I often see free-to-play game designs where every interaction is a potential monetisation path. These games want to sell energy, buffs, character unlocks, aesthetic items, rule adjustments, experience points and so on. Usually this is because their developers are trying to make the business cases for their games. By showing that all roads lead to cash, the hope is that the project will be signed off.
Creating many roads to monetisation might sound good but there's a point beyond which it becomes pay-to-win. At that point the game loses a reason to be played, and players sense it. You can sell a lot within a game, but its important to always have at least one dimension of it that can't be bought as that ensures the motivation to play. So I've created the Free-to-Play Triangle, which you can hopefully use to sanity-check your economy.
Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time. There is more than one kind of viable graph, but knowing which kind you are aiming for is important. It should affect every strategic or marketing decision that you make. This week's news that Draw Something's user numbers have already dropped by 30% is significant, for example. It makes Zynga's purchase of it look like a lot of money spent based on misunderstanding that game's graph.
Do you know which kind of graph you are creating, and are you making the right choices to improve it? Are you targeting your monetization strategy in the right way, or are you basing it on a faulty understanding of its likely graph?
CNN recently asked why games are never finished by most players. In an age when production values are so high, it’s a very valid question. The industry response is often that older players with work and family commitments simply can’t play as much as they used to, so this makes the case for shorter, more intense, games.
I disagree. In my experience, players find the time to play just as readers find the time to read. Online games also indicate that games can occupy many hundreds of hours for motivated players in the right circumstances.
The uncomfortable question to ask is whether the problem is the games rather than the players. Simply put, are players not completing games because they’re boring?
A depressing story that occasionally does the rounds of blogs and forums is that of working conditions in the games industry. Whether it’s EA_spouse or the recent revelations about the conditions at Team Bondi (of LA Noire fame), the sorry story of how the pressure cooker environment of game making leads good people to become crazymakers is a long and ignominious one.
It’s sad for three reasons. Firstly that there are studios out there that think nothing of abusing staff. Secondly that, despite the overtime, they still can’t manage to ship games within a reasonable timeframe. And thirdly that developers young and old seem to think that this is the only way that life can be.
Have faith friends. There is more to life than this.
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