Making $ with Free-to-Play

I touched on this earlier in the post about why SWTOR went free-to-play, but its an important topic, at least for us. It’s because the second title we have begun to work on will be our first foray into this model of design.

And there are a couple of reasons for this.

One, is the obvious advantage of pure numbers. Anyone can download the game, they don’t need to get over that initial barrier of entry of cost. This means that generally more people will be playing your game. And right now, that is more important. Money is a great benefit to making games, but it is incredibly difficult. By paying for our company with the contract work we bring in, it’s more important that we become a known source in the industry.

We don’t have to do a demo. Which is a nice side benefit. As we tweeted about earlier, we just sent the demo of Loc for the iPad out to Apple to be certified. As awesome as demos are for the player, on the development side they are a risk. You have to basically copy paste your entire project and start hacking away at it, sliming it down, to create a stand-alone product that quickly and easily shows all of the interesting mechanics of your game. We created one for the original launch and every time we update, to version 1.1, or now 1.2, we have to go back into that alternate project and port our own changes over.

But how do you make money off a free game?

The answer is micro-transactions. In the game, we setup a little digital economy of items and content that we allow the player to purchase. Here is an example: Through playing, the player collects gold coins. At the main menu is a shop which sells “running shoes” for their character. These costs 300 gold coins. The player can keep playing the game, collecting their gold coins in order to get enough to buy the shoes, or they can pay 99 cents and get 1000 gold coins.

These shoes allow the players character to permanently run faster, which in turn allows them to collect more gold coins faster, which they then spend on other items that help them gain gold coins faster.

This economy loop is what drives in-game sales, known as micro-transactions. In short, the player is paying to unlock content faster. The best part is it’s just an option. The player doesn’t need to do this; they can achieve/get everything in the game, without spending a single cent. However, it is guaranteed that it will take them a longer time.