Free to play is killing games in the minds and hearts of mobile users

[charlesr]

My own headline

http://recode.net/2014/04/09/most-mobile-game-players-quit-after-one-day-exclusive/

19 percent of those new players opened the games only once, and 66 percent had stopped playing after the first 24 hours.

Only 2.2 percent of players spent any money at all, and 46 percent of the revenue came from the top 10 percent of those spenders.

Free-to-play veteran and DeNA head of European game studios Ben Cousins says the numbers Swrve found are not that surprising. 40 percent retention on day two, he said in a tweet, is ?a sign of a real hit.?

Funny old game this gaming stuff.

[MisterBubbles]

I say good, as soon as this mobile F2P, ( it should be called Pay to Play ) fad dies the better, another game ruined by IAP and greed, all the devs chasing Candy Crush money it's despicable, http://www.computerandvideogames.com...rosity-review/ Dungeon Keeper and it's ilk aren't gaming, as the Metro review stated its virtual begging, http://metro.co.uk/2014/02/04/dungeo...-hell-4289901/

[Lebowski]

I don't think it will die though, look at last gens monetisation method the, map-pack, what started off as a ?4 purchase has now become a season pass which regularly costs as much as the game itself. Doubling the cost of call of duty was quite a canny move by Activision really but one gamers are getting sick of.

Sadly as their are people willing to pay for these sort of free to play games i doubt they will go away, the worrying trend is how Microsoft have been trying to put ftp mechanics, in full price games. I would like to hope that they have had more of a negative effect than a positive one, It would be nice to see that Forza and Crimson Dragons sales have been affected by IAP and the negative publicity they gained, just so they will scrap the idea, but i have the feeling that lots of people have probably been buying coins in Forza to buy extra cars, and don't even realise there being hoodwinked into paying extra for something that last gen was a lot east to get at.

[wakka]

What Lebowski highlights is the really ****ty part. Dropping ?50 a game and finding it riddled with microtransactions must just be the worst thing.

And they always say 'Oh it's optional, it's just for people who don't want to play through the game'. Yeah right. If that's the case give us cheat codes like we had back in the day. Microtransaction strategies will ALWAYS result in the restructuring of the game at some level in order to accommodate them, and most of the time this will mean introducing grinding to encourage payment.

It's bull****.

EDIT: woah what happened to the swear filter?

[Neil]

It's bull****.

EDIT: woah what happened to the swear filter?

**** knows

[Brad]

I was about to say that I don't play F2P games but I was playing War Thunder onTuesday so i guess I do. I've not spent any money though. I think for me the issue is I want to know the total amount a game costs. If for example War Thunder had ftp mechanics but I knew that once I'd spent, say, ?30 (it's not that great of a game, I'd accept a higher limit for something I liked more) then there was no more to spend then I might buy a few things e.g. a Spitfire.

Anyway, as The Dude (when he's not abiding) says, it's the f2p mechanics encroaching on conventional games that's the problem. Not experienced that yet and hope never to.

[charlesr]

Forza 5 changed quite radically between launch and now. Read my review. They were basically seeing what they could get away with and scaling it back until they found a place that people were happy with. For example to start with, you bought some DLC cars but then had to grind for days to get any of them in your garage (or pay extra coin to speed up that process....). Now DLC is put straight in the garage. The amount of XP and credits you get for track time has also increased too. And then they went and destroyed the whole thing by giving out millions of credits to people who had played the previous games, far exceeding anything you could acquire by grinding for a few days, thus making the whole thing seem entirely pointless.

At new tracks are all free so far.

[Brad]

If I'd bought Forza and they'd done what they did originally it wouldn't matter what they did after that, I'd resent them. Well, the publisher I guess as I don't know who is ultimately responsible for seeing what they can get away with. It's just horrible.

[wakka]

I read your review Charles, and it seems like the microtransaction implementation was a total cock up from start to finish.

They're still experimenting. But unfortunately I think microtransactions may become a standard feature of almost all games in the future.

[charlesr]

I wish the Titanfall devs had had the balls to make everything available from the off. But that's getting rather off topic.

[CatCopter]

Surley the amount of revenue that could be generated from advertising in games would put the amounts generated from micotransactions in the shade. Thay wouldnt have to be intrusive either.

[Duncan James Waugh]

What advertising agents pay for static ads is very, very low. If you look in the mobile world where ad-based games are most prominant you get paid almost nothing for views, the majority of networks out there genuinely do pay nothing for ad impressions.

Revenue is driven entirely by clicks and even then your usually talking a few pence / thousand clicks. The click through rate typically varies based on the type of ads shown - more interactive ads with lots of animation drive a lot more clicks. But typically a click through rate of around 3-5% is considered pretty standard.

So for every 100,000 ads you display to the player you are looking at around ?4-6 in revenue on average. If you compare that to the average game's install base I think you start to see the problem.

And that's with full screen intermissions in game, banner ads won't get anywhere near that revenue. One of the reasons Quake Live failed was because they stated that the adverts in game were far too subtle and due to the fast gameplay innefective. Subtle in game advertsising doesn't work.

[Dogg Thang]

I think there is a real question over the sustainability of this. The figures read far too fragile and, even though there are clearly some huge success stories, it seems like the model itself will become riskier and riskier the more it is used, increasing competition for the same money from the same people - those few people willing to pay. With that kind of gamer, how many games will they realistically support at once? I'm not convinced it would be many.

Meanwhile the F2P model hammers home the perception that entertainment should be free, devaluing the entire industry and causing immense long term damage.

And this is why I get bothered by the celebration of 'disruption' in business. Disruption is a negative, it's damaging unless you're actually replacing a business model with something better that's sustainable. Just breaking a market is not something to be applauded.

[EvilBoris]

Mobile phone playesr overwhelmingly prefer free to play games, so it's hardly suprising that it's becoming more commonplace

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/31/ios-users-prefer-freemium-games/

[Dogg Thang]

And it's hardly surprising that polling lots of people on whether they'd rather have something for free or pay for it will result in people choosing to have something for nothing. Pretty sure that would apply far wider than just games. It doesn't mean you can build a sustainable industry model around it. The problem is that this will be very difficult to come back from. Most paid games now get slaughtered in the App Store and that's not going to change for a very long time.