According to Easy Studios general manager guy Ben Cousins, selling new games for $60 is “exploitative”. The fact that his company is primarily involved in EA’s free-play projects Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, Lord of Ultima, and Battleforge has nothing whatsoever to do with this.
“I can’t think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60,” he tells Rock, Paper, Shotgun in a recent interview. “That’s a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively.”
He explains that for “90% of people”, the play-for-free business model “means going into a game and playing for free. They are part of the community and they never need spend a penny. A very large proportion of players play for free. A small number of players will get so into the game that they will want to buy some stuff. What they buy gives them a small play advantage, you could say something like a 5-10% advantage. Or It makes the character look cool, or we might add in some bought-in clan features. So overall free-to-play is very simple. It’s a try before you buy model.”
Because buying extra junk that gives you an advantage over the people who don’t buy the extra junk isn’t exploitative, of course.
“What we do is enable everyone to play the game, and figure out if they like it. If they don’t like it they can walk away and they don’t lose anything. How many times have we all bought crappy games for $60, right? And the majority of people in our game spend less than that – the cost of a full-priced game. So what we’re selling is a cheaper than full price game that you can try before you buy. If you choose to buy at all.”
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