Personal – Free 2 Play – A short reflection
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I was reading “Mastering F2P: the Titanic effect” by Ramin Shokrizade at gamasutra.com It made me start to think a bit about the F2P model. Although the article is short and not very rich in content it mad me think about how and when Free to play should be used and when it should not. In the article Ramin touches the subject of unethical methods in F2P very lightly. He takes Zyngas FrontierVille as an example of unethical use of it. He claims (I have not played the game) that early on in the game the player will be shown a wounded crying deer and the game will tell them that if they do not pay 5$ the deer will die. When searching for some more posts to backup the authors statement I find what it actually says in game when you find the wounded dear: (This is shown when sharing)
However it does not seem like the player are forced to pay money, but the option is probably there. Nevertheless I agree With the author that this might be a bit unethical. Maybe not for adults but for the kids playing these games it can be harder to resist putting real money on these kind of things. Especially when you can buy gift cards for facebook in general stores. There is a lot of unethical use of the F2P model but also some great use of it. Take LoL (short for League of Legends) for example. You can use real world currency in the shop but you can not buy things that will give you a upper hand. Champions can be bought with real money, but also with in game currency, but buying all champions will not give you any benefits except that you can choose between more champions. It will not make it easier for you to win a game. One thing that can boost your champion is runes, these are extra stats that are bought to give your champion better stats at the start of the game (you can only have a finite number of runes on a champion). However these can only be bought with in game currency that is earned by playing games. This way there is nothing unfair and everyone has equal chance to acquire these. Each champion have one or more extra visual styles, also known as skins. Skins can only be bought with real world currency but they only give a different visual appearance and no other benefits. I might be overselling but I think Believe LoL is a great example of a well executed F2P-model. However this does not mean that F2P is in anyway the best business model. One student from the audience asked if they were planning in making Shelter a F2P game. The Employee ( Johannes Wadin ), looked a bit confused at first before he said that it was nothing they planned to do. One kind of Free to play games that i do not like is the limiting ones. And by limiting I mean games that have for example a stamina bar where you can only use a certain number of actions and then you have to wait for the stamina meter to refill. For example FarmVille. Item limit and area limits also bugs me. When you play and you can not have the bad ass guns because you are not paying makes me immediately lose the interest for the game. Mainly because I will know that I will never receive the bad ass items by solely being good at the game. So making Shelter F2P would mean they would need to cut the game into pieces and put a price tag on each piece. Or they would have needed to lock certain actions, for example jumping, and you would need to pay money to be able to jump. There is a lot of ways that i could have been done but none would have been better than the Marketing model they currently have. I realize that this is more or less a rant. However I’m not a very experienced blogger or writer but I think that the only way for me to get better is to write. A lot. I will also separate schoolwork from personal posts, but every post will be somehow connected to game design. Next time I might be writing about a really horrible game that started as a decent copy of a popular zombie game. |
