Free to play video games haven’t been around for a long time; the genre began with “indie” massively multiplayer games. Typically browser-based, cartoonish, and lacking in serious graphical “punch,” these games would allow anyone to join and play; but if you wanted to get the coolest items, face the most intense bad guys, or just advance more quickly, you had to spend cash. I have absolutely no idea how well these games did for their creators. I’d guess the better ones did decently, but no major developers (read: the kind with stockholders) jumped onto the idea—there were online games that were free to play, but most of these you still had to purchase a physical disk for, and none of them had in-game systems that funneled cash to developers.
In retrospect, free to play looks like the type of innovation that would lead to massive success. Executives couldn’t see how the model would work, and, to be fair, there needs to be a very careful balancing act between making micro-purchases “worthwhile” to consumers and not alienating those players who don’t want to spend the money. However, making a game free to download, install, and play solves the major problem of the computer gaming in the last decade, piracy, and vastly expands the potential audience for a game.[1]
The question has always been whether that expanded base was going to generate enough money to justify not having every person pay $30-50 upfront. So far, the answer has been a resounding yes—so long, of course, as the game in question is a quality product. The most prominent free to play game, League of Legends, probably the best current DotA successor, recently announced that it was going to hold a tournament with a final cash prize of one million dollars. Two months ago, Valve (who are, incidentally, currently developing DotA 2) made their incredibly successful Team Fortress 2 free to download and play.
Both of these games are only playable online. And so far, both have combined massive player bases with affordable and attractive purchasables, which seems to be a formula for success. The question is whether other games can mimic this success. Could a monolith like WoW, with its focus on status symbols that have been gained through hours days weeks of tireless farming succeed if those symbols could be purchased? The model will never work for single-player games, but could we perhaps see more “episodic” games appear, in which players pay small entry fees to play short or small games that have frequent content updates?
Another question is how such games will succeed once the market it more crowded. Currently, LoL and TF2 offer the best (and cheapest) their genre has to offer. But LoL’s most well-known competitor, Heroes of Newerth, recently went free to play, and while Valve will not discuss their pricing plans for DotA 2, a free to play system would make sense, given their already established ability to distribute and promote through Steam. When compared to a games with traditional pricing structures like WoW or Call of Duty, we really don’t have any idea how LoL’s players translate into money for Riot (though I’m sure Riot has this information); likely only a small percentage of players make purchases—and it is unclear whether those players will switch (depriving Riot of their fund source) if a game of similar type and quality were released. What I’m questioning here is whether, without the initial buy-in required in a traditional purchasing structure, games will be able to pay for their development in a market in which players have options. Frankly, as of yet, we just don’t know.
[1] It is telling, I think, that the most monolithic of game producers—EA Games, and their divisions, including EA Sports—are the ones who have fought the losing battle with piracy the hardest. As early as five years ago, EA Sports used piracy as an excuse for not putting effort into porting their products from the consoles to the PC (I bet any psychologist or marketing exec could tell you that this is not the right strategy). In contrast, companies that either satisfy their fan bases (see Bethesda, BioWare) or have serious disadvantages to piracy built in to the game structure (Blizzard and the inability to play multiplayer-oriented games offline) have seemed to be much more successful at combating a problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment