OSG Bang for your Buck

As you many know, most OSG’s employ the “free-to-play” strategy where the game itself is free, but players can spend money to gain advantages, usually in the form of more convenient features, increased production, etc. I was interested in which games offer the most for your money and did a little cross-game comparison. Be aware that this can’t necessarily be considered a 1:1 comparison due to the differences between games and the varying price of in-game-currency based on quantity.

Game	+25% Production	Plus Account
Travian	$0.83	$0.41
Wild Guns	$1.90	$1.25
Ikariam	$4.50	$1.25
Freesky	$4.80
Lord of Ultima		$1.70
Lords Online	$14.00
Evony	$20.00

I arrived at these figures by assuming the player is spending $25.00 USD, then extrapolating the closest Real Money to In-Game-Currency ratio. From there I found the cost of a Plus Account for 7 days, and the cost of a 25% production of ALL resources for 7 days. Again, not all of the games make this comparison easy. For example, Freesky only offers a 20% production increase for 3 days, so I simply multiplied the cost by 2.9. Further, some games like Evony offer “bonus packages” with every purchase of in-game currency, so if you really did spend $25 you would also receive some items to speed up construction or whatnot.

Honestly I was expecting to see the games much closer together. I was surprised by how cheap Travian is, and was also surprised by how expensive Evony is. Now, it can certainly be argued that in some games resource production isn’t as useful as in others, but nevertheless, since it’s something all these games share, it’s an interesting note of comparison.

Wild Guns

Elclarkey made a comment directing me to a Western themed OSG: Gameforge’s Wild Guns. I started to play to write a review but quickly came to realize: Wild Guns is Travian, with better graphics. The game play is pretty much identical so, if you enjoy Travian, you’ll like Wild Guns (unless you have a penchant for originality).

In Wild Guns you pick from one of three tribes, the Cowboys, Indians, or Mexicans. From there you’ll build up your resource fields, construct a village, and train an army. One pretty cool feature is that each tribe has a completely different look:

The world map also looks a bit nicer than in Travian, and there’s an awesome Overview that I wish Travian would include (though I know there’s a script for it).

Anyway, I didn’t see much point in a review, but if you want something more in-depth I found one at brighthub.com.

Cheers,
Oliver