There’s A Bunch of Downsides to Free-to-Play Stormgate (Part II)
There’s A Bunch of Downsides to Free-to-Play Stormgate (Part II)
Paying money for stuff has advantages
There’s a trend that’s gotten more popular over the years where something is made to seem less expensive by comparing it to the price of buying a cup of coffee. The classic example is Wikipedia’s annual fundraising drive, where they’ll say something along the lines of, “the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world is totally free - with no ads! - and our fundraising would be over today if everyone just donated the price of a cup of coffee.”
It’s a compelling pitch, but I think it elides the fact that paying $3 or $4 for a gourmet coffee is quite a lot of money, even now, and for most people was borderline unthinkable to buy on a regular basis not that long ago. And I think this reflects how the Overton window of what we consider to be out of reach economically has changed a lot over the years. That this analogy to a gourmet product even makes sense to most people would be startling to someone in, say, the 1950s.
I think about this when I think about free-to-play. Even just twenty years ago, the notion of a “free computer game” was a crappy flash game you played in your school library. A bunch of factors like reliable and cheap digital distribution, vastly superior long-term monetization channels, massive growth in player numbers, and a general cultural comfort with digital goods changed all that. Nowadays many popular games, from League of Legends to APEX to Halo Infinite, are to one degree or another free-to-play.
It’s great that developers have found more and more ways to monetize games. I’m all for artists getting paid for their work and if they can find better ways to do it, all the more power to them. But like anything else, each of these business models has trade-offs. It’s not something you can handwave away by pointing out how popular it’s become among esports, and I feel like the trade-offs of this model get underexamined. People tend to focus on the darker side of things; the obvious ripoffs associated with long-term monetization (e.g. “horse armor”), the exploitative mechanics (e.g. lootboxes), the shady changes to development practices (e.g. cutting content from an initial release and selling it later as DLC), etc. That’s a totally fine place to focus your attention, but I’m more interested in the trade-offs when everyone involved has good intentions.
Barriers to Entry Have Upsides
Let’s go through a few of the downsides. In Part I of this series, I talked about one disadvantage, which is leaving money on the table. I think we’ve been in an era of easy money for so long that people understate how much of a downside that actually is. When your business loses money and can’t turn a profit for a long enough period of time, it closes down. I get that the Ubers and Twitters of the world make it seem like that isn’t true anymore, but it is.
One way to avoid this is to accept money when you sell your product instead of giving it away for free.
But there’s other considerations, too. I think one advantage to asking players to pay money in order to play your game is that it weeds out people that aren’t particularly interested in your game. This ensures that when someone goes out into the world and talks about your game from first-hand experience, they actually had some genuine interest in the first place.
When I look at some of the promises Stormgate is making, like the idea that it’s “the RTS everyone’s been waiting for”, or “#RTSReturns”, I think to myself, Jesus. It’s just asking to get negative coverage from folks who don’t understand RTS, don’t like RTS, but nonetheless think to themselves “I’m smart, I’m good at video games, I should be good at a real-time strategy game!” These folks are going to log-in, get slapped on the ladder, encounter the inevitable bugs associated with an indie game product, and jump onto Reddit to describe how badly the developer pooped the bed.
Then there’s stuff like cheating, griefing, etc. With a paid product, you can associate genuine penalties with this kind of behavior. With a free product, it’s much harder; you have to add workarounds like phone number verification ala CS:GO.
I never encountered a cheater in StarCraft II when it cost money, but I ran into several after it went free-to-play. Similarly, the number of smurfs I ran into (as measured by how many of my opponents had a bunch of instant-leaves in their match history) skyrocketed post-F2P.
Sure, you could write these off as a symptom of the game simply becoming more popular. But when a game is free, there’s really no downside to cheating or griefing, is there? It’s not like you paid money in the first place; who cares if your account is banned. Hell, you were probably on VPN to begin with. Just make a new account. This type of behavior becomes more common in part because a lower barrier to entry means a low barrier to entry for everyone, even the people you don’t want playing your game.
Free-To-Play Doesn’t Mean Free-For-Everyone
I mentioned earlier that I’m not that interested in the “darker side” of free-to-play, like exploitative mechanics. But I think some nuance I want to add there is that most people see this stuff as the result of malevolence, whereas from my perspective, people with good intentions can arrive at some pretty bad ideas.
Take co-op commanders in StarCraft II. There was something odd about how they were implemented, particularly Tychus, Zeratul, and Mengsk. Specifically, they were ridiculously overpowered at launch; like, bafflingly so. Each was nerfed soon after. The idea, as far as I could tell, was that the commanders should be super strong at launch in order to make them more fun and encourage players to purchase them, and then nerfed later in order to maintain relatively good balance with the other commanders.
This… seems kind of shady! I mean the whole idea is that there’s some segment of players who wouldn’t have made a purchasing decision if the commanders were balanced at launch. Best case, it’s intentionally confusing.
Take Warchest as another example:
I gladly bought all of the Warchests and I had a lot of fun earning skins. But that didn’t change the fact that putting a time limit on earning those skins was unfair. It felt like a transparent way to artificially raise player engagement.
Look, I mean, in general, I think it’s all pretty harmless. Warchest was fun! I’d buy it again. But I think it’s a great example of how free-to-play changes incentives for developers. Players don’t give you any money upfront, so fundamentally they are a cost. Servers cost money, community managers cost money, stuff costs money. It becomes the developer’s job - even a developer with good intentions - to figure out how to extract money from players.
I don’t doubt Frost Giant when they say they want to do free-to-play “the right way”. But I worry that the bad structural incentives they’ve setup for themselves will push them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider.
(People spent years meme’ing about how esports don’t make any money, then pulled out their Pikachu faces when ESL sold themselves to a company backed by the Saudi Arabian government. You can’t just lose money forever, it doesn’t work like that.)
For better or for worse, this isn’t Blizzard - there isn’t an MMO money printing machine in the back room funding all of these ideas. Now what you have are VCs who, like everyone else in the market, are staring at fairly bleak balance sheets and are wondering when their investment in this RTS studio is going to turn into something. And I get concerned about what the result of that pressure will be, versus the tried and true method of just… accepting money when you sell your product!
I hope free-to-play works out for Stormgate because I hope Stormgate, in general, works out. Nonetheless I think the nuts-and-bolts downsides of free-to-play don’t get enough traction in mainstream press coverage. I also have a general objection towards the broader economic trend of “cheaper, but worse”. Anyway, that’s a topic for Part III.
Until next time!
brownbear
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