Is Free-To-Play the Future of Gaming?

Free-to-play is all the rage. Though the F2P movement has been on the rise for a while, it hit mainstream gaming like a ton of bricks over the summer. And like any new trend, it takes a while for companies to get all the bugs worked out. Let’s look at a couple of games and see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the free to play model.

League of Legends
It isn’t surprising that the free-to-play model for League of Legends is pretty solid overall given how Riot’s business model grew out of the existing success of Defense of the Ancients. There are a few basic champion archetypes focused around ranged or melee play styles and team builds. Diversity within those archetypes generates a ton of playable options. Each week the lineup of free champions changes, providing a selection of characters of varying difficulty and type. As you play you earn Influence Points, one of their two types of currency, which you can spend to purchase buffs, permanent access to champions, and other minor things like alternate skins. While the game lobby has a visible store button and there is a steady stream of information about what it for sale, it never feels like you’re being pressured into buying something you don’t want or need. With “real” money, you can buy Riot Points (the other in-game currency) which provide a shortcut to buying any of the above buffs or champions.

In my mind, the key to the success of League of Legends is that the game is fun. If it’s your kind of thing, the game is easily worth paying for. The competitive nature of the game and inclusion of user-friendly community options increases the desire to do well and helps to justify the cost. While I was aware of the constant presence of purchasable content, I didn’t realize how low key the approach really was until I played Crimson Alliance.

Crimson Alliance
Crimson Alliance has the distinction of being the first free to play title available on XBox Live. It’s a fun dungeon crawler in the style of Diablo and offers up purchaseable content in the form of additional gear and characters. The game seems to be totally aware of how much it is capitalizing on the growing anticipation for Blizzard’s next entry into that series. The self awareness of it’s potentially short market window might be where my problems with it arise. While Crimson Alliance is fun to play and the controls are intuitive, the experience of playing it is jarring and left me with a sour taste in my mouth. The game constantly harangues you to make a purchase, from the moment you fire it up to the point where you get sick of it and have to sit though several screens of sales pitch just to get back to the XBox menu. What could be an enjoyable experience became something I stopped playing in short order. If you love the game you might be able to tolerate the included hard-sell, but for me it made a decent game into something I wanted nothing to do with.

Rusty Hearts
One of the latest free-to-play title to hit Steam, Rusty Hearts sounded pretty good to me. A 3D scrolling brawler with RPG elements, the sales pitch is kept to a minimum (I’m still not entirely sure what you’re really supposed to be paying for), but in general the controls feel unfinished. When you’re playing through the brawling sections of the game, things work well and the controls are responsive, but having to switch between two handed keyboard controls and split keyboard+mouse controls is awkward. The default keyboard layout also doesn’t feel natural and is almost cumbersome. The game gave me a very early tool tip on how to customize the controls and it might be possible to find a combination that was more reasonable, but having to switch between the keyboard and mouse, even to a limited degree was awkward. I am a stickler for controls, and I don’t know how a dev team could make a game that simultaneously taps into the genuine fun of a retro arcade brawler but misses so drastically on the controls. I love the fact that the point of sale materials are not overly obvious, and that when the game is on it’s a blast to play, but without better controls I wonder if it will garner enough support to be worth the investment.

Spiral Knights
As a counterpoint to Rusty Hearts, Spiral Knights does a few things differently and I think ends up as a more successful game as a whole. As one of the first titles on Steam to appear as free-to-play, it has a more polished feel to it than some of the more recent releases. In Spiral Knights you have a daily energy allotment that determines how much time you can spend in the game’s dungeons. Energy is also used to craft items. Players can purchase more energy to craft higher level items or to keep exploring beyond their daily limit, but the game rarely advertises the fact. When I first played Spiral Knights I felt like it was what I wanted Facebook games to be. It presented engaging and interesting gameplay in bite-sized chunks. The downside was that the limited free playtime made it occasionally hard to coordinate with friends to play, but more playtime was always a purchase away. The extensive crafting options and custom dungeon creation system are both excellent value-adds, but the temporary nature of the game made it kind of hard to see either being fully exploited due to the tragedy of the commons that seems to run rampant in both the dungeon generator and auction house systems.

The one issue I have with Spiral Knights is that the value of paying into the system didn’t seem fully worth it because there are in-game limits based on both the time you play and the money you have. While these are both tied together, the game is difficult enough that you need to learn it in order to survive at higher levels, but without simply purchasing the equipment necessary to get to those levels the game gets repetitive quickly. The difficult thing about this imbalance is that since it’s tied to money, changing it can have dire repercussions with your fan base. As time goes on it will be interesting to see how Spiral Knights and other games deal with monetary balance issues without treading on the good will of their customers.

World of Warcraft and TF2
Perhaps the biggest indicator of the potential of the free-to-play movement is the involvement of large, established brands. Word of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 are two of the biggest games in world and each represents a powerful online network, Blizzard Activision’s Battle.net and Valve’s Steam. These games make interesting case studies in the F2P movement because they might allow us to determine the potential impact on the free to play business model when such well established games with powerful networks support join the fray. I feel comfortable lumping these two together for the most part, but there are a few important differences between them.

The biggest difference is that World of Warcraft is the “less free” of the two. The end game areas and expansions where most serious players spend their time require paying monthly fees and purchasing expansions. Because of this World of Warcraft is more like a free-to-try game. Making the first twenty levels of play free, Blizzard almost seems to be scrambling to make up for the mass exodus of gamers from the system and buying time before their rumored next gen MMO makes its debut. The first one is free approach also provides a way to get players on board in anticipation of the release of Diablo III. The recent announcement of World of Warcraft and Diablo Bundles certainly ties these two games together. Despite falling numbers of active players, the WoW subscriber base is still huge and this could be seen as a way to engage new customers who might be more interested in Diablo III (and its cash-based market). Additionally, making WoW free-to-play builds up the battle.net base in the face of rising interest in competitive games like LoL and DotA (a market Blizzard is entering as well), and MMO competition from Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Team Fortress 2 on the other hand does not share the same behemoth status as WoW. While it has maintained massive popularity, it’s not the most popular game on Steam and has been subject to so many sales and bonuses that it’s been effectively free for years. The shift to a free-to-play model seems more like a culmination of ever deeper cuts. My personal theory is that the entire Steam service is built on a solid base of loss leaders. In this model, TF2 is not a mechanism to make money based on its own sales in relation to what it costs to run, but is a way to promote the rest of the Steam service which utilizes less bandwidth than a game, has lower overhead, and rakes in money via price-sharing and licensing fees (much like iTunes does). I would love to see the numbers on how much the inclusion of a custom hat for TF2 effects the sales of other titles. I know from personal experience (and discussions with our very own Kyatt) that purchasing a game just to get a hat is not too out of the ordinary. Gabe Newell’s recent comments on the power of labeling something “free-to-play” certainly back up this idea, but the real benefit to the company is far more widespread.This arrangement allows Valve to make the games they want to make, with very few restrictions. If Steam itself is seen not as a service but a way that Valve can bankroll whatever projects they would like to take on, by giving away TF2 they are not just growing their install base (like Blizzard is doing with WoW), but they’re doing it at very little cost to themselves.

These two approaches to the free-to-play model are interesting in how they rely on their individual game networks and player bases. It will be interesting to see if the more atypical approach of Blizzard works because of the deeper content within an MMO, or if the wave of free-to-play content proves to be too much of a force in the network.

Overall, the entire free-to-play movement is really interesting and has potential to be a positive factor across the video game market. While the idea of venture capital funding of free-to-play causing the market to balloon into a second tech bubble based on speculation against game performance is entertaining, I don’t really see it happening. Just because they’re free, poorly made games aren’t going to get a pass from consumers, at least not in any long-term sense. I think a more conservative outlook is that F2P will promote faster iteration of game mechanic and network design principals while providing more opportunity to small developers to play a meaningful part in the larger dialog about what makes a successful game. If that is the ultimate outcome of the free-to-play business model, I think everyone who plays games benefits from it and those companies who are able to harness the power of free-to-play licensing will end up well ahead of the competition.