 per cent.
SuperData notes that sales of add-on content are increasingly making more money than the old-school one-time purchase model. This is part of the growing games as a service model.
"By shifting to games as a service, large triple-A publishers hypothesise that future game monetisation may eventually do away with $60 full-game products in favor of product ecosystems, where players pay for subscriptions services to access base games and further monetise through in-game purchases for the content they enjoy playing," SuperData said.
"Publishers are willing to sacrifice the full-game box price because they believe that subscription services can increase player retention and spending by effectively exposing players to other games within a publisher’s portfolio that they would otherwise ignore in today’s market due to the existence of an upfront price tag for games."
