Article from a consultant who advises companies on the move towards GaaS/F2P(Gi.biz) - Interesting read, although nothing that new.
With free-to-play clients, specifically those building PvP multiplayer games with core audiences, discussion on the design process often starts with a limitation on what we can and cannot design. The most common restriction they place on the design is that there should be no 'pay-to-win' mechanics, or that the game's monetization should be cosmetic only.
But there's a problem with this assumption. The games that make billions from cosmetic-only economies typically only succeed because of the sheer numbers of players. On a per-user basis they actually have very poor monetization, relative to games that use more aggressive methods. This is because for a multiplayer game that is built from the ground-up to be about dominating other players, the proportion of the audience who are interested in self-expression via cosmetics is rather small.
Free-to-play business plans and forecasts should be built around realistic, self-sustaining goals, not best-case scenarios. That means cosmetic-only economies should never be considered. This is a harsh reality, often shared by consultants with inexperienced teams. Sometimes developers mitigate this issue by going premium-plus-microtransactions. Sometimes they will place more emphasis on player-versus-environment mechanics where 'pay to win' isn't such an issue. Sometimes I work with them on innovating between cosmetic-only and pay-to-win, drawing on the best elements of both.
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