Eli Hodapp
Fueling The Freemium Fire
Earlier this week I posted my feelings on the overall disappointing nature of this year’s GDC Online over at TouchArcade, which seemed to add a considerable amount of fuel to the already blazing arguments taking place in IM windows, IRC channels, and Twitter timelines. After thinking about all this a little more, and watching on the sidelines of way too many of these discussions, I figured I’d toss out some more of my thoughts instead of responding to everyone who has commented individually.
What upsets me the most about this free to play trend isn’t the business model itself, which it seems like entirely too many people flat out don’t understand. Freemium games truly have potential to be just as good as current traditional “premium” titles, and there are already a few stand outs that raise the bar higher than I thought was possible. I almost feel like a broken record at this point endlessly promoting League of Legends, but it is the absolute best example of a free to play game that sacrifices nothing for the sake of free to play monetization. League of Legends is just as fun to play if you never spend a single cent on it as it is if you spend hundreds on it.
Like all things in life, an overall balance is very important in good game design. In a traditional video game sales model, you can plot most titles along a line with “presentation” on one end and “gameplay” on the other. The best games always seem to end up in the middle, taking a very even-handed approach in their development. It’s not hard to come up with examples of games over the course of video game history that stray too far to either side and ultimately suffered for it. We’ve all played games that were sheer eye candy that were closer to tech demos than video games, just like we’ve all played fabulous indie titles that could’ve been so much more if they had more than programmer art and royalty free music.
With the advent of free to play, this gradient of game design has turned into something that resembles a triangle, with “presentation,” “gameplay,” and now “monetization” serving as the end-points. What was so upsetting to me about GDC Online is that it seems that developers are now openly encouraged to build their games as deep into the “monetization” side of the triangle as possible, as it doesn’t matter anymore if you’ve got anything going for the “gameplay” or “presentation” side of things since there’s enough user bases to buy, chart gaming services to employ, and other tricks to exploit to completely negate the need for your “game” to even actually be a game.
The example that seems to get tossed out far too often to dispute this is that arcade games were obviously pay to play, and games had no problem sucking every last quarter out of your pocket. Some argue that these monetization-heavy free to play games are no different, only now, instead of dropping quarters in a coin slot, you’re buying packs of virtual quarters to spend in a similar fashion.
While I totally see the logic path some are taking with this, I really don’t think that this is that great of a counterpoint. Plotting arcade games on the game design triangle I discussed earlier would almost always have them landing somewhere in the middle. Early arcade games, particularly high scoring games, were games that required immense skill and were entirely possible to be beaten in one quarter. Hell, there’s an entire archive of videos on YouTube of people beating all forms of arcade games on one credit.
The spending compulsion also couldn’t be more different. If you were standing in front of that six player X-Men arcade machine, and you died, you’d effortlessly pop another quarter into the machine because you were having so much fun. The arcade machine was giving you something you wanted, and you felt good paying for it.
Now, compare this to the worst offenders in the freemium farming scene. Sure, you can play the games for free and grind away your silly little farm, but they’re all engineered to eventually drive you to in-app purchase. The spending compulsion the player experiences here isn’t a feeling of “Oh this is so much fun!” as they enter their iTunes password. No, instead, it’s a mixture of frustration that things are taking so long, and a desire to somehow sidestep the irritating limitations placed on them.
This just seems backwards to me on so many levels. Growing up, I worked in the family business where I learned life lessons on creating products people wanted to buy, being proud of those products, and satisfying a customer’s needs with them. When you look at a game like We Rule, none of those lessons apply. Ngmoco isn’t offering a quality product that people want to buy, they’re offering a precisely built compulsion loop that preys on unsuspecting gamers like a modern day social skinner box where you put money or time in and the only thing you get out of it is an advanced progress bar.
I don’t even think I’d call that a game. With the endless reskins and clones on top of clones utilizing identical mechanics, they seem more similar to the endless sea of video slot machines at a casino, each with a slightly different theme engineered for one purpose: To separate you from as much of your money as possible. At least casinos are dangling a tangible carrot, and however unlikely it is, you could actually walk away with something instead of access to a slightly more advanced virtual farm that will only exist for as long as the company selling it to you feels like supporting it.
That’s what feels so wrong to me. As a customer in this whole free to play process, you’re often not getting anything out of it. In fact, regardless of whether or not you pay, you often are the product being sold. These monetization schemes are running so deep that it really doesn’t even matter if you ever pay a cent as long as you can be counted as a daily active user. That almost seems to have more value, and makes these games feel even less like games, and more like fly traps filled with victims to be sold to the highest bidder with something vaguely representing a game serving as the bait.
It sounds harsh, but reality sucks sometimes. This is a horrible direction for video game development to be heading, and the worst part is, there really seems to be no consequences to dissuade developers from going down this road. In fact, the most blatant cash grabs somehow inexplicably seem to make the most money, which only encourages delving even deeper into the monetization side of the game development triangle.
It bears repeating though that just because a game is free to play doesn’t mean it needs to be a precisely constructed cash extracting operant conditioning chamber. We’ve heavily praised NimbleBit games on TouchArcade, because the vibe about them makes them feel like actual games— But more importantly, they actually are free to play instead of free to play with a giant asterisk attached to it that ends in “but it’ll be really annoying to actually get anywhere.”
At the end of the day, the free to play business model is just another tool on the game developer’s utility belt. There’s nothing inherently “evil” about the whole thing, it’s just all in how you use it. It’s just incredibly disheartening how easy this tool can be used in a bad way, doubly so that the financial rewards make it so worthwhile.
