Inconvenient truths about free-to-play

This is a text that I have wanted to write for a very long time. I have been working in the games industry for a better part of a decade. Games for smartphones are my specialty. I got my start back in the day when premium casual games dominated the market. In the meantime, we have seen the free-to-play business model take over the world of gaming. My personal feelings about this particular model have evolved over time.

This text is a list of some notions that I firmly believe in, even if they go against the grain of the common opinions in the gaming world:

(1) Millions of people love free-to-play games. Despite what you might read on the gaming forums, the majority of people prefer free-to-play games. This is clearly evident in numbers. The number of downloads of free-to-play games simply dwarfs any install numbers for premium games. This is a result of two factors. Mobile games enjoy the unfair advantage of Console and PC games. Everyone and his grandmother have a smartphone nowadays, while not everyone is willing or interested in purchasing a dedicated piece of hardware just to play games. Add to that 0 price tag of install and you get a powerful combo.

Number of Smartphone users worldwide per year from 2016 to 2021. Source Statista

(2) Companies keep making free-to-play games because people love them. This is a logical consequence of the previous fact. The love of mobile games can be easily measured by several easy to quantify values, the number of downloads, the time users spend playing the game, the amount of money some of them spend on the game. Gaming companies are after all run as business enterprises. Our aim is to entertain the world and numbers clearly show that players are being entertained. Otherwise, they would just drop our games and go do something else. With zero upfront price, there is no sunken cost to make them stay with a game that they do not like.

Game industry revenue per platform in 2020, source Newzoo

(3) You cannot make a successful business by exploiting your customers, at least not one successful in the long term. The world simply does not work this way. People are not stupid. If they don’t get what they paid for, they will just go elsewhere. Unless you run a government monopoly, you can’t go about screwing the people your paycheck depends on.

(4) Monetization is about presenting value. Free-to-play games make money via two sources, the dominant one being in-application purchases (IAP). Players get to install the game for free, and they have an option to make additional purchases within the game. Over the years, teams making free-to-play games have come up with an array of things that they offer to players. One thing that all of these have in common is that they must have value for players within the context of the game. If players can’t see the value they will not buy the stuff you are selling. It is as simple as that.

(5) Free-to-play players are some of the most sophisticated customers in gaming. They might not be following gaming news, nor care about the obscure lore of big gaming franchises. However, they are not naive, they are not conditioned and most certainly they are not addicts. People who spend on mobile free-to-play games usually know the games that they are playing inside and out. They understand the value of every item that they decide to purchase and will scrutinize the value of every new thing you offer them. They will take into account not only in terms of nominal value but also relative value within the very subjective context of their own playstyle. This is especially true for players who repeatedly spend money in the same game. Quite often they will budget their money and allocate an amount of money that they are planning to spend on their favorite game per week or per month.

(6) Children are not our prime audience. While many of these games are obviously played by children, minors are not the prime audience for most of the free-to-play games. Adults with disposable income make up the bulk of people spending on free-to-play games. They are our best customers. Very many free-to-play games restrict the purchasing options to underage players. The ethics of advertising stuff to children plays a huge part. The legal restrictions imposed in various jurisdictions are another very important reason. Finally, there is simple business logic, children are economically dependent on their parents. The parents are the ones with credit cards.

Mobile game players by age, source Statista.

(7) Free-to-play games are fair to customers. The players get to play the game for free. They get to know the game before they can decide to spend money on it. When you buy a premium game you are essentially making an investment. You are making an investment in the future fun you expect to have based on the ads you saw or game reviews you read. This investment might or might not materialize in the sense of joy you feel while playing. In free-to-play you get to purchase things you already know you will like. In most free-to-play games, you can achieve basically anything that you want without playing. In most cases, only a tiny fraction of players decided to actually spend money on a game. Typically this is somewhere between 1% to 10% of players. Everyone else enjoys the game for free. Teams developing free-to-play games respect free players because each and every one of them is a potential customer. If you run a business, you do not want to chase away a potential customer that has entered your shop!

(8) Making free-to-play games is hard. This type of games usually gets discounted in the minds of gamers. Reality is different though. It is not only that making these games can often be harder than making AAA premium games, but that it requires a whole different skill set. You can think of Premium AAA Console and PC games as movies, where the director and executive producer have firm control over the scope and the narrative. The audience expects to see a singular piece of entertainment art. The creative vision is a monolith of clearly bounded limits. When you are making a game that is supposed to run as a service, which free-to-play games are, you are creating something much closer to a TV series. You are designing something that players are not expected to play through in a matter of days or hours. Your game needs to engage them for months and potentially years. It needs to be open-ended and yet it needs to stay internally coherent.

As my journey through the world of Game Design continues my opinions will continue to evolve. There is no doubt about it. It may so happen that I will radically change my point of view, and come to believe something quite the opposite of some of the statements I have just made. Still, at this point in time, this is what I hold to be the truth. If you have different views I am ready to hear them out and share more of my arguments.

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