I am not personally worried that the market for premium priced games will ever go away, there will always be a large enough market that good stuff will still come out. The problem is that the freemium market will overtake it if it hasn't already, so the majority (whether that be 51-99%) of the money to be made will be freemium, unfortunately for us.
If anything, though, it seems that that would work to the advantage of smaller companies making quality, premium, pay-up-front games targeted at a "hard core" market. If, say, 95% of the games are being targeted at freemium while 14% of customers want a high-quality pay-up-front experience (14% who are hungry for a better experience and quite willing to pay for it at that), then making a game for that demographic is going to be particularly lucrative due to the relatively small amount of competition.
Simple math--if you're competing with 5% of the games for 14% of the market (and a
lucrative 14%, at that), then you'd be a fool not to get into it. If, of course, you have the ability to make something worthwhile and not just freemium sucker-bait.
Because let's not forget that a large amount of freemium games are simplistic garbage designed entirely to sucker in the low-attention-span phone user when they get bored for five minutes, then attempt to get them somehow addicted using a simplistic mechanic so that they'll buy into your system. Nuanced, deep freemium games exist, but they're a tiny fraction of the market, and the business model, so far as I can tell, by its very nature does not scale well to a deeper experience--it
requires simplicity and addiction, rather than a beginning-to-end experience cycle.
By my estimation, it would be pretty hard to gross $800 million from 11 million $50 items.
Which is why, if you read my post, I said
"upwards of $50". The $800 million figure is a hard number, very, very widely quoted in the media, and is correct. The 11.2 million copies number I got from an estimate in the
Wikipedia article which got the figure from
this IGN article referencing the Guiness World Records the game holds. The precise numbers are $815.7 million and 11.21 million copies in 24 hours.
US MSRP for the base game was $59.99, so I assume the difference was due to a combination of countries with higher MSRP and people springing for either the special edition at $79.99 or the collector's edition, for $149.99.
) who are using daddy's/mommy's money to feed their gaming habit.