If you thought free-to-play gaming models were all about megacorporate philanthropy, think again.
I mean, do you think Zynga got rich off people’s gratitude?
No, they made heaps of cash selling stuff to people who reckon they paid nothing for the game in the first place, so they’ll spend more than that box price on premium extras.
“The reason some people are moving to this area is that free to play showed up in the “social gaming” segment (Facebook) and made a few people (Zynga) very rich,” writes Minecraft dev Markus “notch” Persson over on his blog.
“It’s been tried in other genres in other markets with decent success. By ‘success’, I mean ‘it’s profitable’. The reason anyone switches to ‘free to play’ is to make more money. You get your players hooked on your game,and then you try to monetise them.
“The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psychological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than Half-Life 2.
“So instead of calling it ‘free to play’, we should call it ‘as expensive as you want it to be’ or something.”
Or something.
Minecraft dev says Free-to-play isn’t very free << Comments and views
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