HoN’s Marc DeForest on Evolving Business Models

It’s been a little more than a week since Heroes of Newerth celebrated his first anniversary by going temporarily free to play and Gamasutra took the opportunity to quiz S2 Games’ CEO Marc DeForest on the company’s business model in an article-interview. Here’s a sampling:

During HoN’s beta, “We had 3.3 million registered beta accounts, although we don’t know how many of those were actually unique,” says DeForest. “Within the first week of retail we sold somewhere within the 200,000 range between pre-orders and sales immediately following.” At half a million accounts sold the team began running promotional periods designed to offer players’ friends a lower barrier to entry in joining.

Then in December 2010 the 2.0 update rolled the RMT shop into the mix: “We always had the intention to bring some form of a shop to the game – we were just working through how, exactly, that was going to work,” says DeForest. “But having our biggest competitor being a free game has really hampered us.”

“From all the info that we were gleaning, we had some pretty significant play numbers prior to the point of going pay to play, at which point our numbers about halved,” says DeForest, providing the following data on number of unique daily logins, average number of users online and peak concurrent users during HoN’s pre-release, on the Sunday after its retail launch, and last Sunday, at the game’s anniversary.