Anyone who releases a game for 60 dollars without charging additional fees is missing out on huge opportunities. At least that’s what Tim Campbell, Vice President of publisher Gameforge, thinks in a conversation with pcgamesn.
If you offer a game for 60 dollars and the player spends thousands of hours in it, it’s understandable from a business perspective to say, as Campbell does: “Damn! We just gave away tons of content!” From the customer’s point of view, of course, this looks different. You pay for a product and use it as long as you want, just like you’re used to with other products. However, Tim Campbell of Gameforge is very critical of this Buy2Play model, especially since the console business has suffered from it.
If people don’t buy your game at retail, it goes to Gamestop and is sold as used over and over again – as a publisher who has paid 30, 50, or 100 million dollars for the development of the game, you see nothing from these sales in the used market. (…) How do you generate revenue to finance further cool developments (…). That was a big problem we dealt with for a long time.
According to Tim Campbell, Free2Play would solve these problems. In the past, it was often overdone, and there was a lot of criticism, but Free2Play would minimize the risk for development studios and publishers. If you launch a high-budget game for 60 euros and it flops, then you have a problem. Eventually, it ends up in a sale for 10 euros, and players then spend hundreds of hours or more on it. As a developer, you gain nothing from it. In fact, this could lead to a lack of funds for future games.
However, if you remove the entry barrier, that is, the purchase price, many more players will take a look at the product. If they like what they see, they stick around, and you can recoup costs through an in-game shop. Free2Play is a fair system, says Tim Campbell, because everyone can invest as much as they want. Some only invest time, while others also spend money.
This makes sense especially when continuously developing products, which is regularly the case in the MMO area. World of Warcraft does it well. The MMORPG generates a steady stream of revenue – and has been doing so for many years. However, the subscription model only works these days for a few exceptions. According to Campbell, Buy2Play and other business models pose a great risk, as they also jeopardize the development of further games. Is Free2Play the panacea?
Andreas says: Free2Play has a bad reputation. In the early days – and sometimes even today – players were simply charged for things they needed to actually play properly. While this has improved since then, many gamers still view Free2Play games very critically. Shedding the bad reputation is a huge task. It is counterproductive to say that Buy2Play is a business model that no developer likes to use because it provides too much for too little money. Buy2Play also has its place in the gaming market.
Of course, every company wants to make as much money as possible over a long period, because that is the goal of most firms. However, you must always treat customers fairly. This can certainly work with a Free2Play model. But exactly here, more effort is needed to show players that you are not trying to rip them off, but that you are also offering them something. League of Legends, for example, illustrates that a Free2Play model can work well if you deal openly and fairly with customers. However, many developers still have to learn this. It is also clear that a few mistakes will be made during this learning process.
Buy2Play remains the fairest model, because here you pay money for a product and then use it in most cases without restrictions. If a game does not sell well at release, you should not blame the customers but yourself. In the MMO sector, one can argue that the games are continuously expanded with new content and improvements. But here, ArenaNet shows with Guild Wars 2 that the Buy2Play model can work in the MMO genre.
