Free to Play isn't to blame, it's the consumer

For people hesitant to pay for games (outright or IAPs), I think it's helpful to consider the situation of leaving a tip at a restaurant.

When tipping, you may find yourself deciding between, say, $5 & $6. The dollar doesn't seem like much in that context, and you are paying for a small amount of work by a single person.

On the other hand, an app that costs a dollar is not only giving you hours of entertainment, but also funding the labor AND creativity of many people, including musicians, artists, programmers, etc., each of whom give MANY hours of work rather than the half hour or so of intermittent service from a waiter. (This is not at all to denigrate the waiter's work!)

It's also helpful to appreciate that we get to live in a sort of golden age, in which we're carrying around these devices that give us access to games that are more fun than much of what I played on more expensive systems years ago, but generally for $1-$5 instead of $50-60. We also are enjoying rapid maturation of gaming concepts and experiences, as the low bar to creating and distributing working games has led so many talented people--programmers, artists, musicians, etc--to able to get their ideas out to anyone with a smartphone, and thus to inspire other creatives.

Not long ago, only the tiniest fraction of people were able to get their ideas out, and the companies that made this possible were disinclined to support ideas that may have been interesting/edgy/beautiful because they wouldn't risk not recouping the formidable costs of production (requiring entire distribution networks to stores, and manufacture of things like packaging, manuals, and cartridges (!) or discs--and back in the day, separate boxes for 5.25" and 3.5" discs!)...

 

I personally have taken to stopping and comparing the freemium game I am playing to what I would have paid for something back in the day. Yesterday playing Nimble Quest I was debating buying the currency doubler in game....$4 though nuts to that!!!!!! Then I stopped and though about it for a second and realized this is basically a budget DS or GBA game. Back in the day they would have charged $30ish for this game and I would have paid $10 used online.....but I am not going to pay $4 for a coin doubler why? I stopped and bought the doubler and also a $2 in game hero on principle. Some free to play games get it right but it can be hard not to judge them on the wrong scale.

humans place odd and at times hypocritical values on things. With the massive number of games coming out and the many models to pay for them it's good to have a realistic scale to compare expectations on.

 

I think you need to look a little closer do some actual research on the data behind your assumptions. Console still generates more revenue, but look at the trends. I am not saying that console gaming is dead, not at all, but consumer behavior is definitely changing.

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/the-case-of-social-vs-mobile-vs-console-gaming/619616

The quantity of premium games on a platform does not mean they're successful, and you undermine your own point by sayng that the biggest games are still premium. Of course they are, they are backed by huge publishers who do the market research and pander to a very specific audience that they know will pay. That means absolutely nothing in this argument. In fact, the existence of paid blind packs of gear in just about every EA multiplayer game for the last two years actively contradicts you, as Battlefield, Madden and Mass Effect are some of the biggest titles out there.

 

Think of it like a bubble. Business trends tend to follow specific patterns and I don't see this one as any different.

Someone comes up with a new idea to make money. Other people see them making money. Everyone jumps on board. The market gets flooded, most of it is crap, consumers are excited at first but at a certain point start to abandon the new concept en masse due to the large number of low quality offerings. After a horrible crash that takes out the garbage but will unfortunately also take out some promising offerings as well, the market stabilizes into a new normal.

With mobile offerings so flooded right now I think we've already peaked. F2P companies are making tons of money but consumers are starting to catch on. This bubble is going to pop. It may not do it in 2016 or maybe even 2017, but the market is going to crash hard. It is going to crash because of the crass cynicism being offered by F2P publishers who would rather think of ways to market to consumers than offer value to their customers. We see too many terms like "whales" and "churn" and while you can get away with "churn" right now at some point you are going to run out of suckers.

We saw it with the dotcom bubble, subprime loans, hell I remember the original videogame crash of the 1980's which followed a VERY similar pattern of cynicism and reliance in marketing rather than quality products. I played E.T. on the Atari 2600.

Ironically, these bubbles can be avoided but it rarely happens because these companies are so focused on next quarter rather than thinking about a sustainable model.

EDIT - Minor clarification, subprime loans tanked because of bank practices and not general bank customers. However, it was very similar if you think of banks as the consumers no longer buying unsecured debt as a way of making money, which eventually left the worst practitioners holding mortgages that were worthless as the creditor was never going to be able to actually meet their financial obligations. Guess what industry I was in 2008?

 

What is it with everybody wanting me to do research in this thread?
Fortunately, to reply to you I don't need to do any research: The games Battlefield Madden and Mass Effect that YOU mention as 'some of the biggest titles' are all premium (paid-up-front) games; that you can also pay extra for DLC after that initial payment does not detract from my 'paid-up-front is doing great in the living room' point-of-view.

Since 'research' in this thread only seems to warrant naming one example, let me mention an example: http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8414099/cities-skylines-hits-million-sales-mark
Game from relatively small developer/ publisher, one million sales in first month, actual revenue ($30 - 30%forValve) * 1.000.000 = 21 million dollars of revenue to the publisher. In one month. On one platform. From a game I imagine most people who do not play on PC have even heard of.
Can you name a game with a similar level of *financial* success in the free-2-play realm, with a similar visibility (so this is not a game in the 'crossy road' region of fame, this is just some successful game, plus I doubt crossy road made 21 million (*))

*) added at in edit, look at all this 'research' I am doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossy_Road "Three months afters its initial release, the game earned over $10 million and had over 50 million downloads"

 

This comes from a person who is using this website for free...?

I hope he sees the irony...

*facepalm*

 

It's not such a black and white polarized issue. There r greedy #### developers and publishers and there are ones with realistic expectations. £69.99 for smurfberries? Yea that's an absolute douchebag developer that should be burned at the stake. 3.99 to unlock half a game? Brilliant.

Some other ones are more of a gray area like MKX

 

I also believe a crash will happen… I also believe out of the ashes there will be a resurgence in premium games. When people realise how much f2p is a honey trap they will search for quality and something of worth. When the publishers get burned badly they will go back to the traditional models.

When the crash happens there will be opportunities for developers with cash and balls. Can you imagine some developer releasing a game to the same quality standards as Mario Kart 8 priced at around $20. All you would need is a few million people to download it and you get big profit. The people get a game worth the price and the developers can earn cash.

In the f2p model a few million people are small fry to publishers… they want 10s of millions of people or more to make large profits. The share holders to the big publishers want profit and at the moment f2p is where the massive profits are and the publishers need to keep the share holders happy. As soon as that market crashes they will change tact. They will be forced to go back to the premium model and value games on what they should be worth because they will need to make profit.

The crash will happen because the cost of making a f2p game is going up, budgets are getting bigger so that they get noticed and User Acquisition is getting more and more costly. All it takes will be a publisher who has spent loads on developing and marketing to fail a few times in a row… that will be start of the crash.

 

So if someone offers you a drug knowing you'll be addicted, you take it, become addicted and blow your finances over addiction, it's the pushers fault. Gotcha.

 

What is the maximum amount you would pay?
And how many games would you buy in a year?
(As in, multiplying those numbers, how much money do you think you would spend per year if you could select from a large amount of games you find great)

While I await your reply, I will try to figure out if there is a way to see how much money I spent in Steam this year.

 

In regards to premium vs free, I think it also has to deal with how the customer feels about the developers.

For example, if I have been following a development of a product through forums and/or web pages, I have no qualms with premium payment. I know that the developer has put in hours for it.

As for a developer I don't know that well, I usually wait. This is in part due to there have been some "scams" where there was no product but just screen shots. In addition, if I know that in the above case that something is coming out and highly anticipated at that, then that app has to go on the "back burner" since one only has so much time to spend. Sad but a true statement since not everyone can be a reviewer. And even reviewers sometime only have a set time to review an app before moving onto the next app.

Sadly the releasing of apps is not like the movies where you know what is coming out when in the next few months. Yes I know all about how game development works, since I have been in the industry for quite some time. BUT if the premium apps did have a defined release date, I suspect these apps would get more love like movies. Alas, I don't foresee it in the immediate future for apps. This is due to the fact that there will always be new operating systems, new tools and other items that get updated regularly on the backend of an app. And even when everything looks good, the next version can break the app internally. Then all of those "lovely" people come out of the woodworks saying how horrible the app is and the developer should fix the app ASAP in forums and the like. If these folks even took the time to know what has to go into fixing a bug in an app and as well as the apple approval process, then maybe these folks would be not so vocal. Sure the developer needs to know but posting for the umpteenth time it is broke really doesn't help.

Sorry for the tangent above but I am passionate for the little known developers. The big companies know their product will be reviewed. Alas not the case for small or little known developers. Some of them put their blood and sweat into these apps. And to even get noticed by anyone is a monumental - even more so if it gets reviewed in a favorable light.

 

Sorry but I have no sympathy for developers. I hear gamers all the time crying about the plight of developers and it's just ridiculous. It's like complaining about the danger when u are a cop or not seeing your family as a politician. U chose the job and if u didn't do the research to learn that game development is time consuming, a headache because of bugs and often income is dicey its your own fault. Art has never been a high paying medium and when it is it's usually not the artist getting rich. Eli wants to talk about having your cake and eating it too, I feel this is true of developers and publishers not we gamers. They release a buggy mess and we are supposed to just accept it? Gaming keeps getting buggier and more profit driven and yet I keep hearing more cries for the poor developers. Even the small Indy guys that deserve some sympathy ultimately still chose this field though.

Sorry if this seems heartless but we all make choices and we have to live with them. I say the same to my friend who went into dance and is stuck babysitting, my friend that went into photography and works at a dog groomers and to my unemployed self. These developers don't deserve sympathy just for being developers any more then I deserve sympathy for messing my life up screwing around in high school. They chose this field of work and while I respect and love them for taking that risk to bring me art, they don't deserve my tears dollars or patience just because of it.

 

That's pretty heartless… because the human race values art. Sure you get talentless hacks but for every Picasso or Einstein that falls through the cracks is a sad thing. Because you feel you have failed you should not project that on others. There could be a developer who makes something unique, so original that people want... only to be bashed down by the jaded who refuse to award the effort that goes into creating.

 

The reason I asked is because I think that even for players like yourself (and to a lesser extend myself) a willingness to pay for premium mobile games is not enough to make the platform interesting for publishers. Unless they are willing to spend like drunken sailors, like they do on other platforms.

What I wanted to indicate is that the f2p vs premium discussion cannot be done in a vacuum, this is in the end a discussion about money, and platform competition plays a role too.
The different gaming platforms are essentially competing for the attention of game makers. Mobile has the users, but not the spenders.


I promised I would look at my Steam purchases this year. I did some back-of-napkin-but-in-excel calculations, and I think I spent 277 euros on PC-games in 2015 so far, on 11 games in total, which comes to 25 euros per game. Now this is not a regular year for me, and I think will probably only buy a few more games this year, and I assume I am a bigger consumer than average. So a more realistic number would have been half that I think, so 140 euros. But then I am a somewhat average living-room-gamer consumer I think, plus I only got exactly one game without any discount (GTA-V).

How many people are willing to spend 140 euros a year on iOS games, even among gaming enthusiasts that read TouchArcade? I spend maybe 40 euros on say 20 iPad and Android phone games so far this year (although there I am not a typical gaming enthusiast, I am a bit burned out on mobile games, the originality of the early years is gone imho).

There was this idea that if you have a billion users (that iOS+Android now easily have), you only need 0.15% of all users to buy your game at 99 cents, and you're a millionaire. But that model has not panned out.

So you would like more people, the gaming enthusiastcommunity, to pay for premium games. Okay, I support that idea, but if I were a publisher I would think wait all these enthusiastically paying users already exist, it's just that they are on XBox One, PS4, and PC.
How far is willing-to-pay-for-premium mobile market removed from those other platforms, I think it is very far.

 

Disclaimer : i only read the OP.

Complainers will complain. It's a buyer's market - they drive the prices, or lack of. Developers will be aware of this, so they need to market/price accordingly.

I still believe there is a market for premium games - but generally limited to high profile/quality/exposure.

I don't see anything wrong with waiting for sale or drop to free.

Overly agressive F2P mechanics will backfire and create a negative reputation for that company. There's nothing wrong with balanced F2P, one where you can progress, but optionally speed this up with micro transactions.

Radiation Island is a fantastic game, I bought it day 1 but such is the way of the App Store, there will be the 'next big thing' along soon after, so ppl forget about it.

It is what it is. Quality games flop on other systems, not just iOS. That is always the risk.

 

This makes zero sense. They are reward with respect and money if they do a good job and from me I even will give artists a pat on the back and a atta boy try again and thank u for a crap game thst was their vision/dream. They do not deserve though to be praised and given money and endless patience for buggy games. They do not deserve sympathy for choosing a low paying job. What I am saying has nothing to do with if I have failed or not, thanks for calling me a failure though(don't consider myself one). It has everything to do with we as gamers creating a culture where th bar is constantly being lowered. Buggy game, no pause menu, half thought out idea, unbalanced freemiums, we not only swallow it all but make increasing excuses for those killing the industry.

 

At least there isn't IAP just to read the next article or to comment in a forum!