Thoughts on the future of F2P

• Extending F2P current direction
• Practicality: ♥ • • • •
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Free-to-Play (F2P) games are becoming way more than what we have understood video games to be. For already more than a decade, a fun game has not been enough for it to warrant success. Mobile phones not only opened the door for the masses to adopt games as a favorite pastime, they also helped open up the creation of games to be more accessible. A limitless stream of games is added to the vast ocean of choices available to anyone who opens their device associated stores. Discoverability has been a real issue to the mobile game’s market for a long time and back in the day, great games moved their install prices into a race to the bottom for as long as price was still something that could differentiate your game from your competitor’s and grab the audience’ attention. And so, free games came into existence and minimized that last bit of friction to install.

F2P games may have minimized the friction to install, but they didn’t stop the ongoing flood of new games being released. The game’s market continues to expand and Covid-19 proved to be an excellent catalyst to propel games into the mainstream and so more and more companies are entering the market hoping to capture a piece of the ever expanding pie. All in all this means that user acquisition (UA) cost will continue to rise and F2P games need to continue to become ever more engaging, for longer periods of time to be able to recoup that initial UA investment. It is in this light that F2P games need to have the best production values, the smoothest user experience, the most fun and varied gameplay and the most content to keep players coming back and hopefully spend some money. 

It is now common to expect a return of investment to happen from a small percentage of all your players and to expect that to happen months after the player first installed a game. And for anything to entertain and provide value to its customers for such a long time it becomes ever more apparent that F2P games need to be more than games and so games as a service (GaaS) has become the norm.

A F2P game revolves around a single or multiple activities that are fun for a long time in their own right. To increase their longevity an additional layer of gameplay and progression is introduced where the first activity feeds into, usually referred to as the Meta-Game, or simply the Meta. In its most basic form, players play the fun activity, earn some sort of currency that feeds into the meta-activity, allowing the player to progress in that system, endlessly looping between fun activity and meta activity to continue their progress. And although this structure forms the basis of F2P games and in potential could keep players engaged for months, players often need more diversity and “newness” to be kept entertained and not wander off into a competitors game.

This is where LiveOps enters the playing field. LiveOps is anything that can be controlled and modified from outside of the game (through a back end system) to alter the state of the game in such a way that it makes the game feel alive and current, without the necessity of updating the game through one of the app stores. This allows the developers to keep the game feeling current and offer the player something new on a regular basis. This could be anything from displaying a simple message reflecting something current (Happy Mothers Day) to month long events that reward special prizes. 

To leverage all these players playing this free game, in-game stores are getting really sophisticated and often resemble physical stores in the way that they promote their in-app purchases (IAP) display their offers. Virtual scarcity is introduced to make deals more valuable and players are segmented into different categories to offer them not only the most optimal and fun experience, but also that one particular deal that they find irresistible. Offers are tested, made time limited and connect to real life events and holidays and that one life saving item is presented just when the player needs it the most.

And with in-game shops looking more and more like their real world counterparts, so the need for customer support becomes real too. Games should not just be intuitive, any form of doubt should be addressed and gaining the player’s trust has become a key pillar in the production of any F2P game. A dedicated Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section needs to be accessible at all times and a connection to a real life person is expected from the start. More often than not, community managers will answer questions on dedicated forums and Discord servers, allowing players to engage directly with the development team. Games played for months create deep relationships between developers and their players. 

Social elements are added to F2P games allowing players to reach out to their friends from within the game environment, inviting them in, play games together or against each other and to form social groups to reach goals together. Chatting, making appointments, sharing in game resources and experiences and simply hanging out in your favorite virtual environment are starting to become a necessity to be able to compete. This social layer serves multiple purposes from the developer’s point of view as it could potentially lower the user acquisition cost enormously and keep players engaged for longer as they are now enjoying the game with their friends.

Underneath it all is data flowing in from our observations from with the game and ever expanding the knowledge we gain from it. What are our players enjoying in our games, where do they spend and how long do they keep playing? The data coming in requires specialist analysing the data and making sure it in return flows back into the game as the basis for another event or that attractive new deal. 

It is clear that F2P games are emerging to be way more than games and if you extend these current developments further along, beyond GaaS, where will the end up? I think it will end up to become games as a platform (GaaP) – Games as a social media platform. Although different on scale – you can start to see why games might develop into the so called Metaverse, a virtual world to play, to socialize and to connect with others that like being in the game’s ecosystem.

Matthew Ball believes the metaverse to be persistent (always on, always available), synchronous and live, have no cap on the amount of players, include a fully functional economy, spans both in the virtual and real world, be interopearational across different “worlds” and become populated with content and experiences from a wide range of contributors. 

The F2P road to the metaverse makes sense from a game developer and publisher’s standpoint, right? Rising costs, bigger and bigger games with higher budgets and plenty of things to do. Why invest in a risky cycle of making a great game, hoping to find the right audience and keeping them engaged long enough to make up for the investment? When it becomes harder and more costly to get players into your game, you’ll want to keep these players engaged for the longest time possible. Not only extend the game with variations of the same game through different events, but offer new games when they get bored of the current one. When they want to engage with their friends, why not offer that too. Watch a movie together, listen to music together before joining another match? That’s the allure of the one game that will rule them all. 

Not everyone will want to be fully submerged in the cartoon-like world of Fortnite, or enjoy children’s favorite Roblox. Will therefore each niche get their own Metaverse? And how many of these Metaverses can exist next to each other and will they be able to capture every audience? Or will all Metaverses eventually collide into a single one?

I’m pretty sure some of these Metaverse games will follow the same aggressive strategy as big tech seems to favor. Make your product irresistible and at a bargain price (or free) to drive off any competition and become the dominator in the market. This dominating strategy is already happening with companies M&A-ing (merging and acquiring) to create a complete vertical of the market where the total company controls the ad-space, the ad-agencies, the development studios, the data analytics and the game publishers. This control basically means that they can steer groups of players from one game to another – all in their own ecosystem, their own semi-metaverse.

The game’s industry is developing fast. What was new yesterday is old news in a week and because of the constant movement there seems to be a lot of uncertainty. I still remember the mobile games market in 2013. There were some great premium blockbuster games bravely stepping up against the trend of lower and lower prices and requesting some actual money again – I remember Oceanhorn and Ridiculous Fishing costing like EUR 9.99 – all the while the F2P tidal wave was imminent. And then – out of literally nowhere came Flappy Bird, an simple and punishing game, made by 1 person with stolen graphics and a single, extremely simple activity, that captivated the world and inspired an army of game developers and amateurs alike to replicate its seemingly simple success. No-one saw Flappy Bird coming, and no-one would have imagined it starting the Hyper Casual Games Genre by itself. 

This unpredictability, this constant flux of where games are heading and these random-like massive changes makes this industry so worthwhile to be in. The golden formula of fun still has to be discovered. I feel like the metaverse will be to games like what Amazon is to shopping, it’s like that super-convenient-and-deliver-whatever-I-can-think-of-to- my-doorstep-instantly, but it won’t be game’s end game. Some people will never get into it and others will yearn for simpler times where games are just games again.