Successful MMOGs can see $1-2 in monthly ARPU

There are not many publicly available statistics on the free-to-play industry in the western world. Here is what I found on the web for some of the popular virtual worlds and MMOGs:

Second Life

Second Life’s economic statistics are reported monthly. In May 2007, Second Life reported:

$165m Linden dollars sold by Linden Lab through the Linden Exchange in May
$127m Linden dollars paid via weekly stipends in May
860k residents logged in over the last 30 days

Since Linden pays $300 Linden dollars in weekly stipends to premium members, there are around (127m/300/ 4 weeks=) 100k premium subscribers paying $6-10/mth. Lets call that $800k in monthly revenue from premium subscribers.

Linden dollars currently exchange at 264 Lindens to the USD, so Linden Labs made $165m/264 = $625k in currency sales.

These are the two primary sources of Linden dollars into Second Life’s economy, so Linden Labs made at least $1.4m in revenue from the 860k residents that logged in over the last 30 days, or roughly $1.70/active user.

UPDATE: Several comments note that I have ignored the bulk of Second Life’s revenue which is derived from land maintenance. An updated analysis is here.

Club Penguin

When Club Penguin was bought by Disney in August 2007, it was reported to have 12m registered users and 700k paying users. As the monthly charge for paying subscribers is $6, this suggests monthly revenues of around $4.2m. Compete reported 2.6m UU to Club Penguin in that month. Dividing these two numbers we get around $1.62/active user (where an active user is defined as a unique user in that month).

Habbo Hotel

At AGDC in September of 2007, Habbo Hotel’s lead designer, Sulka Haro gave some statistics on Habbo Hotel’s usage:

Habbo Hotel has approximately 7.5m unique players per month globally — nipping at the heels of World of Warcraft. In the seven years since the game launched, 80 million accounts have been created. Globally, the game typically has 100,000 concurrent users playing at one time.

Furthermore, Habbo was estimated to do $77m in revenue in 2006. In the middle of 2006, Habbo had around 53m accounts. Assuming a similar ratio of monthly players to total accounts in mid 2006 to what Habbo has today, that suggests that there were around 5m unique players per month at that time. Dividing $77m by 12 months by 5m unique players suggests about $1.30 in revenue per active users.

Runescape

Finally, Jagex’s Runescape claimed 1m players paying $5/mth in May 2007 and 6m players per month in October 2007. That suggest $5m/mth in revenues from 6m players, or around $0.84 in revenue per active user.

In summary then we have:

Second Life: $1.70/mthly user/mth UPDATE: Should be $9.30/mthly user/mth
Club Penguin: $1.62/mthly user/mth
Habbo: $1.30/mthly user/mth
Runescape: $0.84/mthly user/mth

The average across these four is $1.40/mthly user/mth*. UPDATE: excluding Second Life, should be $1.25/mthly user/mth.

Having spoken to many other MMOGs and virtual worlds on a private basis, this estimate seems to be a good gauge for what a well performing MMOG can aspire to from a free to play business model.

Do readers have any datapoints that they can add to this survey?

* Note that this is based on monthly users. Many MMOGs calcuate their average revenue per user (ARPU) based on Peak Concurrent Users. On this basis, ARPU can be more than an order of magnitude higher than the $1.40 guideline.