Case Study on Management and Profit Pattern of The Free Online Game

• Main Authors: An Hsieh, 謝安
• Other Authors: Eric T.G. Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37108209542441427494

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理學系碩士在職專班 === 94 === ABSTRACT With its rapid development, the Internet enriches not only the entertainment contents but also opens a new page for computer games, from the single-board games to the online games. Nowadays, online games play an indispensable role in the digital entertainment field with its tribe covering all ages. Although there are discusses about the R&D, marketing, strategy management and brand promotion of online games, we hardly can find an essay aiming at analyzing the management and the profit pattern of free online games. Since the use of Internet has been increasingly common and the broadband service is no longer a problem, the online games apparently have become the major active for the teenagers on the Internet. The Internet bubble had little effect on the online game industry. In fact, the profit of the industry had been increasing every year in the past. This situation attracted many companies to invest into this business, intensifying the competition in the industry. Some companies even offered free online games in the market. Thus, how to operate the business of free online games and develop a proper profit model should be the most important issue facing the online game companies. The main goal of this research is to understand the development status and the market opportunity of free online games. The study attempts to develop a complete pattern of management, analyze the revenue and profit structures of free online games, and generalize the key factors to how to run this business successfully. This research starts with describing and analyzing the background and environment of the online game industry and the possible future trend of free online games. Since the profitability of free online games depends largely on the properties they offer, we take the related fixed price model as the basis and conduct a case analysis as the illustration. As such, we can easily collate the five major free online game properties: Identity properties, Assistant properties, Facilitate properties, Consolidation properties and Implement properties. By gathering and analyzing the management and the finance database of the case company, we can define the case company’s five major directions: Manage target, Marketing strategy, Price strategy, Sell pattern and the Channel strategy. Based on the management model, online game companies can expand the properties of selling, product package, card-collection merchandises, value-added serviced, and monthly-charged commodities for greater earnings. Such a strategy can be executed with other profit modes such as customer service profit mode, time profit mode, new product profit mode, large-scale profit mode, benefit-sharing profit mode, combined-merchandise profit mode and the channel profit mode. With this study, we identify seven key success factors for the free online game business: satisfied online customers; correct market positioning with appropriate expedients; broader membership for greater operational scales; strategic alliance and integration alliance; high quality products and services; better information management; better channel and payment systems. Also, it is suggested that the government can invest more resources into this field to push the online game industry as an international business.