6 ms·

Meanwhile, there are multiple F2P games with over $1b in revenue True, but at least the folks at ustwo games still have their souls.

minimaxir 10y ago
It's really not fair to keep citing the "F2P is evil!" meme nowadays. If you haven't played a F2P game in 2016, I strongly recommend taking a look. Game like Clash Royale, Hearthstone, and Kingdom Hearts are fair and are not aggressive/condescending toward in the goal of generating revenue. Mostly because developers finally realized that making a good game is just as important as monetization.
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago
  So Supercell, Blizzard, and Square Enix/Success are not awful. That's great, but what about all of the others? Kabam, Big Fish, Machine Zone, King, Playtika, EA, and the list goes on.
- 1123581321 10y ago
  Hearthstone is a unique bird as its playerbase is used to Blizzard and Magic and so expects to pay something like a AAA game price for card unlocks. It's not really necessary for Blizzard to sell the idea of paying in Hearthstone. Clash Royale is very aggressive about getting money. It does appear passive because it's better for revenue if non-enthusiastic players progress slowly, but trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way. It's quite clever. It also benefits from increased sophistication of players in that it can signal when to make the premium purchases more subtly than was necessary a few years ago. I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP. I certainly think Ubi has learned from its poor attempts to milk its lower-priority IP by farming it out to F2P developers, so a transition has been made in the company overall.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    > I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP. A little more context: Assassin's Creed was F2P during soft launch, but player feedback drove Ubisoft to retool it as a paid title without typical F2P gimmicks (although online-only requirement remains): http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/24/assassins-creed-identity-begins-rolling-out-on-the-app-store/ http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/24/assassins-creed-identity-b...
    - 1123581321 10y ago
      Ah, okay. Sounds like it was part of their general recognition that they were damaging their brands, then.
  - furyofantares 10y ago
    > trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way. In contrast with many games which are nearly pure skinner boxes, Clash Royale's gameplay itself is fun and there are skills to be mastered. The monetization scheme is just as bad as other games in that it lets you put in exponential dollars for linear gain. But the refreshing thing is the base game is fun and can be played freely without any time limits or other barriers. That said after about 100 hours I may have finally reached my top skill and may get bored of the game before I unlock any new cards.
    - Falcon9 10y ago
      I struggled so hard with that game before eventually "winning" my internal battle and deleting it. As you say, the core gameplay is actually really fun and skill based but the psychological pressures at play with all the chests and timers just felt too oppressive. Opening the app just got to feel too much like exposing myself to radioactive highly optimized whale food, and I had to just say "NO!"
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  Dota 2 has an interesting f2p monetization strategy: create a competitive game, then sell a $9.99 "compendium" each year. It's basically a virtual goodie bag. Of each $9.99 sale, $2.50 goes towards increasing the prize pool of their yearly tournament, The International. With that strategy alone, they're likely to surpass a $20 million prize pool this year, which means $60m in pure profit for Valve. The impressive part is that none of the compendium affects gameplay whatsoever. It's solely things like cosmetics that make your character look cool. It's tempting to call Dota a one-off, but I think this model could be followed by many other games: make your game competitive, then fund a yearly tournament. The reason Dota is so huge today is because Valve personally seeded the first International's prize pool with a million dollars, which was simply unheard of at the time.
  - stepanhruda 10y ago
    There are compendiums multiple times a year now. It does work out very well for them, the prize pool is $7M and it was launched less than a week ago.
  - webkike 10y ago
    And I think this model's success is reflected in Dota's reputation compared to that over games like League of Legends. LoL has a lot of characters and a lot of them cost money (at least for a time). And they keep adding more. Regardless of whether or not the characters they add that cost money are better than the others, it still makes the game less balanced and less competitively interesting in the low-to-mid level than Dota is. Sure, high level LoL is probably interesting, but I do not have the money to find out if I could ever enjoy that myself
    - fbuilesv 10y ago
      Without going into the balance/entertainment part: You can get all of the LoL characters for free, even the new ones (although those will be a bit more expensive for 1 week). I haven't been following the game closely lately but as far as I remember all the content can be unlocked for free now (that includes skins).
    - 10y ago
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  There have always been a few F2P games that aren't awful, and if there's starting to be more of them now, that's excellent news. But the fact remains that 95%+ of F2P games build their entire business model around dark patterns[1], and as long as that remains true, new games will reasonably be expected to prove themselves better than that. [1] http://darkpatterns.org/ http://darkpatterns.org/, if you're not familiar

minimaxir 10y ago

It's really not fair to keep citing the "F2P is evil!" meme nowadays. If you haven't played a F2P game in 2016, I strongly recommend taking a look. Game like Clash Royale, Hearthstone, and Kingdom Hearts are fair and are not aggressive/condescending toward in the goal of generating revenue. Mostly because developers finally realized that making a good game is just as important as monetization.

aaronbrethorst 10y ago
So Supercell, Blizzard, and Square Enix/Success are not awful. That's great, but what about all of the others? Kabam, Big Fish, Machine Zone, King, Playtika, EA, and the list goes on.
1123581321 10y ago
Hearthstone is a unique bird as its playerbase is used to Blizzard and Magic and so expects to pay something like a AAA game price for card unlocks. It's not really necessary for Blizzard to sell the idea of paying in Hearthstone. Clash Royale is very aggressive about getting money. It does appear passive because it's better for revenue if non-enthusiastic players progress slowly, but trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way. It's quite clever. It also benefits from increased sophistication of players in that it can signal when to make the premium purchases more subtly than was necessary a few years ago. I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP. I certainly think Ubi has learned from its poor attempts to milk its lower-priority IP by farming it out to F2P developers, so a transition has been made in the company overall.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  > I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP. A little more context: Assassin's Creed was F2P during soft launch, but player feedback drove Ubisoft to retool it as a paid title without typical F2P gimmicks (although online-only requirement remains): http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/24/assassins-creed-identity-begins-rolling-out-on-the-app-store/ http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/24/assassins-creed-identity-b...
  - 1123581321 10y ago
    Ah, okay. Sounds like it was part of their general recognition that they were damaging their brands, then.
- furyofantares 10y ago
  > trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way. In contrast with many games which are nearly pure skinner boxes, Clash Royale's gameplay itself is fun and there are skills to be mastered. The monetization scheme is just as bad as other games in that it lets you put in exponential dollars for linear gain. But the refreshing thing is the base game is fun and can be played freely without any time limits or other barriers. That said after about 100 hours I may have finally reached my top skill and may get bored of the game before I unlock any new cards.
  - Falcon9 10y ago
    I struggled so hard with that game before eventually "winning" my internal battle and deleting it. As you say, the core gameplay is actually really fun and skill based but the psychological pressures at play with all the chests and timers just felt too oppressive. Opening the app just got to feel too much like exposing myself to radioactive highly optimized whale food, and I had to just say "NO!"
sillysaurus3 10y ago
Dota 2 has an interesting f2p monetization strategy: create a competitive game, then sell a $9.99 "compendium" each year. It's basically a virtual goodie bag. Of each $9.99 sale, $2.50 goes towards increasing the prize pool of their yearly tournament, The International. With that strategy alone, they're likely to surpass a $20 million prize pool this year, which means $60m in pure profit for Valve. The impressive part is that none of the compendium affects gameplay whatsoever. It's solely things like cosmetics that make your character look cool. It's tempting to call Dota a one-off, but I think this model could be followed by many other games: make your game competitive, then fund a yearly tournament. The reason Dota is so huge today is because Valve personally seeded the first International's prize pool with a million dollars, which was simply unheard of at the time.
- stepanhruda 10y ago
  There are compendiums multiple times a year now. It does work out very well for them, the prize pool is $7M and it was launched less than a week ago.
- webkike 10y ago
  And I think this model's success is reflected in Dota's reputation compared to that over games like League of Legends. LoL has a lot of characters and a lot of them cost money (at least for a time). And they keep adding more. Regardless of whether or not the characters they add that cost money are better than the others, it still makes the game less balanced and less competitively interesting in the low-to-mid level than Dota is. Sure, high level LoL is probably interesting, but I do not have the money to find out if I could ever enjoy that myself
  - fbuilesv 10y ago
    Without going into the balance/entertainment part: You can get all of the LoL characters for free, even the new ones (although those will be a bit more expensive for 1 week). I haven't been following the game closely lately but as far as I remember all the content can be unlocked for free now (that includes skins).
  - 10y ago
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
There have always been a few F2P games that aren't awful, and if there's starting to be more of them now, that's excellent news. But the fact remains that 95%+ of F2P games build their entire business model around dark patterns[1], and as long as that remains true, new games will reasonably be expected to prove themselves better than that. [1] http://darkpatterns.org/ http://darkpatterns.org/, if you're not familiar