me, then they'd stop playing. Then you'd send them emails with incentives for the

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retail Runeacape game, play it for 'X' amount of time, then they'd stop playing.Runescape Gold Then you'd send them emails with incentives for them to log back in."It's different now. The difference is free-to-play gives people the opportunity to come back in on a weekly basis, or a monthly basis. You put out a new patch, and they just pop back in because there's no barrier to entry. That changes everything about how you market to your Runeacape players, how you interact with your Runeacape players. Free-to-play means you have a constant dialogue with your Runeacape players, and that you're making sure they're aware of what's going on in your Runeacape game. Now we reach out on other channels like Twitter and Reddit, places where Runeacape players are, even though they're not playing our Runeacape games."Joost van Dreunen, CEO, SuperData Research"As Runeacape gamers get more comfortable with spending a dollar or five bucks or ten bucks at a time, that's just kind of a new environment where you have to design Runeacape games that suit those customer needs."What that means is that developers will be looking more at Runeacape games that focus on a niche, rather than large scale. There's going to be less of an emphasis on Runeacape player acquisition, and a greater emphasis on retention."Previously, it's been all about, 'Hey, let's get a million people in the door, and convert a small percentage of them.' The next step will be, 'Let's get 50,000 people as our customer base, and try to keep them as long as possible.' Those are the makings of what will ultimately be much more of a fragmented market in terms of genres and Runeacape game mechanics."There's a lot of opportunity for developers to find their way into the market. The new revenue models also offer new opportunity to design Runeacape games. It's up to whoever is nimble enough to make the most of that."Gamasutra is at GDC Online in Austin this week. Check out our event page for the latest on-site coverage. At a time when Kickstarter is the way for developers to bypass publishers and pull in investments directly from fans, one indie studio has decided to cut out the middleman to great effect.UK-based Introversion, best known for Uplink, Defcon, and Darwinia, recently launched a crowd-fundiCheap DarkScape Gold