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

I've made both premium (Taxiball) and F2P games (Big Fish Casino, Fleck), and I can honestly say that the best development experinece I've ever had has been working on F2P. There are a lot of reasons why:

1.) You can create something small, see if people like it, and expand it over time.
2.) You're not constantly fighting piracy.
3.) You don't have to convince someone to drop a sustainable ($5+) amount of money *before* the player knows anything about the game.
4.) You can develop a game with a live audience, with their feedback, which can be a really positive and rewarding experience for everyone.
5.) You're not stuck working to a specific release date where you need to launch with a huge bang. You can release a game and continue to build it, improving it over time & continually building your audience.

I know F2P gets a lot of flack, and in many cases, rightly so. A lot of the most successful games are hugely exploitative, and mostly built on monetizing pain. I don't think that's necessary, and we were able to prove that out with Fleck (where we were able to make enough per user to be well more than sustainable, but the game had some structural problems that led to its eventual demise). The problem is that everyone's currently pulling from the King/Zynga playbook re: monetization & "pressure", and I think in the long-term, it's unsustainable.

If I download a promising game, and it "feels" like Clash of Clans, it's an instant delete. I don't need another CoC. I don't need another CC. More, I don't *want* another game that I know will evetually devolve into misery and pain. I want a Hearthstone, or a League of Legends, or a Vainglory. F2P games that give me something I genuinely want & value in exchange for my $. A Hero Academy - I couldn't even give that game enough of my $ even if I bought everything in it.

There's another reply eventually to be written about how "whale hunting" sucks, but not "capping" how much a person can spend in a game isn't the inherently evil thing people think it is. Basically, it just comes down to the fact that across a large enough population, some people have *astonishing* amounts of money, and to them, spending thousands in a game is like you going out and spending $5. Given how F2P works *right now*, you can do it and not have it be "evil". Of course, plenty of companies do it in an evil way, but basically any tool can be wielded badly.

But re: development, as a developer, as someone who's running a startup, I actually really *enjoy* working in F2P, and I hope that our future products will help push the business model forward in a way that's beneficial to gamers, and helps to create a *sustainable*, long-term evolution of F2P, instead of cashing in on the current model of exploiting players for the fastest-possible $.

 

150-200K is what you get in NYC / Silicon Valley as a decent developer. Heck, you don't need to be capable of soloing a 10,000 download, $3 game to get $150-$200K in major markets. The chance of an indie developer making anywhere near their package in a real job is slim, whether it is F2P or paid.

 

$300K in the Bay Area will let you work with an experienced team of 4 with livable salaries for...

$75K average/employee + 50% cost overhead (insurance, rent, legal, etc.) about 8 months.

Or you can go with junior folks who can work for peanuts & live on ramen, and still in the Bay Area, you'll need $45K basically just to have an apartment. +50% overhead, and you're still up to $60K+

If you charge $5, you can expect to convert <<<<1% of the TA audience to paying users. If you charge $1, you'll covert 5x more, which means net it's basically a wash. (yes, I have experience doing this.)

Plus, you've got to budget something for marketing. And *this* is where big-studio F2P crushes small-studio freemium. Because you're ultimately competing for the same attention. And if a big studio can pay $13-15 PER USER for advertisements, then now your game, which you're probably going to have to sell for $2, cannot possibly even remotely recoup your costs.

Developing games with anything more than 2 person team of folks right out of college doesn't just cost more than people think - it costs *astronomically* more than people think. And marketing doesn't cost more than people think, it costs more than most people can even *comprehend*. Seriously. Working at the top of the App Store, you're spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars *every day* on marketing. You're spending tens of thousands of dollars a *day* on salaries.

But even if you scale that way, way down to an independent studio with four people (two of which aren't taking salaries) like I'm doing now, and you're *still* dealing with numbers that are incomprehensible to *most* random game players when they think of what it takes to make a game they're buying for $1.

 

BTW, I'm suggesting $75K average for the Bay Area for folks who are taking a radically reduced salary in exchange for equity. Hiring a Jr. developer right out of college in the Bay Area, you're competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, etc. - a new person immediately out of college who's even marginally competent can likely land a $100K/yr job with a $100K bonus and $100K in stock. It's insane, and it's unsustainable in the long term, but that's where we are right now, that's the reality of the situation we're dealing with.

 

I don't see the purpose of "capping". If someone is going to spend an insane amount of cash you might as well make it convenient for them.

I've worked in software development a long time and generally feel like there is no amount of money too large for me to accept.

 

Whenever somebody mentions how cheap Android users are, expecting everything for free, I need to point such naysayers to this thread that also shows iOS users behaving pretty much the same way.

 

It's so frustrating when you pay for a nice premium game and I hear from a friend on android and their like "Lols, got that for free but I only played it for 10 minutes and then deleted it."

At least the developer is still getting paid...

 

[shrug] Just like how there are more than a handful for iOS users who expect premium features for free.

And if an Android game has ads, they're still paying for it. That's pretty much how it is on iOS these days it seems.

 

I don't think we need to somehow take solace that iOS users are somehow morally superior to Android users and there is a critical lack of evidence to the contrary anyway.

If you want to see what people's attitude is about paying when they don't have to, go back and research the history of Napster. It was quite sad to talk to people back then who really felt like they had no obligation to pay and many of them argued vehemently that it was NOT theft.

The attitude is not limited to platform and while it may be worse due to ease of theft it has little to do with one userbase being inherently worse than the other.

Dealing with the world is a whole lot easier when you just accept the fact that people suck in general.

 

I take it the time needed to develop something to the end also goes up exponentially if you don't go beyond a 2-person team? Not to mention also requiring costs, training, and time to work in collaboration tools?

There was a thread on how Gasketball, an Ipad game was a great game, but ended up being a financial disaster for the devs. They took 2 years to make such a game with a 2-person team, which unfortunately, sounds about right given the usual delays you can expect in software development, and IIRC, they were new to iOS development as well.

 

#Free2Play

 

I wonder if WOW and other MORP's are partially responsible for F2P. They created a generation of game players who are comfortable with microtransaction and subscription fees.

 

No. They are not. They just have adapted.

It's the casual crowd who is responsible for this.
By casual I mean that now even a woman in her 50s has something to throw her wallet at. Like Candy Crush or whatever. This wasnt a thing back on consoles and/or personal computers.

 

Amazing how quickly people's memories fade.

Casual gaming was a thing before mobile gaming. In fact, most "casual" games made in the last 10 years are more sophisticated than anything the Atari 2600 could do, so today's casual might very well have been yesterday's hardcore "real" game.

However, don't forget the phenomenon that was Bejeweled and how it even went to consoles. For that matter, the XBox 360 and PS3 both had marketplaces full of casual games you could download directly.

Not to mention the deluge of Flash games that were done after that format took off.

 

Cards games like magic the gathering are another precursor. It's no coincidence that Heartstone is doing so well in iOS.

 

As someone who was running a business that moved to F2P, I can say there's *exactly* one thing that led to the prevalence of F2P: The total collapse of "Premium" as a solidly sustainable business model on mobile that happened mid-2009. Even before F2P was a "proven" model on mobile, Premium was functionally dead in the water. At $1, it's impossible to make a living with a team unless you basically win the lottery. With F2P, you could adapt *how* you developed, iterate faster, and expand on things that were showing promise in a way that's extremely difficult to do with a buy-once model at $1. If it were commonplace for games to sell for $10, it'd be a radically different story.

But the rise of F2P? Simple. The race to $1 mid-2009 destroyed peoples' abilities to sustain teams of any kind of modest size for games of any kind of scale whatsoever.

 

While I'm not really a fan of Magic, i can't blame a game store for selling it, holding more events for them, and otherwise catering to them more than standard board games if that's what pays the bills, and keeps them open so the rest of us have a venue for gaming. However, some do take it far overboard