Free to Play will eventually completely transform the console game industry radically for the better. Thats a pretty bold statement, I think. Not that eventually F2P will transform the console industry - thats already starting to happen. But I think the perspective that F2P will change development *for the better* is probably a pretty rare opinion among traditional developers. Lets start with this, though: Lets throw away the Free to Play moniker. Because if youre advertising your game as Free to Play youre lying to your customers. Youre saying, Here, you can have this for free, but thats *not true*, because as a developer, you need to raise enough money to continue development. You NEED players to spend money. Period. Or youre dead. So why say its free to play when its not? Say its free to try. Say the core mechanics are free. Say you can play some portion of the game for free. But whatever it is, lets remove the idea that these games are free. Second, lets start monetizing things other than pain and frustration. The reason a bunch of F2P games convert such a small number of their users is that they create an antagonistic relationship between the players and the developers. Players win by not spending any money. Which, again, is a *stupid* series of design decisions on the part of the developers. The players should win when they get the best value. Im not suggesting pay to win - Im suggesting that the *best* situation for both the player and the developer *should* be a situation where the player has paid enough that the game can continue development. With Fleck, for instance, we allowed players to vote on what features would be developed next via spending their in-game currency. Why? Because it was a great way to get feedback, because you knew they genuinely *valued* their vote. So frustration and pain isnt the only thing that can be successfully monetized. Still, thats not exactly the point. Lets take a bit of a leap, here. Lets say that between companies like Riot (League of Legends) and Blizzard (Hearthstone) and others, as a community, we will find ways to create microtransaction-based payments that are effective, and provide positive value to the players in a way that isnt just based on pain. Lets say that for all the developers who are currently repulsed by F2P, someones fixed that problem and done it in a way we can all agree is right. Id argue that some already have, but I can understand if others dont think thats happened yet. But for the sake of argument, lets make that jump. What does that change? Everything. First, if youre creating a microtransaction-based game, youre creating a Game as a Service (GaaS). Youre creating something thats not done, thats always evolving, that youre constantly pushing updates to. You have to change the underlying structure of patches, and releases, and updates, and blah blah blah, and now everyones moving on to something resembling continuous (or very, very frequent) deployment. Instead of monolithic changes to the game that alter huge aspects of it, were releasing a feature or two every few days, or every week. Instead of trying to predict what someone wants three years into the future when your game is finally done, youre instead predicting what they want two weeks into the future. Or simply listening to your audience and interpreting their desires in almost-real-time. Whats that fix? It makes the cost of innovation much, much lower. It mitigates your risk almost completely. It eliminates crunch. What would the world be like if a game series like Assassins Creed was released as an AAA-caliber service that is continuously evolving? It doesnt even necessarily need to be an MMO or even a multiplayer experience. But instead of assuming 8-16 pre-built hours of content, youve structured the game where youre releasing parts of it on an extremely frequent basis. Or that you start with a limited area of the game and more content gets built out progressively. Where you can add new features regularly, instead of needing to change *everything* from year to year building on a ten-year-old foundation? The point being, lets not be constrained by our perceptions of microtransaction-based games-as-a-service as shlocky Farmville-derived exploitative garbage. Lets imagine people who genuinely value the relationship with the player, who want to create something players *love* operating in an environment where you can iterate incredibly quickly, where risk is hugely mitigated, where you can receive feedback from your players in real-time, where you can experiment and test, and change stuff and be creative, and not be shackled by the risk of a $500 million development budget and 5 years between releases. Lets leave the legacy of Free to Play behind, and try to step forward into a future where we fix the problems with AAA gaming with a business model that has shown to work in a less-than-ideal situation, and lets make it *better*. Lets move it *forward*. Lets make something that is much better than people expect. Lets change the world for the better.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:55:31 +0000