Free 2 Play!

First, apologies for delays in blogging. I've been playing a lot of different games like Skyrim (again), Civ 6, Clash Royale, some PlanetSide 2, and finally got around to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. All great games, btw. Civ 6 was particularly distracting. Just. One. More. Turn... Ok, back to it.

I've made some comments in the past on Reddit and in person for those who I had the pleasure to meet at events like SOE Live about my extreme distaste for Free To Play. I don't dislike Free 2 Play entirely; games like Clash Royale fit well for F2P. Sometimes it makes sense for the game. Sometimes its forced and not such a great fit. Free to Play is more than micro-transactions. What I want to talk about today is the model, how it impacts the dev process and how it indirectly affects the game in a negative way. The case study of course will be PlanetSide 2.

The PlanetSide 2 Model

PlanetSide 2's F2P model was based on League of Legends. The idea was an in-game currency (Auraxium, see this post on what happened to it) would act like gold and become a currency for buying primarily boosts, cosmetics, and weapons. All of those things could also be purchased for real currency.  On top of this was a subscription for those who wanted traditional MMO benefits that offered a boost, some currency for puchasing items, and a resource boost that included boosting Auraxium. It's very similar to League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, etc if you just mentally convert heroes -> weapons. There was also a natural pressure to buy the weapons because they were expensive compared to much-cheaper boosts which you could get more out of in the long-run. So the ideal was to use in-game currency to buy boosts, and money for weapons & subs.

The primary driver behind this economic model is convenience. You're buying xp boosts to get certs faster, so you can get guns faster, or buying them directly. In order for purchasing that to be an actual convenience the game must be inconvenient without those things. Therein lies the evil rooted in F2P; you must intentionally make your game less fun so you can sell things to make it more enjoyable. The result is that grindy feeling, and feeling compelled to spend money so you can get real enjoyment in the game. When I encounter this I feel resentment because I know the game could be more fun, but the developer is intentionally making it less so I fork over more money. Personally, I'd much rather pay up front money for the game than deal with that constant unpleasantness which will eventually drive me away.

Fairness to Players

Then there is the mismatch of economics. Some players pay nothing. Some players pay 10x or more what they would normally pay for such a game. F2P offers you the "power" to choose how much you want to spend on the game - it was even the slogan "free to play your way." Lets do a little math. Lets assume that only 1 in 10 players actually monetizes and pays real money for a F2P game, which is a good conversion rate (IIRC, the industry average is between 5%-10%, so 10% is great). Compared to your traditional box price of $60 which would bring in net revenue of $600 for 10 players (for simplicity lets remove retail costs and assume it's being bought directly from the developer), how much would the lifetime revenue need to be for the one paying customer to break even? $600. That doesn't sit well with me. I just don't think its a fair thing to players willing to pay money to gouge them to compensate for others who pay nothing. Most people these days are willing to spend $20-$60 on a console game, so why not do this for a AAA shooter?

I'm making a critical assumption here - that the number of players would be the same between a traditional box price and F2P - and that is unlikely. Its generally accepted that F2P brings in more due to the risk-free nature of F2P. How much more? That's unknowable, but there are many games that convert to F2P and see a revival, like Dungeons and Dragons Online, and end up making more money than they did before. There are also games that didn't. And the stickiness is different too, as I will discuss below.

Development Impact

I said I wanted to talk about impact to development, so lets get to that. When you are a F2P game, you must always be thinking about monetization - how what you are doing affects existing monetization, and how you can add to more monetization. You are personally motivated to do this - if the game makes more money, you see royalties sooner, and the team and game can expand (the carrot). If you don't, then folks leave the team or get laid off (the stick). For more on this, see my last post. So one way or another, monetization affects everything you do. Take Directives for example. One of the purposes of Directives is additional exposure to buy more weapons. That's why each directive tier adds another directive to advance and most are weapon-based. We didn't have to do it that way, but we did because it was a monetization opportunity. Directives also help motivate players to keep playing for the achievements, so it is also present to help with stickiness and longevity.

Another impact is that things which have clear monetization value get prioritized over things which do not. Just look at the major systems features I worked on, in the order I worked on them -> VR (try out things before you buy them), Tutorial (new player stickiness is direct revenue increase), Directives (stickiness & subtle monetization push). All have clear and obvious monetization value.  They were also needed and generally liked by players, so it's not all bad. What about metagame features like resource revamp? No direct monetization value. New weapons, vehicles, etc took precedent. Some features that were big draws like a continent revamp were prioritized because they could bring players back and were things marketing could rally around and promote. It's much harder to sell things that could make the game simply more fun or play better when you have pressure to make more money.

We could have done things to make the game more fun and enjoyable, but the business model always demanded we sacrifice fun to the green god. In a way, the game became a slave to its own business model, because that's the financial reality of game development.

New Player Impact

Having worked on the Tutorial, I learned a lot about new player stickiness. It's not the best tutorial, but I'm very proud of it given the impact it had on stickiness and the extremely limited resources I had (shameless plug: apart from some UI additions, I made the entire tutorial from scratch in a few weeks, including the scripting engine and level design).

There's a psychological influence property called Commitment & Consistency (Its how POWs get brainswashed, fascinating stuff - if you're interested in this sort of thing I recommend reading books by Robert Cialdini). Basically, people tend to be consistent in their decisions, which means one decision, even a small one, commits you to a path you are likely to stay on. Monetizing in a game is a big commitment. You decided to buy into a game. (And yes, I know what you're thinking - I too have a Steam library full of unplayed games, but nearly all are from flash sales and bundles, not games on which I paid full price). You will tend to want to get your money's worth and give it a better shot than a game you didn't. I believe games which have the right box prices - up front commitment - have much better stickiness over a F2P game, which requires only the commitment to download it. If you aren't immediately hooked, you can dump it and not feel any real loss, because you didn't really commit. If that happens, there's no money or enjoyment gained from others for that player. This is a big advantage I believe any sort of gating cost has over a pure F2P game. Note the box price has to match the expectation, otherwise players get angry and demand refunds, like No Man's Sky.

There's also a stigma for F2P games. Players see F2P and their quality expectation immediately drops to some mobile fart app. That's not good as a first impression. I recall articles talking about how surprising PS2 for a F2P game. New players have to overcome the F2P stigma before even trying the game.

Then it has to hook them. And since they're free players, the game is slow and grindy, because it was intentionally made inconvenient so the F2P model can work. These are all difficult hurdles for a new player to get through to really see the fun in the game, and are a big reason why a lot of players don't stick around long enough to see how awesome of a game it can be. I believe these aspects of F2P wipe a way a lot of the potential increased player base benefits of F2P. This is also something that can vary greatly between games. Some designs can minimize these hurdles, and developers could actively address new player issues.

Some PS2 players might be wondering why new player features keep cropping up from update to update - this is why. The new player experience is bad, partly because its a complex pure-pvp game, and partly because of the business model. Sadly I don't think there's much in the way of silver bullets to solve that problem.

Am I Right?

So am I right about all this? Well, I would point you to H1Z1 - the game released after PS2 that was originally touted as a F2P game. As I write this, H1Z1 has been in "Early Access" for almost two years (23 months), and it still has the same $20 buy-in and in-game shop.  It also has a game mode that was added recently as a stand alone game for another $10 "early access" price. And as of this writing, I can't find any reference at all to H1Z1 being a F2P game on its website, but you can still see it listed as such in old articles when it was announced.

Seems clear to me that the F2P experiment at SOE/Daybreak did not work out as they had hoped, and they have returned to a reasonable box price + in-game shop as a monetization model once they saw how much revenue that brought them in Early Access. They also set expectations low with perpetual "early access." That's a fair way to go, IMO. You still have the opportunity to sell cosmetics and game modes like battle royale to scale up investment, but with every player putting in some money you can afford to focus on making the game fun instead of bleeding out every cent from the whales who actually pay for the development. You can still have whales, but the pressure on them is greatly reduced.

Had F2P been all what they wanted, they'd still be using it. Lesson learned, at a steep cost. I hope this post helps explain some of the reasons why.

If you think I'm wrong, by all means, please comment and share your thoughts. Preferably in a civil manner. :)