next »

[larsiusprime]

I've been thinking a lot about Free 2 Play recently and figured I'd try to apply my "four currencies" theory to it and see if had any explanatory power.

Free 2 Play and the Four Currencies

The basic idea builds on my previous article, Piracy and the four currencies, where I try to explain the psychology of piracy in terms of the forces that motivate people other than money (mainly, "spending" time, pain-in-the-butt, and moral integrity).

Anyways, I'd be interested in your thoughts on it.

[Chris Koźmik]

I have been doing F2P for many years (with a reasonable financial success, it's the source of majority of my income right now), and I would say "normal" devs don't get it They all loathe it and think it's immoral and invent strange ideas like "exchange time to money to boredom". It's not that this is not true, but it's very shallow. Only the "best" companies like Zynga do it this way. Others do normal games and don't rely on the player getting annoyed.

It's actually much simplier. There is a F2P game. There are some people that play it who form a community. Some of them are rich some are poor. The rich ones pay for stuff (and not that rarely they buy stuff for their poor friends) the poor ones do not pay for things. The developer gets money, everyone is happy.

The key word here is COMMUNITY. Those people play together (I can't really see F2P work for singleplayer). Without this there is no F2P.

[Muz]

I play F2P a lot and agree with Archibald.

The 'proper' F2P business model is more similar to Starbucks. Starbucks creates a nice place for people to meet and talk, and sell coffee on the side. It tries to guilt you into buying some coffee, but doesn't go all nagware on you.

A F2P creates a meeting point for people to sit, play a game together, chat. Usually sells things on the side. A lot of people scoff at "luxury/appearance goods" being sold on a MMORPG, but the system works because everyone knows each other. Some people like having the 'prestige' of being a regular donor to the game.

Also when you have a community, the $I value really goes up. You're no longer supporting just the developer, you're also supporting the rest of the community.

Donationware does work... see Dwarf Fortress and the Humble Bundles.

If you set a price of $20, people will only pay $20. If you set a price of "pay anything", most people will pay a little less than their $I. A lot will pay the bare minimum. Some may pay $500.

It's a nice article though. Agreed with your other one on piracy, but this one has a lot of holes in it.

[Chris Koźmik]

Donationware does work... see Dwarf Fortress and the Humble Bundles.

Do not mistake donationware with F2P, these are completely different beasts (althrough, I agree that some of the feeling of "helping the developer" is present in both). The problem is that when it comes to donationware there is always the same success story, it includes DF and Humble Bundle and... that's the end of the list. When it comes to F2P it's not only about Farmville, the list can go on and on, there are thousand examples (most of which most people never heard about, yet these are successful financially).

The difference between F2P and donationware is that in F2P the financial success is a norm while in donationware it is a rare exception.
At least that's the impression I'm getting, I know only about F2P, never tried donationware

[larsiusprime]

I wouldn't consider the HiB to be donationware, in fact the linked article I mentioned in the original topic explicitly contrasts Pay-What-You-Want to Donationware.

There's a big difference between "pay what you think it's worth" and "take this, and if you feel like it later, please pay me something." Mechanically they're similar (you can pay as much or as little as you want for something, and the price is up to you) but psychologically I would say they're very different, because Pay-What-You-Want still "asks for the sale."

There will always be an anecdotal project somewhere that subsists on Donationware, sure, but that doesn't prove it as a consistently reliable business model.

[Hima]

'Surviving HIghschool' is a game that relies on narrative and yet integrate F2P pretty well. They make it like a tv drama series. You can play the latest episode now, but it will only last for a week. However, you can pay money to buy these episodes and play it whenever you want.

As for donationware, just putting the game out there for free and crosses your fingers hoping for people to throw you money will rarely work. That is definitely not what Dwarf Fortress is doing. Dwarf Fortress proves itself to offer a unique experience that players know that there is no alternative, and without supporting, their source of entertainment would die. They also provide 'physical' item with highly emotional value to people who donate. This includes originally written story just for you, drawing made by the creators send to you personally, and putting you on list of donators. You don't just rely on releasing your games for free. You use your game as a tool to generate revenue from something else. This is already what many indie musicians are doing - releasing their music for free, and sell the physical CD, or merchandises instead.

For me, the problem with F2P at the moment is it allows the creators to abuse this and manipulate the players. The big guys in social games in Japan are doing this, intentionally making an item that break the game balance.
With that said, I think we certainly need more F2P that is not 'evil' or 'manipulative'.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDIT :

Recently I've been playing 'Puzzle Craft'. From what I understand, it is a paid app, but the mechanic and features in the game are very much like F2P games. I think this is what they call 'Paidmium' : a game that combine both elements in the paid games and freemium games.

From what I've played, it seems like in a paidmium game, the cost for $P is low. Grinding and time-consuming activity is still there, but it is not as abusive as other freemium game. (Waiting 2 hours just to create a monster, etc.)  To be honest, it feels like normal paid game, but with options to help you advance the game faster in exchange of some money.

Also, the game is a single player game with no social element. I'm not sure how much money does it make, but I remember seeing the game on top ranking quite often.

[Muz]

Donationware does work... see Dwarf Fortress and the Humble Bundles.

Do not mistake donationware with F2P, these are completely different beasts (althrough, I agree that some of the feeling of "helping the developer" is present in both). The problem is that when it comes to donationware there is always the same success story, it includes DF and Humble Bundle and... that's the end of the list. When it comes to F2P it's not only about Farmville, the list can go on and on, there are thousand examples (most of which most people never heard about, yet these are successful financially).

The difference between F2P and donationware is that in F2P the financial success is a norm while in donationware it is a rare exception.
At least that's the impression I'm getting, I know only about F2P, never tried donationware

There's lots of other good 'commercial' donationware too... mIRC, Sublime Text, jQuery. It's an uncommon method. Though you do have to bundle a tiny gift with it. It depends on your definition of 'donation', do TF2 hats count?

Of course, it doesn't work with a lot of things. Dwarf Fortress has to be donationware because it's permanently in alpha. mIRC is easily the most popular IRC client in the world. If they charged for it, people would just find another IRC client. And because you've got people who log onto it every day and see the nag screen, mIRC gets a trickle of money.

Look at Farmville. If people didn't drag their friends into playing, the popularity of the game would never take off. Heck, look at the failure of Farmville 2 - FV2 is a far superior game, actually very technically impressive. But without the strength of communities, it flopped. People got their friends to play. They got friends who quit to start playing again. People would click a few cows and then just toss money to not play. I mean, the funny thing is that nobody really wanted to play Farmville, and they literally paid NOT to play it. It was just a social show off thing. And when people got sick of Zynga's money grubbing, the social pillars collapsed. Nobody played because their friends were no longer playing.

It's more complicated than just running the numbers.. there's too many blurred gambles and a lot of conditions. You won't be able to sell Warcraft on donationware/F2P, but you would probably be able to pull it off with WoW.