Why Free-to-Play is not the answer to everything

I read this post on Gamesbrief this morning.

It’s Mr Lovell’s usual evangelical pro-F2P…I was going to say “trolling” but that’s unfair.  As he himself will freely admit, his writing tends towards the hyperbolic in order to draw people in and start a conversation in which all sides of the argument are welcome.

Indeed, I’ve written for Gamesbrief myself in the past, which was great.

My main problem with this post is that it boldly asserts that F2P will inevitably slaughter all of the other business models and emerge triumphant, brandishing their expressionless, sorrowfully hatless heads with furious gusto…

“…on a ten year view, I don’t believe it will be possible to charge for basic access to content at all. We will all expect to have access to all the music, all the books, all the television and all the games that we could ever want. Sure, someone could invest in content and tell me that I can’t have it unless I pay. But there will be so many alternatives, both legal and illegal, that the model of paying access will be close to impossible to sustain. “

There’s some noticeable hedging here: we go from “I don’t believe it will be possible” to “close to impossible” in the blink of a paragraph.

However, I’m going to take this at face value.

Then I’m going to say, respectfully, “Bollocks.”

Free-to-play is a juggernaut: we’ve just seen Valve take a very popular “core” game and convert it fully to F2P; we’re hearing rumbles about other platform holders bringing in F2P support; we’re all aware of the world-changing sales figures that titles like Moshi Monsters and developers like Zynga generate.

Fantastic!  It’s great that the games industry has produced an exciting new payment model that can be used in all kinds of different ways by all kinds of different titles.

But what these trends don’t mean is that every game should be F2P, and they certainly don’t mean that every game will be F2P.

F2P titles rely on generating a very large audience of players, a percentage of whom are willing to pay for specific in-game experiences or status.   Let’s say that percentage is roughly 10% of your total audience.

In order to make a free-to-play game in the traditional sense, a developer therefore needs to design an experience that lends itself to purchasing opportunities.  Obviously, Farmville is designed around pushing players into paying money to maintain a pleasurable state.  Valve have very cleverly identified that TF2 is now a large-scale social system in which people will pay money to express themselves.

But what if the experience you want to design does not lend itself to purchasing prompts?  What if it can’t be supported by adverts?  What if it’s targeted at an extremely small audience who want to forget about money for a period of time?

Then you can’t make that game F2P, and you shouldn’t try.

Say I’m creating a competitive game like Starcraft 2, or a deeply affecting experience like Amnesia…I don’t want to be badgering my customers for money every ten seconds.  I do not want to display, “It looks like you’re doing a 2 barracks pressure build!  Would you like to spend £2 to cut your bunker build time by half?”

It’s my belief that a significant number of people who play games do not want to buy hats, pretend money, carrots or magical ears: they want to buy a game once, as a product, and then leave it at that.

I think, actually, that’s one reason Steam is such a success.  Steam itself is like a giant F2P game, and the “virtual items” are the individual experiences on sale in the catalogue.  That’s the theme apparent here, proving that even Gamesbrief accepts there’s many different kinds of “high lifetime-value customers”…

Once you start thinking in this way, it might be possible to justify all kinds of hideously untrendy thinking, like setting a reasonably high price for an indie title, for example.  If you’re offering a desirable niche experience that can’t be found elsewhere, a product that will make users stand out, then why not aim higher?

Let me now clarify a couple of things I do believe about free-to-play games:

1.)  Free-to-play games will consistently make more money than “pay once” games

If you are an investor, and you are about to chose between a hypothetical brilliant “pay once” game developer and a hypothetical equally-brilliant “free-to-play” developer, you invest in F2P.  Although, you’re probably too late now, but that’s a different story.

F2P games are for large audiences and they are designed around maximal money extraction.

While I think more “niche” F2P games will emerge as F2P development matures creatively, I still believe that the overall target audience required is larger than for a pay once title.

2.) Free-to-play games have lessons for all game developers

I think the key lesson that indie devs in particular need to learn from F2P is this: “Your fans want to pay for additional content that is meaningful to them.”

Many, many people have told me, for example, that they are happy to pay for certain additions to Frozen Synapse.  So, naturally, we’re going to look into ways in which we can develop those additions, and release them for a sensible price.

Low-cost MEANINGFUL DLC for your fans is not used enough by many, many indie devs.  They are missing out on a lot of revenue; gamers are missing out on cool stuff.  This should be corrected.

3.)  A lot of F2P games are rubbish because F2P is immature: that does not have to be the case.

I think the crude, anti-player nature of many F2P games will largely diminish as talented designers become more familiar with its constraints.

I believe new audiences will come to F2P and it will grow significantly in the next few years.

I don’t think “pay once” games will ever be stamped out completely, though. Here are three examples of niches that are not going away any time soon that I believe require “pay once”…

- Titles that require discreet, uninterrupted narrative; “rollercoaster” games

- Competitive multiplayer titles for small audiences

- Experimental games that focus on a small subset of mechanics

Am I saying that those games can’t have large, innovative free demos, sell DLC or be marketed via the use of free products made by their creators? No.  I’m saying that I don’t think they can be supported by advertising or microtransactions, and that audiences will always want them.

I have said rude things about free-to-play games in the past.  I felt frustrated about being told that Frozen Synapse should be a free-to-play browser-based game so many times, so I vented my spleen.

That is not because I am anti-F2P; it is because I am anti-Evangelical F2P.  I can imagine making an F2P game in the future, but I cannot imagine telling everyone else that they are stupid for not doing so.

Finally, creatively and commercially, sometimes it’s not sensible to aim at The Biggest Possible Amount of Money.  That leads to exploitative, derivative, artistically-impoverished products that nobody wants.  Equally, aiming for artistic brilliance can lead to self-important, inadequate drivel, so there is a balance to be struck here.

The rabidly pro-F2P camp and rabidly anti-F2P camp both come across as a bit silly.  I think it’s time to be intelligent about F2P, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to aim at selling a singular experience, aim for “pay once”, because it’s not going anywhere.

Digital distribution is the MMO, your game is the Heroic Purple Moustache of Peacockhood.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 9:08 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Why Free-to-Play is not the answer to everything”

1. TheBeefiest:

   § July 1st, 2011 at 8:56 pm

   I am hoping Frozen Synapse’s first DLC is > 2 players per game! That would be amazing

2. David:

   § July 2nd, 2011 at 11:00 am

   I agree for the most part but, I think it’s too early to say which experiences work with F2P and which don’t. Take your example of Starcraft 2, for starters they could sell icons, clan tags and custom unit models/anims without giving players an advantage. But, they could also sell you access to training, casting/replay tools via social network or maybe even sell tiered access to higher levels of competitive play.

   You’re right that F2P isn’t a silver bullet and I hope that devs will continue to listen to their customers’ needs, including yours. As an example, I think the smart money is on Valve releasing DOTA 2 as F2P. But, I could see Valve making F2P an option, pay once an option, and as they have suggested recently, pay zero could also be an option. In the long term, I think those who can adapt to the needs of their customers will have the most success.

   Not so coincidentally, the way FS could best adapt to my needs would be if it were available to me on the web and iOS. I would gladly pay (again) for that kind of upgrade

3. Paul:

   § July 2nd, 2011 at 4:57 pm

   Yeah, we definitely want to make sure FS is as accessible as it can be, so we’re looking at all the possibilities.

   In terms of supporting a competitive game like SC2 with subsidiary bumf…I JUST don’t think that would work.

   Sure, I think people would pay for avatars / clan tags / maybe access to certain leagues but I just don’t think that represents enough revenue.

   SC2 is a GIANT product that is pay once, and I think that kind of model can still work. The promise of having a lot of content for a single fee, then not worrying about being pestered subsequently, is what a lot of people want from an entertainment experience.

4. Fjonan:

   § July 2nd, 2011 at 5:39 pm

   Nice thoughts. And you did not even touch on another very big thing, the psychologic part behind prices. It is a known fact, that things given away free are not considered worth as much. The mindset a player who tries a F2P game is a completly different one as for say someone who bought the collectors editon for the next Elder Scrolls.
   I can see it with myself, my patience with an F2P title is a lot lower, my expectation for “instant fun” higher. And the customer automatically does not thinkg that high of a title given away fro free.

5. LABRAT:

   § July 3rd, 2011 at 11:28 pm

   Value took a game I paid good money for and changed it to something (hats and crap) that I would never of bought, I wasn’t given the option to opt out and keep the game I bought and enjoyed. I can understand giving people free stuff but not at cost of ruining the original game.

6. Our digitally distributed futures… | Contains Games:

   § July 4th, 2011 at 9:29 pm

   [...] over at Mode 7 Games has put up a succinct rebuttal to a particular pro-F2P piece by Nicholas Lovell. That pretty much says it [...]

7. Patrick:

   § July 7th, 2011 at 4:29 am

   It would be nice if, instead of rhetoric about the future of the games industry that no one knows a clear answer to, you’d just fix the servers so that *paying customers* can actually log on in the evenings without constant crashes and interminable logging in times.

8. Alex:

   § July 20th, 2011 at 1:40 pm

   Not sure if your attitude to f2p is mellowing, but it would serve you well if you seriously looked at it as a model. The phrase ‘free-to-play’ is a little clumsy when looking at the Social Gaming sector anyway, since at it’s heart a lot of products there are actually pay-to-play, not free-to-play.

   When I say pay-to-play, I don’t mean pay a single transaction, I mean pay for time. From what I know about FS (I intend to play it, although I have to say it puts me off somewhat I can’t try it for free) it would suit the pay-to-play model pretty well. Give people limited free ‘energy’ each day to play the game for free (and thus get them hooked, if your game is truly that addictive) and then have them pay for more energy so the power users pay a fair amount for the entertainment they receive. If someone plays 6 hours a day, they should pay more than the guy who only plays for 20 minutes right?

9. Paul:

   § July 22nd, 2011 at 12:40 pm

   I’m genuinely interested in the pros and cons of every business model out there, which is why I felt free-to-play needed some caveats attached to it.

   “The phrase ‘free-to-play’ is a little clumsy…”

   That may be true, but since a very large number of products self-identify as such, I didn’t see any need to qualify my usage of the term.

   “If someone plays 6 hours a day, they should pay more than the guy who only plays for 20 minutes right?”

   I absolutely, totally 100% disagree with that.

   When someone is playing Frozen Synapse, I don’t want them to have to think about money. I don’t want them to think, “Oh, my time is running out soon, better buy some more TIME”. That’s the absolute opposite of the experience we want to create.

   When someone pays for the game, they are purchasing the perpetual right to be immersed.

   If they are immersed for twenty minutes or six hours, that is up to them, but they have the right to be in that state without fear of interruption.

   Do I want a situation where people are willing to pay for further FS-related content and experiences? Do I want a way for our long-term fans to spend more money with us, up to quite a high value? Yes, of course I want those things – we’re definitely working on them.

   But, in THIS game, do I think putting external pressure on people to pay for more core gameplay is the right choice? Absolutely not.

   Would I consider making a game like that? Of course! It’s just not right for THIS game.

10. kursy tanca rumia:

    § September 22nd, 2011 at 3:40 pm

    I need web kind of this one, can u tell me who made graphic layout for your web?