Free to Play
The free to play model has taken on various, demented forms over the last few years, and has quickly become the go to for any game that wants to make absolutely sure that it will have a healthy population. The debate rages on about what the real costs are to the games’ quality, if there are any.
Free to play done not so well
ArcheAge is awful! Just kidding, take a deep breath. While AA’s model is one I am not a fan of, they have a substantial playerbase who continue to share space, with a mixture of pay and free to play users. This is actually something I have less of an issue with - openly admitting that some users are funding the game, while others are potentially not.
The real issue I have with free to play games, is that which you will find in basically any completely free to play game. Microtransactions. Games that profit solely from microtransactions are almost always knowingly cashing in on the abuse of human psychology. Games that have limited lives per hour, but “Oh boy, would you look at that, for just $2 you can play again right away!” ‘Infestation: Survivor Stories’ (then ‘The War Z’) is one game I remember encountering this in, but it is common in a lot of harmless little mobile games. Some see it as clever marketing, I see it as building a trick into a game that people wouldn’t pay for, to sneakily take nibbles out of someone’s wallet.
Pay ‘GC’ (Currency purchased with real money) to respawn straight away in ‘Infestation: Survivor Stories’, or wait for the timer to reach zero.
I suppose I can’t really talk about free to play without mentioning pay to win. Pay to win is undoubtedly a problem in many free to play games, and while I would hesitate to work on a game that had such a structure, I don’t look upon it as negatively as microtransactions. Yes, developers are selling big sticks that their users use to beat up the defenseless, non-paying players. But this is a blatant option that people can accept as part of the game they are playing or move on. Many games that I would consider pay to win, a lot of people also view as just offering an alternative. As a recent example, I found the cash shop in ‘Heroes and Generals’ to be absurdly pay to win, especially considering how long it took to earn weapons as a non-paying user. This is the alternative that some people are okay with. Grind for weeks, or pay a little real money for instant access.
Free to play done well
Here is the part where I most likely smell badly of bias and contradiction. There are a couple of completely free to play games that I can say I have played extensively and never been anything but happy with, one of these being Dota 2. Whatever people have to say about Valve, it is undeniable that they know what they are doing when it comes to making money out of a free game. I think the key to this is the amount of effort they put into what is actually available for purchase.
Hats. Gotta have me them hats. By expertly maintaining a constant flow of quality cosmetic items into a game that has a large amount of focus on “look at me totally being the coolest person here out of 10 people”, Valve is able to make a healthy profit out of a game that is completely free. But how exactly is what they are doing anything special? Well, for one, the cosmetic items that are available for purchase in Dota 2 are a combination of items designed by professional Valve employees and talented freelance designers, who submit their work to the community to be voted on. So, Valve not only creates quality content that is available for purchase, they actually let their consumers tell them what they want available.
The obvious, yet important thing to mention about selling only cosmetic items, is that there is not a hint of pay to win in Dota 2. Every hero and every ability is available from the first time a user opens the game. The reason I mention this about Dota 2 specifically, is that the system used by most other MOBA’s I can think of, is to provide free to play users with a limited selection of heroes (which sometimes change to new heroes) and have the option of purchasing heroes for permanent use. This to me is basically the definition of pay to win. If you are offering extra game mechanics (which is what different heroes are) to people who pay money, you are letting them pay for an advantage.
Taken from:
http://www.das-tal-game.com/post/113879778176/how-to-make-money-off-your-game-and-not-ruin
Don’t turn this into “yet another”. People are catching on and news spreads like wildfire.
Turn to the community and build something out of it.<3
