This is truly a self-inflicted wound right now. I read a great article about the making of Fallout 4 and how they've had a team of about 60 people working on it. Where Call of Duty games, no joke, have over 1000. As a 15+ year veteran of the software industry that boggles my mind. I've worked on some very complex projects and once you hit a certain team size trying to get anything accomplished becomes an ongoing effort in diminishing returns. So we now have multi-million dollar game budgets that yield possibly a break-even. The big publishing houses all committed to AAA titles when the economy went south but what they committed to was a 4 way game of chicken. That strategy killed off THQ and left the big publishers scrambling to pick that corpse clean, all while doubling down on a strategy that killed a major player without increasing their profits. You can tell that F2P has crested because the big players like EA have jumped in both feet first. Ubisoft is testing the waters but I expect them to do the same soon. 2K games? Oh yeah, they've been there already. Frankly, I'm ready for the big crash to happen. I don't believe we'll see any wisdom in the industry, so just let the catastrophe happen so we can all move on. F2P will be around forever, but it's currently plateaued and isn't going to advance until something major happens.
I believe Freemium games are bad for everyone, but I have a different perspective because I created a Freemium game with ads and IAP, then changed it to Premium and re-released it the other day. And I was a little surprised at the response I've got; people really do want premium games. You can read more about that decision here, but the gist is that it's now a better game. When developing a freemium game, you have to make a lot of gameplay decisions that you *know* will suck for the players. Like charging just a little too much for some items, so they have to buy gold. Putting ads in the way to annoy them. Locking up some of the best content until they pay for it. For me, the thing I dislike the most is just not knowing how much a game is really going to cost me, or wondering how annoyed I'm going to be when I can't go any further unless I buy some gems or watch some video ads. When done poorly, as it often is, it really hurts the gameplay. Even extremely popular multiplayer games with competitive elements have problems. They make a ton of money, but it ruins the game when this scenario happens: 1. I get beaten. 2. I make an in-app purchase and buy an item to make me more powerful. 3. I beat the guy that beat me. 4. He buys an item to make him more powerful. 5. Repeat steps 1-4 forever until one of us decides this game is stupid, or until we have no money left. Dave
See but you're falling into the classic trap of giving out a couple dozen promo codes, have a few people give you positive feedback, and assume "Well, shit, this is what the world wants." The same sort of thing recently happened here- http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JakeSones/20151214/261712/The_story_of_a_pretty_decent_game_failing.php ...Which, again, is totally cool if you've got a day job that's paying your bills and releasing iOS games is just something you do in your spare time, considering any revenue beyond the $100 a year the iOS developer membership costs to be gravy. Unfortunately, that kind of logic doesn't work for any "real" studio with people who need to pay mortgages, feed families, pay health insurance premiums, and things like that. Reality sucks, most of the time.
Well Eli, if that's not a bit of F2P apologizing, I'm not sure what is. I sometimes wonder if you guys meant this site to be more for developers than consumers. While your concern for paying developer mortgages is laudable, it seems to be the go-to rationale for dismissing or ignoring the real issue of games being compromised by the F2P model. Every time someone points out why it sucks for consumers, they're met with "games are expensive to make... reality sucks... deal with it...". Maybe this is the "future of gaming"... maybe not, but you're not doing yourselves any favors trying to wish the issue into the cornfield.
He is not apologizing for anything. He's stating that there aren't enough people who want pay-once premium games to reasonably support a full-time developer, in the vast majority of cases. He's not saying "Yes, use scummy free to play tactics!" he's saying don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone wants and will pay a decent price for your game because a dozen people on the TouchArcade forums said so.
I think there's some circular reasoning going on here. Considering apple store games cost a fraction of what vid games used to cost, how is it possible there are not enough people who want pay-once premium? How did game developers survive before the App Store? It's this bargain bin model, promoted by the industry, that has created the 'dearth of paying customers'. It's by design, and we all know why. If the model disappeared tomorrow, kids would go straight back to buying their games like in the days of yore. Yes, there would be fewer games and fewer developers, but that's preferable to getting consumers to subsidize and sustain a bloated monster.
Freemium started long before Apple even entered the smartphone market. I remember seeing f2p MMO games back 2004/2005, mostly from Korean companies at the time. It's expanded since to all markets, not just iOS.
What else do you expect Eli and crew to say? Do you want dozens of articles a day raging on how awful f2p is? Do you want them to ignore the facts that are right in front of you that premium makes VERY LITTLE money these days on iOS? TA represents tiny percent of the entire iOS consumer base, and the anti f2p sentiment found here doesn't exist outside of niche gaming communities like this. Most people look at mobile games are being as disposable as a Starbucks coffee. Therefore, any real company who actually needs to make money to survive is a fool to not at least consider f2p when making a mobile game.
This really just goes to show how naive a lot of the people who want to rage against free to play are to the history of games in general, regardless of how much they want to profess otherwise. In the US, Facebook was a huge source of massively popular free to play gaming well before the iPhone even existed. Carrier billing in Asian territories made microtransactions for things in mobile games a reality far before 2004/2005, even if that's when the popularity of Asian MMO's with those pay models began to reach western shores. This isn't a new thing, and as long as it keeps making more money than single purchase games, isn't going to stop anytime soon.
It's interesting, I've been railing on about what I perceive to be TA's industry friendly editorial slant. I just read the sobering FDG patreon thread, and think I need to modify my views a bit. TA didn't create the environment we find ourselves in, they're just trying to provide a service within it. On reflection, I think my attitude has been somewhat accusatorial and unfair... Dudes I get it, you're just trying to make a go of it like everyone else. I won't abandon my views on f2p, but I'm sorry if I've been a dick about it.
*sigh* It's not an apology it is an ugly reality. People think mobile game development is "cheap" but the cost per hour is no different than any other kind of development work. There is nothing magical about app development unless the people doing it are willing to work for basically free and get almost nothing in return. Which will get us lots of nifty little games that will last us a short period of time before we wander off to the next. In other words, casual puzzle games and the occasional game with any real depth made by someone REALLY dedicated. People complain that mobile games aren't console quality, but those people need to take a harder look. There are indeed incredible gameplay experiences pushing the limits of mobile hardware. Games that would be too much for a Dreamcast to play and a PS2 might struggle with. Yeah, it's older hardware but you also have to go look at the size of an old PS2 or XBox and compare that to a smartphone. What is being done is AMAZING! Except the general public wants it for under $10. Under $5 would be better. $1 is really the sweet spot but we'll wait for it to go on a free promo before downloading. How in the world is that model supposed to make money? Even if the time to develop is a quarter what it takes to do a full AAA title on the console you still need to be able to release at a quarter the price of a new game, or $15. That is super conservative by the way, it's all probably higher than that. People RAGE at a game that dares to release at $15. I expect people to mail dead animals to SquareEnix everytime they release a premium game. I HATE the F2P trends but the reality of the market is that is how mobile makes money right now. It won't always be that way, but it's the reality now and will likely stay that way for at least a couple of years.
At this point it appears you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. I don't know, how is it possible I used to buy CDs in the '90s for $20 each? And yet, free, ad-supported streaming music and one dollar songs are our reality nowadays. Go figure. They didn't. Not indie developers at least. That's what's so different about today than in the entire previous history of video games and why the "it worked in the old days, no reason it couldn't work now!" mentality is so wrongheaded. Bargain bin model promoted by the industry? This is some Grade A tin foil hat talk. Free to play on mobile evolved and mutated into what it is today of the course of many years. Games started out at ten dollars on iOS, and at the time it felt like that was a nice sweet spot. Cheaper than console and PC games but they generally were lesser experiences anyway, but WAY WAY better than the shitty feature phone games that were blowing up at the time that cost about the same price. But since developers had full control over pricing, they all started dropping prices left and right to get noticed. Eventually they ended up at the bottom, 99¢. Even at the bargain bin price lots of customers were feeling burned because they bought a shitty game, and even at 99¢ the purchases add up. And since everyone was always having sales, why even buy something at full price right away? So then even 99¢ games were hard to sell, so people started going free. Even if you didn't make any money, at least your game and your name was getting out there, or at least that was the argument at that time. Then it seemed free with ads was a sufficient model, and if you could drive the proper number of downloads it could actually pay a decent living. So then PAID free app promotions started, where developers would literally pay tens of thousands of dollars to a website to promote their freebie sale in the hopes that driving a few million downloads would more than make up the difference. In the majority of the cases, it didn't. But yes, the industry was TOTALLY responsible for and wanted that, right? They were super happy they had to make a game, charge absolutely nothing for it, pay out the ass to even let people know they could download it for free, and then pray to the lottery gods that they'd somehow at least get their money back and hopefully if their prayers are answered actually turn some sort of profit. Yes, what a great life! They hoped for all that, you're right! Apple adding in-app purchasing actually balanced out this whole debacle. Now you could have the free game and remove the barrier of entry for people to try it without risking even a dollar. Then if they liked it they could pay for stuff from inside the game. It really is the most ideal model to all parties involved. But it gets abused by some, and then people like yourself just lump everything together in black and white about "free to play is garbage!" It shows a severe lack of understanding of the industry. Citation needed? The race to the bottom strategy started well before free to play. But beyond that, there's just too much supply when it comes to video games. Read through this thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1167542 Game development has never been as open to anybody as it is right now, and the result is that everybody and their brother are making video games now. There are too many good games to play and not enough time. So no, there's not a mob of people rushing out to buy each and every new game at full price when it releases. Back in the day people weren't as concerned dropping $50 or so bucks on a game, because at best there was one big game coming out a month. It was something you could get excited for and plan for, and once that game finally came out you'd play it to death, maybe even for months or years. That $50 went a long way. Nowadays we are literally bathing in great games to play, and they all are drastically cheaper than games used to be. Why would I rush out to buy a game at full price when I have more than enough to play in the meantime and that new game will just be cheaper in 6 months or a year anyway? Pretending that a little website like ours is to cause for this, or evil corporate executives created and are perpetuating all of this is just plain insane. Ignoring the reality of the situation and saying "Just get rid of it! Things will work out because… reasons!" is childish and naive. And that goes back to my original argument that you seem much smarter than that and you're probably just arguing for funsies now. EDIT: And now I've read all the post left while I was writing my reply, including Oscar's apology, and now I too feel like a dick. Sorry for getting heated in this response, free to play is on par with religion and politics when it comes to passion about discussing it and opposing viewpoints.
It's all good man, you guys take a lot of undeserved shit. I know cuz I've been shoveling some of it. Anyway, my issues with our vampiric corporate culture shouldn't be laid at your doorstep.
The AppStore is floated with freemium. To me that's a good thing. Now completion get devs to dance on a pole for the player. To get our attention they got play nice or they will get replaced by there copy cats that play nice.
By not spending any money a game make it easy for the player to quit, and also the fact that the AppStore is full of copy cat games or " copy paste" games ,now you can just quit a game and try one of the copy cats until you find one which please you. And is easy on your wallet. For example Contest of campion brings a log of new mechanic to the injustice formula- but it has an Internet connection required.( I hate that) However I got a easy fix The brutal zombies fighting game which I forgot the name of got all those mechanic plus added some new mechanics. And# You can play it offline
