Black Prophecy: Gamigo’s improvement for a free-to-play title

Black Prophecy, which is planned to bring to market later this year, has been revealed that it will have cost over €10 million to develop – a significant level of investment for a free-to-play title by the German online publisher Gamigo. Gamigo’s Ralph Frefat explains the investment.

“But compare it with retail – if you have a big game there, you have a time frame of let’s say 8-10 weeks when the game is hot, before it drops. The lifecycle of a normal free-to-play online game is 3-5 years, so I don’t care if it’s not that successful in the first six months – it might be in the next four."

"If you summarise the revenues that we did with certain games, even if you just make €100,000 per month, add all that up over a lifetime and it’s much more than some retail games make."

"You have a completely different approach to your customers, compared to retail. But let me go back one step – when we’re looking at whether or not we’ll make back that €10 million, we can do that because of our portfolio."

"It’s a mix of opportunities and risks – we also have browser games that don’t even cost €1 million, just a few hundred thousand, and we’ll make that money back in the short term. It’s a mixed calculation."

Black Prophecy is a fast-paced 3D real-time combat space MMO with state of the art visuals. Both the Player-versus-Players combat and an exciting storyline in a rich universe are important aspects of the game. It is the first Sci-Fi Space MMOG that dares the step towards action-oriented gameplay from a third-person and first person perspective.

Now players are available to sign up the upcoming Closed Beta in April at the official website.