Op Ed

[Jan 05, 2012, 11:05 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

IndustryGamers - Free-to-Play Is The 'New Frontier of Western Game Development,' says Former Activision VP.
I believe free-to-play is the new frontier of western game development. Free-to-play’s biggest difference is that success is based on creating an intense emotional response and ensuring real human interaction across huge hours of play. People are interesting, complex and challenging. In free-to-play games, people ARE the game, not the graphics, not the game mechanic, not the AI or scripting, but real, living, breathing people. The games must be designed to drive the consumer to engage with the game and ideally with one another. This is the key to success for Words with Friends. Real people get to interact virtually. The more engagement, the better the results.

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Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 21:20

Sepharo

My friends don't seem to tire of Spiral Knights, they've basically been playing since right before it showed up on Steam and haven't stopped. I think they're crazy people.




[I'm not trolling I'm just] tossing stuff like that in there only to get your panties all bunched up. -TrollinThundr

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 20:10

Dev

I think F2P is more often a way to greatly expand the playerbase and potential market of a game. The main question is, can those people be converted into paying customers. With most paid games, the most you can spend on them is $100 or $200 once you add up all the DLC. With F2P, some people (albeit a few) spend much more than that, sometimes thousands. Valve has had great success in their conversion rate with TF2, they've said its 30% (compared to 3%-5% for most F2P)

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 14:28

Cutter

They have these things called demos which generally give people a good idea whether they want to buy your game or not. People don't like being nickeled and dimed to death like you see in most F2P games which is generally why they don't stick around.




"Are you crazy? Is that your problem?" - Jack Burton

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 14:15

killer_roach

It's the new frontier, which means everybody and their brother is going to jump in, a small handful make a fortune, the rest crumble, and the industry takes a step back and goes "well, we're not going to make that mistake again". ...until the next fad, of course.

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 13:41

Fion

If anything World of Tanks and DOTA really prove the point of how crazy popular and profitable F2P can be.

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 10:50

InBlack

Trust me you aint missing much with clanwars. Its fun to be part of a cohesive team for once, but unless you have a really great commander and a very disciplined team things tend to go south much more often than not.

Recently my clan had 4 provinces on the Clan Wars map, it took us two months to grab em. We lost them a few days later, due to inclan bickering and fucking ego trips.

Worst of all, Clans still get to play the same old stale random battle setup. There really isnt anything different from random battles other than its two coordinated teams and not just random people trying to get organised.




I have a nifty blue line!

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 10:42

WarpCrow

InBlack wrote on Jan 5, 2012, 10:28: Bla bla bla....F2P games have to be like crack......bla bla bla. Seriously though, in many ways I have to agree with Robin. F2P games have to have a good gameplay mechanic to be successful. However the problem is that because of their inherent nature, not nearly enough money goes into developing F2P games. They usually sacrifice a whole lot or ship with a lot of bugs, and features missing. Case in point? World of Tanks. One of the best games I have played. Seriously. Its a great and simple concept that could have been so much more. The game is enjoying great success at the moment, which is a double edged sword. At the moment the developers are really lazy, instead of adding new feature that could make it a better game they are playing it safe. Adding new tanks and factions while keeping the same stale one-type CTF gameplay. World of tanks is one of the only games of that type (with the typical CTF, deathmatch, etc. gameplay) to really grab me, and I agree that its biggest downside is the lack of variety in gameplay. Every update it's one or two new maps and that's it. I believe the next one is bringing in a French tank tree, but the gameplay remains the same and for people like me at least, who don't give a shit about clans or leaderboards, lack of variation is what eventually drives us away.

Re: Op Ed

Jan 5, 2012, 10:28

InBlack

Bla bla bla....F2P games have to be like crack......bla bla bla.

Seriously though, in many ways I have to agree with Robin. F2P games have to have a good gameplay mechanic to be successful. However the problem is that because of their inherent nature, not nearly enough money goes into developing F2P games. They usually sacrifice a whole lot or ship with a lot of bugs, and features missing.

Case in point? World of Tanks. One of the best games I have played. Seriously. Its a great and simple concept that could have been so much more. The game is enjoying great success at the moment, which is a double edged sword. At the moment the developers are really lazy, instead of adding new feature that could make it a better game they are playing it safe. Adding new tanks and factions while keeping the same stale one-type CTF gameplay.




I have a nifty blue line!

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