$1million prize x bleh = bleh

I was chatting with a friend from FFXI (ThuggyChan) and he told me about a $1million prize for playing an MMO game, called Risk Your Life. Basically, you get the $1M if you're the last player standing in a very long tournament. Why have I never heard of this game?!

So of course I did my research and wow, I don't know what to say. See a press release here. This story is months old and I wasn't going to write about it but then I thought, wait a sec, this is actually a great time to talk about this.

It's safe to say they took a risk; now I'm not sure if it paid off or not since I don't know their financials. I was, however, able to find that they reached a 100,000 user mark. I'm sure they're not paying the full $1M in cash, (taking out my old finance book) so with a 20 year annuity and a decent inflation rate, they're probably paying $500,000 or $5 a user. With a standard subscription model, that's not a bad price to pay to get a user. In that sense, I like it.

Overall though, it doesn't make sense. Sure, it excites players to have a chance at winning, but at the end of the day, I'm going to be knocked off early and guess what, if the game isn't entertaining, I'm not keeping my subscription. Big splash tactics fall into this short-term gain, long term weakness trap.

I really hope it's a good game.