Free Online Super Mario and Sonic Games can easily be addicting.

Free Online Super Mario and Sonic Games can easily be addicting, it’s a fact.

It is also a fact, one of the largest or even the largest of all online Industries is the gaming business. One minute charging ahead as if it is totally immune to the rest of the financial carnage sweeping the globe then before you know it the entire industry seems steeped in the mire engulfing the rest of us?

So is it totally immune to the rest of the financial ills or is this just a minor blip?

Free Online Games

The bottom line is that no one really knows and whether the news of job cuts at the major studios of EA and THQ are symptomatic of a much wider malaise, no one again really knows.

Has the recession affected Free Games?

The thing is that the Industry has become such a dab hand at re inventing itself that you have to constantly keep your wits about you at all times when trying to pass any form of economic forecast of this industry. Though development and lead in times for each new release can be extremely long drawn out affairs they can also throw out quite unexpected surprises from time to time

Perhaps the one sector of the economy that has possible found itself immune to outside financial ills is the free games sector.

Though a difficult business model to actually perfect the very nature of the fact that cash doesn’t actually have to change hands between developer and players gives it a little breathing space in times of financial hardship if nothing else. Taking the concept of extending the free line just that little bit to new levels this does give these developers the chance to enter into and develop markets that hitherto would have been nigh on impossible.

The upside of this all means that any successes in this arena can then be rolled out and developed as branded and more commercially viable propositions in the main commercial arena. This form of what can best be described as extreme “Research and Development” can be invaluable in an area of Software development that hitherto has been renowned for being a bottomless pit in terms of development costs. The advantages to be gained by being actually to be able to test and trial a product out in a live environment are tremendous and are not to be ignored.

The hard part of the entire procedure and has been alluded to as the difficult part of the business model is to take the free version of the programme and then establish the same programme or package within the “paid for” environment without alienating your core market. Gamers can be notoriously fickle and also extremely loyal within the same breath and what has hitherto been an extremely loyal market and fan base can just as easily turn on the manufacturer within a moments notice if they think they are being taken advantage of.

Keep the fan base with you and you are made, so to speak.