Today’s lesson from 2013 is all about free to play or as I’ve taken to calling it, free to ignore. The very same developers who designed free to play to advertise to the gamer bouncing around from title to title are now finding that their customers are in and out in the blink of an eye. In a way, free to play was a great method of knocking the low hanging fruit from the development tree. Gamers now have the ability to download a game, realize that it isn’t worth their time, and leave it behind without a single cent lost. When a game goes free to play, developers are quick to trumpet how their population increased by five hundred billion percent, only for the PR department to go strangely silent when, after about a month, most of those new players have already moved on.
Free to play was once the bastion for lower-tier games and indies, and then the big industry folks moved in and did what they do best, knock everyone out of business including themselves. Heroes in the Sky, Age of Empires, the Mummy Online, Fusionfall, Battleforge, RaiderZ (in most territories), Kartuga, Prius Online, Dungeon Fighter Online, Dragonball Online, Sevencore, Wrath of Heroes, Hellgate: Global (in Japan), The Old Republic (Asia Pacific), Family Guy Online, and Glitch, and that’s just a small list of games from the past twelve months. Then look at the games merging servers: Rift, Neverwinter, Age of Wushu, Age of Conan, Vanguard, The Old Republic, and that again is a small list of AAA titles from the past year. The system has been turned on its head so much that now free to play games are partially converting to subscription models! Dogs and cats are living in harmony, put all of your money in gold and bury it in the backyard, the world is coming to an end!
When adding this topic to my list of lessons, I asked myself “I’ve harped on this subject more times than I can count. Why bring it up yet again?” The best answer I can come up with is because out of all of the items on this list, this is almost guaranteed to not just be a problem next year, it will be bigger. Like lemmings, completely oblivious to the growing pile of dead bodies around them, developers of all sizes and budgets continue to throw their hat into the ring with the outdated and inaccurate belief that free to play is a treasure-trove of easy money with no effort because games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends are extremely popular. These are the same developers who blew up the subscription market by trying to beat World of Warcraft and subsequently shut down because, regardless of profit margin, they couldn’t make their target of a billion subscribers.
Imagine how much better off this industry would be if developers would only set a goal of carving their own section of the market, rather than those who took an everything or nothing approach.
MMO Fallout 