I find myself scratching my head over the continued bursts of angry criticism against the Free to Play business model.
Here is Michael Thomsen writing in Kill Screen, “Will Work for Fun“:
The original Super Mario Bros. defined the console blockbuster with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. After going free-to-play, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times (though some versions are still sold for 99 cents). The scope and stakes of videogame commerce have irrevocably changed, and, in a way, the value of the medium has degraded as a result. Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Worse yet, they are using them as an interactive form of muzak, creating a lively backdrop against which the small percentage of people willing to spend money on new quests or in-game trinkets will feel more likely to spend.
The value of the medium has degraded? Really? On a basic level, I still feel that this type of criticism is eerily similar to the kinds of criticisms that people tend to direct at video games in general: commercial, exploitative, devoid of artistic merit etc…
There seems to an underlying conservatism at play, where we intuitively believe that what we grew up with (games being sold in boxes at fixed price points) is a neutral good, and that everything else is ultimately a perversion. But all business models have a built-in skew: the boxed model skews towards pretty graphics and a well-designed first-15-minute experience, after which the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive.
On the other hand, when I say this (that all business models and incentive structures have a built-in skew), I can hear myself mimicking my undergraduate university teachers: “games are always already influenced by business models” (the “always already” part signals that you are part of the clique).
So that also feels like a cheap argument. I was entertaining the thought that it has to do with a basic conception of games (the magic circle if you will) as an egalitarian space where things like money are not supposed to make a difference, and the free to play and microtransactions seem offensive because they make the playing field skewed and unfair. (See the report linked below.)
Again, the default counter-argument would be that this is an illusion – because there never is any pure game space where money does not matter and so on. But this is again too easy: the fundamental fact is that our conventions of game-playing (and sportspersonship) involve trying to create a type of pure egalitarian space, regardless of the fact that this can never be achieved a 100% (and regardless of what researchers think).
Michael Thomsen discusses free to play and capitalism at length, but ultimately I think we need to acknowledge that money is just one of many different resources (and not the only one worth talking about). I recently heard an established game developer argue that microtransactions are fair because they level the playing field between him and the people with more time on their hands, and I have entertained the same thought myself. Microtransactions are really a type of “executive summary” for games.
And that is the bottom line for me: no business model is neutral, but it is also true that free to play can collide with some of our fundamental assumptions about what games should be. And yet … for some games, the more expensive executive summary just is the better deal. (And the task of Free to Play game designers is to make it so, of course.)
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PS. Here is a study of player perceptions of free to play: “Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle”, by Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun.
