as an exercise, lets see if we can actually think of a way you can actually Improve a game with real money.
So lets look at what we can do with f2p, what has been done and what is possible to be done. The goal here is to come up with an outcome that is better than the single pay to play version, I'm skeptical that it can be done. (note i don't consider a multiplayer game with a larger player base to be better because it has more opponents).
So we have a few categories for things we can sell.
1. cosmetic items, (hats)
2. game-play items, (swords)
3. story content, (extra chapters)
4. world content, (multi-player levels, places to explore)
5. extrinsic content (music, avatars, shiny names)
6. game modes (capture the flag, deathmatch)
7. game time (charging for how long playing)
8.privileges (control over other players)
9. game ai (different enemies to fight?)
10. menu skins (gui stuff, blinged life bar)
11. in game money (just allows you to do more for less effort, the irony is here the player pays so they can spent less time playing the game)
From there we can split them down into what effect they have.
withholding player customization
withholding gameplay
withholding story content.
The key point here is no matter what you are doing you are asking the player for money to unlock content that has been withheld from them before hand. But withholding things from a player is one of the key design tools we have as designers, so surely we can make this work?
Perhaps we can envision a game where you need ranks of players, so you have controlling players that are the leaders of guilds, but for the game design to work the majority of players would have to be grunts, so you could pay for the privilege to be a controlling player. (but would this be any better than letting the most experienced players get this honor?)
Actually walking through this i have no idea how to use f2p to improve a game design...
I'm right with you Muzz. Nothing wrong with the F2P model in itself but simply no matter how it is implemented it will eventually mess with gameplay elements. Players will not just be operating the game as designed but operating with mechanisms to pay the developer - how difficult would this be every time to not cross someone's lines?
Some people at a movie would love an intermission to go and buy some snacks, some will downright hate it.
I do like your idea of free multiplayer, paid single as for many games this would make LAN games way easier and more legal.
---
Also I'm just not a fan of "supporting the developers" as an excuse. If you want to pay for things and send money to the developers then sure, more power to you but it should be the bonus effect of making a game that's worth trading money for. I let people know I had a negative opinion of F2P on the Hawken forums and like others got pretty much vilified as somebody who didn't want the game to survive.
It seems like you're essentially describing "paying for stuff" as "people withholding stuff from me unless I pay". You could just as easily say that developers who sell games for an upfront fee are withholding the entire game from you.
Why does the payment model even need to improve the game? If it's implementation is equivalent to upfront payment but delivers the games content in a way that attracts more players how is that not a good thing?
I agree that the way developers implement it often breaks and ruins a game but I see no issues with the way TF2 for example is monetized.
Why does the payment model even need to improve the game? If it's implementation is equivalent to upfront payment but delivers the games content in a way that attracts more players how is that not a good thing?
Not saying that it has to, but i do feel that as developers knowing exactly what flaws the system has is only going to improve your implementation.
Also the difference is between paying for it upfront and free to play is that when everyone buys the game upfront its on a level playing field and everyone has access to the full product.
for all intensive purposes, a commercial game given away for free is exactly the same as the paid version, whereas the f2p cannot be.
some friends just gave me two points on chat.
Some games like dota2 use money transactions as a way of feeding a community, as a ton of the store items are user generated and a percentage of the profit goes to them. That is a great implementation.
Also paid tournaments where a large amount of the money goes to a prize pool is a great idea.
both these solutions aren't traditional f2p though, they are essentially making a mini economy, which i think is an excellent idea.
The more time I put into it, the more I am willing to buy items (even if they are simply cosmetics, such as dota 2!)
EDIT: It is not definite that you will ruin your games by having paid items. Just do not have items that increase stats or something, do something like bonuses, Taunts. Follow the model of DOta 2 and TF2.
To be honest, even if its just a donation button that gets me no items.. I would pay the devs using that donation button if I really really loved the game. You should focus more on the content and the experience you will be providing.
The reason why F2P models fail sometimes is just that! You must ensure users love your product and they are passionate about it. Have a referral feature that gives the users some trivial amount of points for inviting their friends. When these rates go up (sky rocket!) you will have some what of an idea of how much people as passionate about your game (dedicated forums help too!)
One thing I thought of for F2P model was that you can join servers with no wait or something like that. Make users pay for convenience.
A level playing field from what standpoint? Vanity items typically have no impact on gameplay, is it important that every player have access to all of them?
From a gameplay perspective ideally the game is balanced to begin with and the player is being provided with more variety through access to other balanced races/characters and not tools that help them perform better than other players.
I have spent around 120-130 in Mech Warrior Online. This includes the $30 to start in the beta before release. I held off for quite some time before spending more than that 30. I have spent not a dime anywhere else.
This has everything to do with my friends playing and us doing co-op coordinated plays. Infact if it wasn't for them I wouldn't even have known the game existed let alone played it.
A level playing field from what standpoint? Vanity items typically have no impact on gameplay, is it important that every player have access to all of them?
From a gameplay perspective ideally the game is balanced to begin with and the player is being provided with more variety through access to other balanced races/characters and not tools that help them perform better than other players.
just in the sense that some players have things that other players don't.
A f2p model that only offers vanity items is a pretty damn weak sauce offering in my opinion as well. If you are going to destroy my immersion i think you should have a far better reasoning than that.
I can live with vanity effects like Hats and skins, but they still annoy me. They have no impact on gameplay but when I see a player enjoying them I can help but be reminded of how they got them. If everything was an up-front payment then that would be behind me when I start to play, now instead the game literally has "buy now" buttons in it. If I could turn off hats and skins on my end just so I don't have to see them then I would.
My other issue is that there's no way to evaluate the worth of this stuff - in a closed market - with arbitrary values. A game in the real world can be compared in worth to a movie, a piece of furniture, a bag of oranges; but there's no way for me to compare a rocket launcher to skin in one game, or to a rocket launcher in another rocket launcher in different game. I understand that making new content takes hard work and they deserve compensation but the market is still closed off and arbitrarily ruled: If I think a skin is worth $1, too bad it's $5 where you gonna go? Oh wait it's $15 now I edited the excel doc.
Paying for convenience is still not a solution since to me it represents the developers admitting to modifying the play experience to be poorer so we would be encouraged to pay for good service. Pay not to grind? If you call it grind then you're already doing it wrong.
A vanity item doesn't have to destroy immersion, I just mean things that change the look of a character that have no impact on gameplay, DOTA2's item store that you mentioned earlier would qualify and they vet the items to make sure they fit the game before they put them in.
I don't necessarily think everybody needs to have access to the same stuff especially if the things they aren't getting are things they don't care about. And a storefront is a pretty good way of filtering out the things people don't care about.
What do you think about League of Legends F2P model? There are no special champions (ie: not a pay to win model), they rotate which champions are free to play each week and you can unlock them all either by payment or by playing the game. Vanity skins are available by paying.
Just to give a far-back reference, if anyone remembers the free to play 'scorched earth' game "Gun Bound", it was popular in the polycount irc for a few months. At some point after everyone had been playing for a while, R13 showed up with a tricked-out setup. He was late to the game and was doing it as a catch-up / "I'm only playing for a short bit so I wanted to have fun" choice.
I haven't played the game, so i can't comment on it.
The reason why i see paying real world money as immersion breaking is that inputting credit card details mid game, or passwords for your paypal is pretty much the definition of breaking immersion for me.
I also stated that i thought that player economies seem to have proven themselves as the best model so far, even if they are few and far between. As it has benefits outside of providing a revenue stream for developers. its very hard to do though as to do it well the store needs to be moderated, and prices and fees regulated and fair.
I would struggle to put player economies and free to play in the same bundle, they are similar in implementation but the reasoning behind them is worlds apart. In the end it comes back to why we even consider this?
Is it to make money or make better games that people will remember and treasure for a long time to come?
I see comparisons between a full price (singleplayer) game, and a more mmo type game that needs money in the long run to sustain the developer/server costs.
I just think that's a unfair comparison, and the discussion should be about, do you want to pay for DLC's/expansions/subscription fee's or a micro-transaction model or comparing different implementations of the f2p model.
But I can't really think of a way for games such as world of tanks to survive on just the price of the box.
GW2 has a cashstore added on top of the price of the game, maybe I am naive, but I don't think that is just out pure greed.
I mean LOTRO went from a mmo that was basicly not gonna last long any more, to doing really well, and still existing to this day when they switched to f2p.
And if I remember well, LoL started out as a actual boxed fullprice game, and they gained their massive playerbase after switching to f2p (obviously not at once like magic, but over the years of using that money to develop the game).
So if you ask, "why we even consider this?", I think there are a lot of good examples out there of games that are doing amazing/better then they were/would if they would have been a fullprice game.
A lot has changed since for example Quake3, where you only had to pay the price for the box, and then the servers/maps/updates (mods like cpma wich basicly did the balancing/updates) was completely community run and didn't cost the developer anything, but seeing how everything has progressed I don't think that is gonna come back soon in triple-A games.
(for example because of piracy concerns)
Even a game like starcraft2 has to generate some money to keep that running, wich they do for example of basicly asking a fee/percentage of the income of tournaments.
just in the sense that some players have things that other players don't.
maybe I am understanding this the wrong way, but doesn't that come down to the mechanics of the game, games like LoL/hawken/WoT/and so on will always have unlocks in some way to keep you playing (because in this day and age people actually like this, I even remember an anecdote of a gamer getting angry at some game because it didn't have unlocks and everything was already there).
f2p in this case is just usage of that system to monetise the game, so I kind of feel like those are 2 seperate discussions.
I haven't played the game, so i can't comment on it.
The reason why i see paying real world money as immersion breaking is that inputting credit card details mid game, or passwords for your paypal is pretty much the definition of breaking immersion for me.
I also stated that i thought that player economies seem to have proven themselves as the best model so far, even if they are few and far between. As it has benefits outside of providing a revenue stream for developers. its very hard to do though as to do it well the store needs to be moderated, and prices and fees regulated and fair.
I would struggle to put player economies and free to play in the same bundle, they are similar in implementation but the reasoning behind them is worlds apart. In the end it comes back to why we even consider this?
Is it to make money or make better games that people will remember and treasure for a long time to come?
Yeah but not every gameplay experience needs to be immersive, I don't role play when I'm in a Starcraft match.
F2P sucks for many kinds of games yes, but it's not inherently bad and the improvements it provides the consumer are not necessarily to the gameplay itself as they are to the community (League of Legends, free players unlocking heros by playing the game keeps the community alive) and allowing content selection so people only have to pay for what they actually want.
Edit: I think the answer to your "why?" question in a lot of cases is "It's the only way to support the kinds of games we want to make"
All I'm saying is that in a perfect world where player counts don't matter (they do), free to play can only be detrimental to a game design in the traditional sense. So if you are going to do it you should do it for the right reasons.
From a game design standpoint I'm just asking to see ways that you can actually improve gameplay. Its an interesting idea.
Using F2P monetization to improve the gameplay of a game would be wonderful, I'm not trying to dispute that. I just don't think that should be the minimum requirement for justifying using a F2P model.
As long as the game delivers content to the player in a way that isn't exploitative or gamebreaking (pay to win being the worst offendor here) then I think it's fine to build a game around it.
Well a lot of it is matter of taste and indeed people like me do not like change. I pretty much have never played MMOs but just to show how hardcore I'm down on mixed game/payments the subscription fee was the major factor in that: simply didn't think games should be paid for continuously.
Immersion isn't required for a fun game but in-game payments definitely trip against it. Games are made up of diegetic and non-diegetic components: Diegetic are things that belong and can bee seen/understood by the virtual world and its inhabitants - Rocks trees, characters, enemies etc. Non-Diegetic are things that cannot be seen by the virtual world, but are seen and interacted with by the player - the hud, communicative sounds, button prompts. Real-world money items in F2P are non-diegetic, and possibly even beyond that: a part of the game that must remove the player from their fantasy world in order to be understood.
What's worse is that it feels like crossed-wires to me. Game Development is a business indeed, but I do my best to forget that when playing, and imagine in my fairy land that developers that really care about the play experience forget it too when designing game mechanics. At some point in F2P this is inseparable: something has to give. And since the devs need money it will be parts of the game that now must accommodate encouragement in player spending.
Well, looks like EA's mended (some of) their braindead ways... oxynary just messaged me up to point out that they've added Origin and the rest of the social aspects of the iOS variant of the game. Now I've got my old Springfield back, huzzah!
My username on there's "flaagan" like it is pretty much everywhere else.
Oh, another ftp game I've been playing a lot of lately, and the reason I started this thread, is called "Ayakashi: Ghost Guild". Kind of a card battle / story game with some really wicked art to it. If you decide to give it a go, use my friend code (stingray) during the setup.
When I feel developer deserve my support.
Game must be good for me to pay. When I spended in game 20h that's the sing of it being good.
I won't pay if the game is trying to strip me of my cash.
If I really like a game, and can see the developers really put the effort in, I'm happy to do some small purchases on mobile games. Maybe £1-£5.
Other F2P games on PC that are of a bigger scale I've spent up to £15 on. Blacklight Retribution to name one.
But the one that's taken the cake is World of Tanks. Must have spent around £200 on premium subscription and tanks. It's so much fun and so addictive, so I'm happy to look at it as a standard MMO with a subscription fee.
I think it's important to not look at all F2P games as having the same model. A game like World of Tanks wouldn't be looked down upon if it ONLY had the MMO subscription model. But they also allow you to play the game completely FREE (just means you progress with experience and in game money slower). So that's a bonus that they add the free element.
Other models are clearly just giving you a tiny bit before manipulating you to spend money.
On PC lately I've been playing War Thunder, a pretty simple but well done WW2 flight combat game. It is *quite* grindy and the pay to unlock scheme is quite pricey, so I probably will stick to just playing it casual.
Some of games are totally worth spending money. Usually I'm trying to find the best deal. For example I bought Bioshock Infinite for 24.90 (at http://www.go2arena.com/bioshock.html) when at the other stores it cost much more.
Replies
So lets look at what we can do with f2p, what has been done and what is possible to be done. The goal here is to come up with an outcome that is better than the single pay to play version, I'm skeptical that it can be done. (note i don't consider a multiplayer game with a larger player base to be better because it has more opponents).
So we have a few categories for things we can sell.
1. cosmetic items, (hats)
2. game-play items, (swords)
3. story content, (extra chapters)
4. world content, (multi-player levels, places to explore)
5. extrinsic content (music, avatars, shiny names)
6. game modes (capture the flag, deathmatch)
7. game time (charging for how long playing)
8.privileges (control over other players)
9. game ai (different enemies to fight?)
10. menu skins (gui stuff, blinged life bar)
11. in game money (just allows you to do more for less effort, the irony is here the player pays so they can spent less time playing the game)
From there we can split them down into what effect they have.
withholding player customization
withholding gameplay
withholding story content.
The key point here is no matter what you are doing you are asking the player for money to unlock content that has been withheld from them before hand. But withholding things from a player is one of the key design tools we have as designers, so surely we can make this work?
Perhaps we can envision a game where you need ranks of players, so you have controlling players that are the leaders of guilds, but for the game design to work the majority of players would have to be grunts, so you could pay for the privilege to be a controlling player. (but would this be any better than letting the most experienced players get this honor?)
Actually walking through this i have no idea how to use f2p to improve a game design...
Some people at a movie would love an intermission to go and buy some snacks, some will downright hate it.
I do like your idea of free multiplayer, paid single as for many games this would make LAN games way easier and more legal.
---
Also I'm just not a fan of "supporting the developers" as an excuse. If you want to pay for things and send money to the developers then sure, more power to you but it should be the bonus effect of making a game that's worth trading money for. I let people know I had a negative opinion of F2P on the Hawken forums and like others got pretty much vilified as somebody who didn't want the game to survive.
Why does the payment model even need to improve the game? If it's implementation is equivalent to upfront payment but delivers the games content in a way that attracts more players how is that not a good thing?
I agree that the way developers implement it often breaks and ruins a game but I see no issues with the way TF2 for example is monetized.
Also the difference is between paying for it upfront and free to play is that when everyone buys the game upfront its on a level playing field and everyone has access to the full product.
for all intensive purposes, a commercial game given away for free is exactly the same as the paid version, whereas the f2p cannot be.
some friends just gave me two points on chat.
Some games like dota2 use money transactions as a way of feeding a community, as a ton of the store items are user generated and a percentage of the profit goes to them. That is a great implementation.
Also paid tournaments where a large amount of the money goes to a prize pool is a great idea.
both these solutions aren't traditional f2p though, they are essentially making a mini economy, which i think is an excellent idea.
EDIT: It is not definite that you will ruin your games by having paid items. Just do not have items that increase stats or something, do something like bonuses, Taunts. Follow the model of DOta 2 and TF2.
To be honest, even if its just a donation button that gets me no items.. I would pay the devs using that donation button if I really really loved the game. You should focus more on the content and the experience you will be providing.
The reason why F2P models fail sometimes is just that! You must ensure users love your product and they are passionate about it. Have a referral feature that gives the users some trivial amount of points for inviting their friends. When these rates go up (sky rocket!) you will have some what of an idea of how much people as passionate about your game (dedicated forums help too!)
One thing I thought of for F2P model was that you can join servers with no wait or something like that. Make users pay for convenience.
From a gameplay perspective ideally the game is balanced to begin with and the player is being provided with more variety through access to other balanced races/characters and not tools that help them perform better than other players.
This has everything to do with my friends playing and us doing co-op coordinated plays. Infact if it wasn't for them I wouldn't even have known the game existed let alone played it.
just in the sense that some players have things that other players don't.
A f2p model that only offers vanity items is a pretty damn weak sauce offering in my opinion as well. If you are going to destroy my immersion i think you should have a far better reasoning than that.
My other issue is that there's no way to evaluate the worth of this stuff - in a closed market - with arbitrary values. A game in the real world can be compared in worth to a movie, a piece of furniture, a bag of oranges; but there's no way for me to compare a rocket launcher to skin in one game, or to a rocket launcher in another rocket launcher in different game. I understand that making new content takes hard work and they deserve compensation but the market is still closed off and arbitrarily ruled: If I think a skin is worth $1, too bad it's $5 where you gonna go? Oh wait it's $15 now I edited the excel doc.
Paying for convenience is still not a solution since to me it represents the developers admitting to modifying the play experience to be poorer so we would be encouraged to pay for good service. Pay not to grind? If you call it grind then you're already doing it wrong.
so vanity>convenience>power
I don't necessarily think everybody needs to have access to the same stuff especially if the things they aren't getting are things they don't care about. And a storefront is a pretty good way of filtering out the things people don't care about.
What do you think about League of Legends F2P model? There are no special champions (ie: not a pay to win model), they rotate which champions are free to play each week and you can unlock them all either by payment or by playing the game. Vanity skins are available by paying.
The reason why i see paying real world money as immersion breaking is that inputting credit card details mid game, or passwords for your paypal is pretty much the definition of breaking immersion for me.
I also stated that i thought that player economies seem to have proven themselves as the best model so far, even if they are few and far between. As it has benefits outside of providing a revenue stream for developers. its very hard to do though as to do it well the store needs to be moderated, and prices and fees regulated and fair.
I would struggle to put player economies and free to play in the same bundle, they are similar in implementation but the reasoning behind them is worlds apart. In the end it comes back to why we even consider this?
Is it to make money or make better games that people will remember and treasure for a long time to come?
I just think that's a unfair comparison, and the discussion should be about, do you want to pay for DLC's/expansions/subscription fee's or a micro-transaction model or comparing different implementations of the f2p model.
But I can't really think of a way for games such as world of tanks to survive on just the price of the box.
GW2 has a cashstore added on top of the price of the game, maybe I am naive, but I don't think that is just out pure greed.
I mean LOTRO went from a mmo that was basicly not gonna last long any more, to doing really well, and still existing to this day when they switched to f2p.
And if I remember well, LoL started out as a actual boxed fullprice game, and they gained their massive playerbase after switching to f2p (obviously not at once like magic, but over the years of using that money to develop the game).
So if you ask, "why we even consider this?", I think there are a lot of good examples out there of games that are doing amazing/better then they were/would if they would have been a fullprice game.
A lot has changed since for example Quake3, where you only had to pay the price for the box, and then the servers/maps/updates (mods like cpma wich basicly did the balancing/updates) was completely community run and didn't cost the developer anything, but seeing how everything has progressed I don't think that is gonna come back soon in triple-A games.
(for example because of piracy concerns)
Even a game like starcraft2 has to generate some money to keep that running, wich they do for example of basicly asking a fee/percentage of the income of tournaments.
maybe I am understanding this the wrong way, but doesn't that come down to the mechanics of the game, games like LoL/hawken/WoT/and so on will always have unlocks in some way to keep you playing (because in this day and age people actually like this, I even remember an anecdote of a gamer getting angry at some game because it didn't have unlocks and everything was already there).
f2p in this case is just usage of that system to monetise the game, so I kind of feel like those are 2 seperate discussions.
F2P sucks for many kinds of games yes, but it's not inherently bad and the improvements it provides the consumer are not necessarily to the gameplay itself as they are to the community (League of Legends, free players unlocking heros by playing the game keeps the community alive) and allowing content selection so people only have to pay for what they actually want.
Edit: I think the answer to your "why?" question in a lot of cases is "It's the only way to support the kinds of games we want to make"
All I'm saying is that in a perfect world where player counts don't matter (they do), free to play can only be detrimental to a game design in the traditional sense. So if you are going to do it you should do it for the right reasons.
From a game design standpoint I'm just asking to see ways that you can actually improve gameplay. Its an interesting idea.
As long as the game delivers content to the player in a way that isn't exploitative or gamebreaking (pay to win being the worst offendor here) then I think it's fine to build a game around it.
Immersion isn't required for a fun game but in-game payments definitely trip against it. Games are made up of diegetic and non-diegetic components: Diegetic are things that belong and can bee seen/understood by the virtual world and its inhabitants - Rocks trees, characters, enemies etc. Non-Diegetic are things that cannot be seen by the virtual world, but are seen and interacted with by the player - the hud, communicative sounds, button prompts. Real-world money items in F2P are non-diegetic, and possibly even beyond that: a part of the game that must remove the player from their fantasy world in order to be understood.
What's worse is that it feels like crossed-wires to me. Game Development is a business indeed, but I do my best to forget that when playing, and imagine in my fairy land that developers that really care about the play experience forget it too when designing game mechanics. At some point in F2P this is inseparable: something has to give. And since the devs need money it will be parts of the game that now must accommodate encouragement in player spending.
My username on there's "flaagan" like it is pretty much everywhere else.
Oh, another ftp game I've been playing a lot of lately, and the reason I started this thread, is called "Ayakashi: Ghost Guild". Kind of a card battle / story game with some really wicked art to it. If you decide to give it a go, use my friend code (stingray) during the setup.
Game must be good for me to pay. When I spended in game 20h that's the sing of it being good.
I won't pay if the game is trying to strip me of my cash.
Other F2P games on PC that are of a bigger scale I've spent up to £15 on. Blacklight Retribution to name one.
But the one that's taken the cake is World of Tanks. Must have spent around £200 on premium subscription and tanks. It's so much fun and so addictive, so I'm happy to look at it as a standard MMO with a subscription fee.
I think it's important to not look at all F2P games as having the same model. A game like World of Tanks wouldn't be looked down upon if it ONLY had the MMO subscription model. But they also allow you to play the game completely FREE (just means you progress with experience and in game money slower). So that's a bonus that they add the free element.
Other models are clearly just giving you a tiny bit before manipulating you to spend money.