Free-to-play live-service games’ business models have been under fire for many years. The issues with these types of games have been exhaustively discussed by many commentators, the always-handsome Act Man among them. He made this meme-filled video back in 2020. While watching, I realized how little had actually changed and just how wrong his prediction was. The future he was painting in his commentary described a “change in the winds”.
The year is 2023, and free-to-play games are more prevalent than ever.
Let’s ask the obvious question first. If people are giddily buying micro transactions and cosmetics, and they continue this behavior despite knowing how these games are designed, are these not consensual transactions? Criticisms about the F2P monetization tactics are years old, so gamers are aware at this point.
There’s plenty of publicly available research and commentary. If you find these monetization tactics depreciating of your media experiences, study them today and make informed customer decisions. All it takes to break the habit of logging in every day to get your login bonus is delete the app. There’s no gun to your head.
The truth is that game companies throw everything and the kitchen sink to monetize 3% of their playerbases. Clearly, the tiny minority making purchases are getting what they want. You don’t repeat the same choice without some awareness of your thought process. You have plenty of opportunity to scrutinize your thoughts at your tenth in-app purchase.
In my view, the actual problem with the free-to-play model is that companies are complacently accepting current paradigms and not thinking further. Despite piss poor conversions, with 97% of players unmoved by all persuasion attempts, game companies continue using the same monetization, often thoughtlessly copied from other companies.
Whatever faults may be inherent in these models, companies also copy these problems when they copy ideas from each other. And then they suffer financially without the insights to predict the problems, let alone mitigate them.
Another issue is losing touch with the customer. The design of monetization is heavily data-driven. The human aspect is easily lost when you look at just numbers. How living, breathing human beings experience a game becomes secondary. How your brand is perceived by customers becomes secondary, especially when focused on the casual mobile market.
Because the focus is so much on psychological influencing of casual mobile gamers who are often disconnected from gaming communities, actual relationship-building with customers becomes secondary.
Free-to-play games actually have huge retention problems. These apps die off without perpetual marketing throwing new names at the signup screens. Because while the initial journey can be enjoyable, the endgame often lacks staying power. If the game has a lackluster story and repetitive gameplay, or just annoying menu-screens, your customers will look elsewhere.
Craving Quest comes to mind. This F2P game, while in many ways a stellar hentai experience, has some of the most atrocious menu design I have ever seen. Everything makes sense for the first few hours, until you’ve repeated the game loop enough times. That’s when you start realizing how much the nonsensical menu navigation wastes time.
For more on the topic, also read what went wrong with gaming.
Games are not just businesses. You cannot half-ass any aspect of them. While customers might not read every quest description, and sometimes they’ll rush past important moments, they’ll come back to those. If they enjoyed the game, they can be left with an itching in their brains. It’s that feeling, like there was cool shit happening that you can’t figure out alone. That’s when players look for communities and commentators who talk about the media in autistic detail.
I have played and promoted some live-service games for years. For example, I’ve spent soon $3000 into Cunt Wars, which sounds like much, until you contrast with other collectible card games. Magic: The Gathering was more expensive. And the blocs constantly rotated, including the core set. But when I returned to Cunt Wars after my 2 years-long break, I could still play every old card. The balance changes had been so few, I barely switched one card in my deck to be competitive again.
A company that blindly looks at numbers will miss key things as to why someone spends. I have played hundreds of different games over my lifespan, I know a good deal when I see one. As card games go, I’ve played Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft TCG, Hearthstone. Of all the options, Cunt Wars is more affordable than most collectible card games.
While many currently dominant game companies have evolved as businesses over time, the sorry result has been an obvious shift in the power dynamics inside of the companies. It’s painfully obvious that the business people, the shareholders, the consultants, the executive branch, all these non-creative number-crunchers have gained too much decision-making power. These types of business minds simply think differently than creatives do, and the dialog between them clearly isn’t working. The traditional hierarchical corporate structure is not the best for the purpose of making fun games.
If you’re the owner of a game company, here’s what you should do: Play your own games. Talk to your players. Instead of always running the business, come down from your ivory tower and talk with people. See what happens.
