Is Free to Play Inherently Bad?

That's a lot like saying that designing roads to minimize accidents is "designing around roads" instead of saying that it's "designing better roads".

Examples have been given of well made, non-exploitative FtP games like Team Fortress 2 or World of Tanks. The concept on its own is fine. It's the dodgy stuff some people do with it that's questionable. And, by the way, that dodgy stuff isn't necessarily confined to so-called FtP games.

I think you're getting two different concepts intertwined with each other based on common association. Exploitative sales tactics exist just as much outside of FtP games as they do within it. They're nothing new, and neither relies upon the other.

 

That's not true. Exploiting a user's wallet doesn't just happen by accident or magic just because you've affixed a price tag to hats in your game. You have to design it that way.

 

As a consumer, the biggest worry is that I don't know how much a game is going to cost me. It's starting to make me feel anxious. It could be zero to several hundreds of dollars.

As a developer, my anxiety with the industry heavily going towards free to play, is that not all games work as free to play. I believe f2p can work, it has worked in the past. But it must fit the game, it's a decision that should be made early on. And I'm not really sure how I feel about the monetization having to be a decision that has to be made from the beginning of a game's design process.

Also as a developer of a "premium" mobile game, I really, really hate it when I get reviews like : "Cool game, but why isn't it free? 1/5"

 

F2P is the mechanism that allows you to do the exploiting. Are there other way to exploit? Sure. I'm not talking about other ways; I'm talking about F2P.

My position is that there is something inherent in the model that makes unethical pricing models like $50 go karts easier. In fact it encourages them more than other models do.

What are our invariants? People and corporations can be good or corrupt regardless of the model used. So set them aside. What are we left with? Different payments models. After controlling for game designers ethical choices, F2P games (I contend) will still tend to be more exploitative. That component is the level of 'badness' inherent in F2P.

Edit: As for the roads analogy, I would say that comparing payment methods is like comparing transport systems. Some systems are going to be safer than others out of the box.

 

But you are talking about other models because you're comparing FtP to them and saying that it's inherently more exploitative.

As a counter example, it could very easily be argued that MMORPGs with subscriptions inherently exploit loss aversion to keep people playing. It's deeply inherent, because you can't remove the character development from the game without fundamentally changing what the game is - it's not a choice a designer makes, it's the fundamental nature of that kind of game. It's highly exploitative because it leverages both loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy, both of which are very strong irrational motivators. So a subscription based MMORPG is an inherently and demonstrably highly exploitative type of game regardless of decisions made by game designers.

With that example in mind, in what way are FtP games inherently exploitative? Whether or not an FtP game is exploitative comes entirely down to decisions made by game designers*, and they can be exploitative in a huge variety of different ways. Do we charge for aesthetics or functionality? Do we waste your time in hopes that you'll pay to speed things up? Do we disadvantage players who don't pay? Do we deliberately put players in situations where the game is un-fun until they cough up cash? Do we deliberately make it difficult to stay with your group if they're paying and you're not? So on and so forth. No one of those is inherent to the fact that the game is FtP, and every one of them could just as well be implemented in a non-FtP game (except for the fact that virtually nobody would play it).

* To be fair, the game designers may be directed to design in a certain way. So the "blame" doesn't necessarily sit solely at their feet - they could be designing a lame system solely because it's what they were instructed to design. In which case I have sympathy for them, because it's certainly not a manner in which I'd employ my own skills volountarily.

 

Ok, you got me. What I mean is that my focus is on the component of exploitation that FtP enables relative to other payment systems, not relative to human nature. In this sense it is not appropriate to compare it with door-to-door sales tactics, but it is relevant to compare it with subscription and upfront payment methods.

Regarding your MMO example, it's not actually a counter example, because you are talking about mmo's being the exploitative part, or at least a critical part of the exploitation. The exploitation of loss aversion could work with a FtP for example. In fact it might work better.

That's pretty much your answer. No one would play/buy it. My claim is that FtP is what makes these questions even possible. Nobody is asking those questions except those making FtP games. Most of those questions don't even make sense with other monetizing systems.

We've been talking past each other on this point quite a bit. Deep down in my heart I don't think FtP has a morality, because it's not even an inanimate object, it's just a loose collection of concepts. So technically you are right. But work with me here. I'm presenting a simplified model. Think statistics. What amount of variation in exploitation/happiness can be explained by FtP. In my simplified model, I attribute that variance to the monetizing system itself, even if technically the causal effect can be traced to people. Since FtP make certain questions possible, and enables certain exploitative scenarios (emotional kids nagging their parents at inopportune times to please let me buy the $10 gem pack, I promise I'll XYZ), to that extent we can say it's inherently worse than other systems that do not allows those questions or scenarios. If you counter with 'parental responsibility' then we are still talking past each other.

 

If 'parental responsibility' is an easy counter argument, then perhaps it isn't such a good example.
Show me an example of a F2P exploiting end users which was not intentionally designed to do so, and I will probably be inclined to agree with you. I don't think such an example exists, however.

 

First I just want to say thanks to you two for the interesting discussion this evening (because I have to go).

Second, @PhobicGunner, I invite you to rethink what it is I'm advocating, because my position is invariant of what the designer intentionally did. I am talking about what they are enabled to do by the monetizing system, and secondarily, what they happen to do through ignorance. Having said that, I think there are going to be many examples of exploitation not intentionally designed because many developers will not fully understand the ramifications of their decisions and they simply 'me-too' the monetizing model with $$ in their eyes.

Since I have to go... #YOLO. here is 'that' analogy. Don't take it too seriously. Automatic weapons are not good or bad, people are. But automatic weapons enables situations that other weapons do not. FtP is an automatic weapon. Yes, some can handle it correctly, but we are all better off without it.

 

But FtP does not make your example possible. That question is not enabled by anything that is inherent to FtP. It could just as well arise from someone who wants to get another month of their MMORPG subscription.

 

I think F2P appears inherently bad, because the bad implementation is so popular at the moment. Maybe if a better way to implement it was found, that worked just as well as the current methods, then our "default" way of thinking of it would change as well and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

I do have to say though, the really ethical and all around great implementations I can think of, requires that the game is "great". I think even just "good" doesn't cut it. While the scummier implementations work on a bigger variety of games.

 

The first ones. I don't think the first F2P games were designed to exploit "whales". I don't think they even understood that whales existed. However, the result was that they found out whales existed because that's how people pay in F2P situations. Non-whales simply don't pay, and whales pay big. There are very few who can throw only a few dollars at it and be satisfied.

While it's technically possible to design it so that whales aren't exploited, I don't think you can make a F2P game that is monetarily successful without them being exploited.

 

It is very upsetting to feel like you have to follow popular trend just to make a profit when in actuality a lot of us developers want to just make great games and sell them the way things use to be....

Arrrrrgggghhhh... (Thats my angry pirate sound) Arrrrrrrrgghhhh I tell you!!

 

Would just like to say... if you're going to argue that F2P is "inherently" bad because it enables publishers to exploit end users, then you might as well also argue that guns are "inherently" bad because it enables people to shoot other people.
Of course, guns are NOT inherently bad - they are frequently misused, but there are also people who use them properly which totally violates the definition of "inherent". If guns were inherently bad, that would by the definition of inherent mean that they would always be used to do bad things just by nature of being guns. But that isn't the case, therefore "inherent" is the wrong word.

By the same argument, F2P is not inherently bad because it's entirely possible (and there are many examples) of F2P done right, which does not exploit the player. Therefore, it is not inherent, and to continue saying could only be the misunderstanding of the definition of that word.

I would also like to discuss something else. It's interesting, as others have pointed out, that F2P by necessity has to be practically ingrained into the game's design document from the beginning. It's actually much more difficult to design a F2P game than it is to design a paid game. You can apply classical game design to paid games, but to F2P you must ensure that all parts of your game will play well with your monetization model, always keeping in mind for example that items in your game can be purchased by players with real money, and how to balance the items such that players with deep wallets do not have an advantage.

 

I think compiring a business model with guns is really dumb. I mean, of course, guns are objects, but their purpose, the reason they were made in the first place was to kill other beings in a more efficient way; and killing is bad, no matter which object is used in the end.

 

I think you may have missed my point entirely (not to mention that it depends who you are killing - if it is an act of self defense for instance, you would have a very hard time arguing that killing the attacker is wrong).
But okay, how about knives then. Knives enable people to stab other people. Does this make them inherently bad? Of course not, because knives also let you cut vegetables, open boxes, spread butter, etc.

 

And that's where the "inherently bad" comes from I think. And frankly, even though I don't think f2p is inherently bad, it does make me feel a little uneasy. Because now, for every design decision, instead of having to ask yourself:

"Does this work?" "Does this make the game more interesting?" "Am I getting an emotional response from the player" etc etc

You have to add: "Will this bring me more money?"

And having to balance all those out makes me feel weird. What weight does each question hold? What are the priorities?

There is something... "Pure"? About the old "premium" model. The money is paid up-front and in most cases, money is never into the equation again. While on the other hand a free 2 play game is like a continuous sales pitch.

 

Basically I see it like this. First the whole F2P term is obviously messed up. We have seen free games completely free to play for years and they are not like this. They should have coined a different term such as Unlockable Content or something along those lines. But anyway that is another discussion for another time.

So... getting back what I was saying.... oh yeah... I see it like this. This F2P thing came along because some people either wanted to make money or they specifically wanted to make money making games. They did not want to run into all of the challenges others had sinking time and money into game development only to make no or very little money. So they (apparently) focused specifically on coming up with a solution for that issue. They knew that most people would not pay anything. Some would pay a little. And then there is another small group who will buy almost every thing offered to them. The so called "whales" mentioned previously in this discussion.

This has always been the case in any form of marketing and sales it is known there is this small group of people who will buy basically anything and everything you offer to them. For these folks spending money and getting things brings them great satisfaction. The F2P model in my opinion focuses on those people.

I do not personally like it. I think there should be a limit to how much a game costs any one person. But the bottom line is they had a great idea. They focused on their end goal (maximizing revenue) not on making a great blow your mind away game and since their focus was on maximizing money that is what happened. And the "whales" were happy because they got to buy a lot of stuff setting them apart from the "cheapskates". In this way it is a win-win scenario. It's just that people like me who think it is excessive cannot "connect" with this method. But ya know if people are making games to make money they should certainly put as much or more thought into how to make that money than they put into making their game. There are a lot of great games out there with starving game devs.

 

Which is one problem with the F2P model: if your game's maximum spend per-person is not almost limitless, your game will almost certainly fail to turn a profit even if it is massively popular. It's happened to a few F2P games.

 

No you don't. According to Jim Collin's book Built to Last (I think) the healthiest companies in the long term aren't those who seek to maximise profits so much as they are those who seek to balance profitability with the value they bring to the world. I think one of the example companies mentioned "reasonable profits" in their charter, along with a desire to improve people's lives by making medical treatments more accessible. This was compared to a company who sold the same stuff but simply wanted to "maximize profit", but was less successful in the long run. (Both were successful, just one moreso than the other. Also, all of that is from memory of something I read years ago.)

But no, the design doesn't have to be about every individual thing making more money. It can be designed to make reasonable money, and still have plenty of features which are present with a primary focus on making a better game rather than making money. And, of course, a better game makes more money anyway, because more players = more purchasers.

 

I'd also like to point out that, more than just "will this bring me more money", most of your effort will be spent thinking "will this totally ruin the game if players can pay for it? if so, how do I fix that?".

 

Indeed. Remember, most people who become "game designers" do so out of an interest in designing good games moreso than out of an interest in gouging people for money. If that's what you want first and foremost then there are easier ways to do it!

 

I think "have to" was too strong. I guess what I want to say is: the monetization is much more intertwined with the overall design and adds a monetization aspect to all design decisions. Not "more money" as I said, I phrased that wrong, but at the very least it adds a "could I/should I monetize this?" question to a lot of the design decisions. And that's where it gets tricky and kinda makes it easy (at least that's how it appears to me) to ruin the overall game design, even if you want to make a fair monetization model that works with the overall game.

The "premium" way in that aspect, is much simpler. The two are very separate.

 

I think I might have to just start using F2P as a way to let people DEMO my games!

Play the 1st level for free and if you like it purchase the full game (In App style) to continue! maybe people will dig this... :|

 

That's sort of how the "try" functionality of the Windows Phone platform works.

But I don't think I like demos, at least like that. It puts an even bigger amount of pressure on the start of the game being "exciting". There are a ton of games where I was "meh" in the first couple of hours of gameplay, only to have them really grab me a few more hours in. If your game has any sort of evolving mechanics, or is heavily story based, or more moody, or has a slow start, there is no way a demo of the first level can be a proper represenation of it.

Vertical slice demos have other problems as well.

 

I'll let this video answer the question

 

I would like to point out something here.
We're a community of programmers. We are the intelligentsia
The majority of people are less educated or specalised in their fields. Working class poor have always made up the majority of populations.

While we can see skinner box manipulation for what it is, many cannot. It's no surprise that tricking people out of their money is the most profitable way to go, when people are of such poor critical thought skills on average

Asking these questikons to the average facebook crowd, if you could get their attention for long enough, would likely yield a completely different answer set

 

huh? are you really sure about this? People nowadays are desensitised to ignore ads more than ever. That combined with adblocking software has basically lowered the cost to the user (in terms of both money and annoyance) to zero.

everyone i've ever spoken to reliant on ads tells me it's not enough, and the value of advertising is dropping all the time

It works well for the end user, and nobody else.

 

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that just because I have a niche skill I'm more generally intelligent than everyone else...

 

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/20/apple-removes-free-from-free-to-play-games-in-app-store

This is interesting development (Speak of the devil lol)

 

It doesn't really answer the question though, does it? It shows an intentionally poorly designed free to play Pac Man intended as satirical comedy. It does not point out any intrinsic flaws in free to play, it instead makes fun of existing free to play titles.

 

No and Yes.

 

One point I'll make since neither the word piracy or pirate has been used in this thread yet ;-) . .. is that an appeal of free-to-play is that you effectively then don't care whether anyone gets ahold of the game. With no up-front cost, people downloading on torrents etc get basically the same game, with the same chance to monetize it or convince them to buy add ons etc, which will have some success, and now it's an equal landscape where there really is no such thing as a pirate. The barrier to entry is zero, so now with a free to play game you have a chance to turn at least some of those gamers into paying gamers. Of course, you have to bring value, and convince them that they want to do that, and many won't, but some will, and this is at least less of a loss than `losing` lots of dollars in up-front sales.

 

That's not true, though. Just a few days ago someone here was saying that they lost significant income from an FtP ad-based game where it was pirated into a region he didn't yet have ad support for. This pushed his ad metrics right down and made his game look less attractive to advertisers.

So, while "more players is better" is generally true, it's still pretty critical that you have control over your distribution, and that control is hugely eroded via piracy even of a free game.

 

My only question is what *is* the value of a F2P game. If I want to buy your F2P game, if I wanted it outright with no paywalls or shops... what's that going to cost?

I can get a complete, fun game with multiplayer for $20.00.

Why is your F2P mobile crap going to cost me $500.00 to buy everything you're selling? Are you saying that your crappy castle war strategy game is worth more than a console game with 40+ hours of gameplay?

This is what bothers me, why I made this thread.

 

Honestly, though, while I get what you're driving at that's somewhat of a silly question. It implies that to play the game you need to make all of the purchases.

It's like asking "why does playing GW2 cost me tens of dollars a month?" when it doesn't - there's absolutely no reason I have to buy every new thing that appears on the gem store.

 

One thing to keep in mind as well, having to "unlock everything" depends entirely on the game. For instance, take a first person shooter. If your guns are sufficiently different, players are likely to buy one or two guns that fit their play style and may never buy a gun in your game ever again.

 

Rephrase it like this... if the game were restructured so I could obtain everything through game mechanics, how much could I buy the game for?

 

My answer assumes three things:

• You are totally unwilling to put in any effort and just want to spend money.
• I'm ignoring consumables (those make the spending limit infinite)
  
• You want to unlock everything.

The answer, if the game's monetization is designed properly, is "A hell of a lot of money". Because if the answer is "Not that much", the game isn't likely to succeed.

Those assumptions aren't generally true, however. First of all, most people aren't trying to unlock everything. Second of all, most people will simply grind their way to unlocking content.

On a side note, those people (your free customers) are very valuable. Those are your "word of mouth" advertisers. If you want good advertising for free, you should keep your free players happy

 

Seems like gamified communism.

 

That's a completely different (and much better) question. Do you realise that plenty of FtP games already work that way?

To specifically answer the question in regards to GW2, and sticking with Phobic's reasonable assumptions, the answer is "$49".

And with that in mind, you'll realise it's not actually FtP any more. It's a good ol' traditional purchase game which happens to have a "gem store".

 

Yeah. I guess that's o.k. Buying in-game currency (or gems) with real cash in place of hundreds of hours of gameplay makes sense, especially if you work long hours. But it makes sense if the game doesn't require those purchases to be pleasurable.

 

Not when you begin to find unauthorized versions of your free-to-play games that have unlimited goods and power-ups.

 

Only if your F2P is done entirely clientside. In which case, F2P is not necessarily more or less secure than standard paid games.
That said your game could do check ins with a backend server whenever possible to update the list of purchased items tied with some sort of user account. The benefit of this as far as the user is concerned is that they can bring their items to a new device easily by logging in with their old account. Of course, it's only *slightly* more secure, since the code which checks in could also be cracked...

The only way to truly prevent this is in a game which naturally connects to an external authoritative server, like MMOs or multiplayer games with dedicated servers. The server would therefore have total control over the items the player has and what the player can or can't do (this, by the way, is the case in the game I'm working on).

 

The game MechWarrior Online does a fair job with their free-to-play model. You can play the game for free by selecting a pre-configured mech in each of the four classes; those choices rotate on a regular basis. A skilled player would likely be able to be as effective as anyone else with those "free" mechs. To own your own persistent mechs with your own custom builds, you had to at least unlock mech bays, which are only $1.38 each. Customizing your builds is a big part of the game. It's more about experimentation and matching builds to your play style than "pay to win" though.

You can certainly spend a lot of money on the game to speed up obtaining new mechs (but not upgrades) and there are cosmetic items. There are some expendable items that can be used in a match, but they aren't effective enough to really be "play to win".

It seems that even in a decently implemented free-to-play model like that, you're still preying on human weaknesses for income, so it's still a negative thing.

If it wasn't for:

* Impatience
* Vanity
* Not paying attention to your spending

then the game wouldn't survive. Hmmm.

I set a hard limit of $60 to spend on the game, which I did get many hours of enjoyment out of. I would have rather had the option to just spend $60 and get everything. It seems uncool to put the burden of determining the "money spent versus entertainment value" balance on the player. That should be the developer's job.

 

So what if this was, say, a collectible card game?

Here's an anecdote. I never got into Magic: The Gathering because I saw it as a money sink. Sure, I could just buy one deck and probably have a blast, but it seemed to me that the whole culture of the game was designed to push you into constantly buying new decks or expanding the ones you have.

Later, someone introduced me to Dominion. It's mechanically quite different, but that's by the by. What I liked about Dominion was that you buy one deck... and 4 people can play. Forever. No need to ever spend more unless you want to, and since everyone plays with the same deck there's no cultural impetus within a game to push you to buy more.

Even so... I've now got 8 Dominion sets. Two different stand alone base sets and 6 expansions.

To be fair, Dominion is cheaper than MTG. But from a practical point of view, Dominion ended up having exactly the same effect that I wanted to avoid in MTG, in that rather than a once-off purchase it's ended up being something I've spent a fair amount of money on over a fair amount of time. This is despite the fact that Dominion follows a more traditional model of larger, complete purchases and MTG takes the less traditional model and sells bits and pieces, almost micro-transaction style.

 

Cloud gaming, whereby most if not all of the game's code and data is hosted in the cloud and the game play video-streamed to its players from hardened, secured servers, is a possible long-term solution to piracy and theft of services.

 

My response to the debate a few posts up: The Free to Play (or, as I prefer to call it, Pay for Goods) model is not inherently "evil" or exploitative. However, it does naturally evolve into that state if the developer attempts to optimize for money earned. Because due to the intricacies of the model and human psychology, exploitation simply makes more money.

That said, "Free to Play" can be done well. But (unsupported opinion incoming) not in the form we all love to hate. (At least, not if you want to make a living on it). "Free to Play" done right is not "Pay for Goods" but actually "Pay for Content", just like the old DLC/expansion pack model. If your game has a vast amount of content such that the player would be overwhelmed if they had it all from the start, then you can safely withhold most of that content and deliver it in a steady trickle. If a hardcore player becomes tired of the steady trickle, they can pay to unlock more content faster. Caveat: It has to be content. New gameplay. Not just reskinned graphics and bigger numbers.

 

personally... with the example of the game Warframe...

i found warframe to be an okay game, but at a certain point, you realize the only reason to play the game is to grind to get new weapons and powerups(like some games, diablo, path of exile)... and since you can just buy those weapons and powerups.. then i realize.. whats the point in playing the game?? .. since the only thing to do in the game is to grind for better weapons and powerups... id buy the best weapon.. to then do nothing???... so why am i playing this game? -quit- (didnt spend a cent)

i wrote on their forums about this.. and they banned me for "dev bashing" LOL .. i said it was poor game design


i like path of exile's model.. the only thing you pay for is for cosmetic effects on your character (although they also have pay to increase stash inventory space..)

 

F2P isn't bad, if done properly, i.e. selling outfits/cosmetics not items that give players advantage over other people. Sell cosmetics, giving players only most basic outfits for free and vanity will do the rest.

That way, by such ethical F2P model you won't alienate poorer players who might eventually buy something in cash shop when they're no more poor (if they drop off the game entirely because F2P turned into P2W, there's exactly 0 chance that they'll buy ANYTHING) while people who can afford premium outfits that give them either same stats as items that can be found in game or no stats at all, but look more shiny will do so just because they can.

 

There aren't a lot of things in life that are inherently wrong... not when you consider the amount of things there are anyway.

Free to play is not inherently wrong it's just plagued by, ironically, greed. A good F2P game for example would be league of legends. I think it's probably the best example actually. You don't pay to win, you don't pay for advantages. You pay for a slight graphics change.