July 31, 2013

Free to Rage

When gaming first entered the home, the goal of console manufacturers was to deliver the experience you get at an arcade without having to dump hundreds of quarters into the game. Arcade games were built as a monetization platform, designed to be difficult so as to maximize the number of quarters fed into them. Home consoles changed that by being able to provide fun and challenging games you can play with your friends for a one-time payment.

Sadly, folks, we've come full circle on a steep, downward spiral. The latest money-making trend goes by different names: free-to-play or F2P, freemium, pay-to-win. There are different forms of it that I'll cover, and many share common traits. But the primary goal is to leech as much money out of the player as possible.





The Freemium Model


The free-to-play system is the bastard offspring of achievements and downloadable content, taking the worst aspects of both. Achievements can be a great challenge for the completionist gamer, and can lead players to areas of a game they might otherwise have missed, but too often they're merely a pointless grind-fest, torturous chores shoved into the game because the publisher wants to meet the quota mandated by the console manufacturer. Downloadable content can greatly expand a beloved game, adding new worlds and challenges to explore and conquer. But they, too, have their problems, such as essentially ripping off the consumer by charging for content they already paid for, as it's included on the disc. I've written about DLC's problems before.

The Freemium Model is the basis of every form of free-to-play, and even more derogatory than referring to it as "freemium" is to call it "pay to win". This started out in software as a common and sometimes successful business model, where you can download the program and use it for free, but it would often be lacking in advanced features unless you paid for the full version. When applied to games, it changes connotation and impact quite drastically. There have been games that let you play forever on a couple of levels unless you buy the full version, or more popularly on mobile platforms, play the entire game while being confronted with ads at every turn unless you buy the ad-free version. These are all gradually phasing out in favor of other models where you never really get the entire experience.

The Grinder


This form of F2P seems legitimate when you're starting out. Yes, they dangle rewards and stat boosters in front of you for prices, but if you're willing to just play without any bonuses, you'll still get the same rewards. It'll just take you a lot, lot longer.

Often, however, this is merely a ruse. Rarely have I seen a grinder that really did cut you off entirely from "winning" without paying a dime, but usually there's a threshold that cannot be crossed freely without putting in more time or effort than it's worth. I'm talking about that moment when you realize how much time you've put into the game already, how much more you'll have to put into it, and how many other, better games you could be spending your time on instead.

There are lots of better games to play that feature grinding.

Lately I've been playing Transformers Legends on my Android devices. It's a very simple card game; in fact, the cards do all of the fighting for you, so it's more of a collectathon. I'm a big enough fan of Transformers that I keep it installed, and play it when I have some time to kill. Every week or so they run some new event where they throw new cards and challenges at you, with greater rewards the higher up the global ladder you can climb. I've yet to run into any real obstacles beyond grinding, though I've heard rumblings from some of the more dedicated grinders that you can't even approach the top thousand ranks without paying into it. Whether that's directly due to the game's setup or because other players have already paid enough into it to become untouchable isn't clear to me. I suppose I'm currently low enough not to care as much, so for now, it stays.

Grinders were a lot more common in the early days of F2P. My first experience of this was a game called Combat Arms, which I happened to start playing while it was in a closed beta. It was grind, grind, grind, but as a game that borrowed heavily from Counter-Strike, it was still fun to play. Once you unlocked and paid hard earned in-game currency for a weapon, you got to keep it. Unfortunately, once the game came out of beta, it mutated into a more sinister form of free-to-play I call...

The Rent-a-Player


Rent-a-Player games will let you grind to your heart's content, but what you unlock or buy using in-game currency (as opposed to real world money) is only rented for a short period of time. The more in-game currency you put towards the item, the longer you get to rent it. Your only chance at keeping the item permanently is to pay real money for it. So you spend a certain number of days or weeks to become a competent player, only to have it ripped away should other things become a higher priority. The sole benefit this model presents is the ability to try before you buy, but considering how long it takes one to earn enough for them to try, the risks still outweigh the rewards.

In the military of the future, a lack of taxpayer funding means 
you have to buy your own weaponry. Thanks, Obama!

The true purpose of both Grinder and Rent-a-Player types is, of course, to encourage you to spend real money on things instead.

The Phoenix


This version is notable more for what it once was than what it has become. Phoenix games (or, alternatively, undead games) are older games, long forgotten, that have been resurrected and reworked to fit a free-to-play model. Examples include TribesRunescapeQuake 3, and the short-lived Hellgate: London. So far, the majority of these games have F2P models that aren't horrendously insulting to your intelligence or your wallet. Tribes, in fact, is very fun to play, despite the parasitic grinding experience. I believe this is due to the fact that many of these games were fun to play before they were reanimated. I think if Unreal Tournament 2004 made such a comeback I would be very unlikely to avoid it.

The problem here, however, is when a game that wasn't designed with free-to-play in mind (read: a good game) has such a model improperly applied to it. It takes more than a passing thought to monetize something, especially when it has a long, pre-established history of following a different business model, or none at all. It will not work for every game, and even if it could be forced to work, should it be done?

"Would you like to buy a fire extinguisher? Only $3.99! This is a
one-time use item. Sorry, no refunds."

Take this article on "Five Reasons Why FTL is a Perfect Free-to-Play Game", and its companion, "FTL FTP on iOS". They offer very compelling arguments as to why and how FTL should be F2P, and in that regard, I agree on the ideas. But I don't agree that making it F2P would be a good idea. In case you're unfamiliar with FTL, it's a space exploring game in the vein of "roguelikes", a category of games distinguished by heavy use of randomized elements and a high level of difficulty. It's frustrating, compelling, addictive, rewarding, and fun. It has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in any video game ever. And unlike Tribes or Quake 3, it was built in the age of free-to-play games. But FTL was designed to have a relationship with the player; it's you and the game, matching strategic moves and hoping your choices are good enough to see you through to the end. It's meant to be challenging, but adding consumables and the like neuter that challenge in favor of one where you see how much money you can spend and still afford rent. There is no multiplayer, there is no social networking. If the creators of FTL wanted it to be F2P they would have designed it that way.

Nicholas Lovell, founder of Games Brief, has written a few articles on what games should be F2P and why, including the aforementioned ones on FTL. These articles are often filled with as much misguided intentions as entitled whining. He wrote "Why I Haven't Bought Frozen Synapse on iPad For £4.99 Yet", where he complains that the game hadn't offered him any freebies to "gain [his] respect", and offers the false dichotomy that if he buys the game and doesn't like it, he's either an idiot for buying it or it's a terrible game. It seems he would rather pay continuously through microtransactions than pay a flat fee (one that perfectly fits that "cup of coffee" purchasing decision target, to boot), when what he's really asking for is a demo version of the game (which exists, and you can get it for Mac or PC). Paul Taylor, lead designer and audio guy for Mode 7 Games, who made Frozen Synapse, wrote an excellent rebuttal entitled "Why Frozen Synapse Costs Money". Interestingly, one of the main arguments he makes is "if there was a way of making Frozen Synapse F2P in a way which wouldn't compromise its design, we would think seriously about doing it.".

The Peep Show


There's really only one word to describe the appeal behind these games: tits. Or breasts. Boobs. You get the idea. Sex appeal is what makes these games stand out. Sexy ladies in skimpy armor parade across Flash banners, advertising a really crappy MMO, usually Korean in origin. The game itself is typically either grinder or rent-a-player in terms of what way they sucker players out of money. They're all painfully obvious in their intention, though it's hard to decide if the marketing is more pathetic, or the people that buy into it.

The most notorious example of the peep show would be Evony. Originally Civony, it was a game in the style of Civilization, where players built up cities and attacked each other for resources. It was decent as far as those games go, and I played it for a while, until I was distracted by some other game. It caught my attention again, however, when it came back under the name Evony, and I began seeing their ads everywhere. Their ads were hard to miss because they all looked like this:

More hand lotion and tissues, my lord?

Meanwhile, the game looks like this:

This game's world is so small, you'll never feel the need to compensate!

According to Wikipedia, they also tend to use stock photos from porn DVD covers. I don't think there are even women in the game, at least not that I can remember (which is an entirely different problem for an entirely different blog post). Picking out sexual characteristics of any of the tiny pixelated avatars is a challenge all on its own, never mind find them to be sexy. The ads are a potent lure for anyone whose sexual maturity never advanced beyond the age of thirteen (which, if any given online encounter is any indication, falls in line with overall maturity). Less mature than its players, perhaps, would be the company itself. Bruce Everiss, who wrote extensively on how terrible Evony is, was then sued for libel by Evony's lawyers. They later dropped the case when he then blogged about a documentary that uncovered many of Evony's fraudulent activities within the game. You can watch the documentary here.

The Consumer


This is the most twisted, most vile, most perverted form of free-to-play yet. There are no permanent purchases, there are only consumables. Everything you pay for is of the fire-and-forget variety. But is the player consuming the game, or the other way around?

Take Candy Crush Saga, for (the ultimate) example. It's a simple match-3 game with combos and such, the type of game that is typically a nice blend between skill and luck. Now throw money into the mix. You get a certain number of lives when you start, and if you lose them all, you have to wait a set amount of time before you can play again. The worse you do, the longer you have to wait. Unless, of course, you buy more lives.

I hereby nominate the shoggoth as the official mascot of free-to-play games.

As you progress through the game, you start to unlock powerups. Cool, they just hand them out! Oh, but wait; in order to use the powerup, you have to pay real money for the privilege. If you don't, this otherwise helpful item is left dangling over the "continue" button every time you lose. The exception to paying real money is to invite and harass your Facebook friends to send you items, increasing Candy Crush Saga's pool of consumers and weakening your personal relationships in one swoop.

Don't worry, though, you won't be progressing far. That's because this game is designed to massively ramp up the difficulty after you're comfortable with the basics of play, and the game has sufficiently pulled the wool over your eyes in making you believe the game is based on skill.

The Magic Christian


This type of F2P game isn't very common, but it runs on an age-old principle: people will do literally anything for any amount of money. It's named after a movie, where a rich Peter Sellers adopts a homeless Ringo Starr, and teaches him this principle through many outrageous stunts. It culminates with them setting up a huge vat of sewage, throwing a few thousand bucks in it, and standing back as everyone loses their shit and gains a whole lot more as they dive in after the bills.



Enter Team Fortress 2. Originally, it had nine classes of various militaristic roles, each with their own unique loadout of weapons and equipment. Then they began adding new weapons to the game. I was hesitant about this at first, but it started off well. It wasn't like they were going to make the game-

Oh. Oh, no. No no no no no.

Oh yes.

TF2 was made free-to-play with no barrier to entry. Granted this was done almost four years after the game's release, but for those who paid for the game, it was quite a shock. At the risk of sounding entitled, it didn't seem quite fair. But not to worry; for our dedication, Valve graciously gave us...

A hat.

Hats had been around for a while, and were essentially useless outside of changing the look of your character. But this was surely a sign of things to come. This update immediately created two kinds of players: those that had built a strong community together, were invested in their purchase, and actually cared about the experience they had. And those that didn't give a winged mating because it didn't cost them anything and likely never would. Servers were flooded with new players, which at first was great, because they were easy pickings. But after a while, long past when the ratio of new people outweighed seasoned players, it became apparent that many of these players would only pop on as it suited them, playing so sparingly that they were forever n00bs.

I'm not saying being a new player is bad. I've been one, and it will happen continuously for as long as I'm playing video games. I've given my share of tips to new players. The issue isn't that they don't know, it's that they don't care. Without having to pay anything to play, there's no incentive to get the most value out of their purchase. They didn't feel the responsibility to work with their team (despite "team" being in the title of the game), and as such you had Medics running into battle with their hacksaws out and at least half of every team comprised of Snipers that were too terrible to hit anything and wound up as Pyro fodder. Now many, more serious servers run plugins that block F2P players from joining.

This is but one terrible consequence of turning an existing game with an established playerbase into a Phoenix-type F2P game, but an influx of inept players is only half the reason behind the "Magic Christian" moniker. Not long before the free-to-play update, Valve changed the previous system of unlocking weapons by completing achievements to one where they would "drop", following a complex algorithm based on length of time played. Inventories began to overflow. A couple months later, they rolled out an in-game economy. This came with a store, allowing you to purchase rare items and exclusive items with real money. Some of these items can be quite expensive, especially hats, which can reach the $20 range.

Valve essentially turned TF2 into a pay-to-win game. There are other things that Valve has done here that are different and even commendable, such as item trading and selling community-made items in their store, giving the artist most of the proceeds. But the effect in-game is that everyone promptly forgot about what the point behind TF2 was, everything became a gold rush for items, and free-to-play players began buying the best weapons and items despite lacking the skills to effectively utilize them. And with Steam's most recent update to their inventory system, you can now sell these items yourself for pennies. So if you want a new hat or a new gun, you'll have to dive into a tank full of sewage and swim around with a bunch of other morons, desperately grabbing around until one happens to fall into your hands.

How do you like that, maggot?

Other Factors


I've listed the most common forms of free-to-play games. It's often quite a bit more complex than that, with many forms blending into each other in various ways. But those core concepts are there. That's just the business model, though, and barely touches on the sinister thought-processes that go into their hideous design.

In "The Top F2P Monetization Tricks", Ramin Shokrizade details the various weapons of psychological warfare that F2P developers use on their hapless victims, known as "coercive monetization". Without naming it, I've already covered the concept of a "soft" progress gate; essentially, you can pay to proceed, or you can grind in whatever fashion necessary to continue on. "Hard" gates also exist, where you simply can not go further without paying money, and there is rarely mention of the inevitable series of hard gates beyond the first. Another form of progress gate would be the sudden increase in difficulty at certain points in a game to facilitate the need to buy boosters and other help. He also covers the scam of premium currencies, where instead of having to earn tons of silver coins, you can pay for a few gold coins that are "equal" to a certain amount of silver coins; and something called "reward removal", where it's possible to lose all of your progress unless you pay real money to merely try a challenge again.

These ploys, to grossly understate it, are unethical. The game industry is old enough to have many tried and true methods for making substantial amounts of money, for indie developers and AAA publishers alike. They also don't require subterfuge, lying, or belittling their customer base to be successful. Instead, F2P developers target casual gamers who are attracted to the simplicity of the kinds of games that are monetized, and even children who are not experienced enough to recognize when they are getting cheated.

If you've never taken an economics class, the first thing you learn in one is that "there's no such thing as a free lunch", the idea being that there is always a trade-off. If you're not paying in money for immediate access, you're instead paying in time to slog through it the hard way. F2P games are the new free lunch, stale and unenjoyable, and predictably always on the next day's menu. Unless you'd like to pay $9.99 for the premium meal?

Addendum


I'm making this edit to plug my friend's blog, Modern Quarter Munchers. She's taking one for the team and voluntarily reviewing F2P games! Check it out!

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