As our own Eliot Lefebvre laid out in last week’s Soapbox, game companies are businesses that exist to make money. Everything they do, whether it be crafting an expansion to an existing game or making a funny joke in a forum thread, is designed to keep you playing and keep you paying. Free-to-play as a business model didn’t come from a bunch of gamers sitting around trying to work out ways to take advantage of developers and get something for nothing, it came from savvy executives who spend every waking moment of their lives searching for the most efficient method to separate gamers from their money.
These decisions weren’t made because a bunch of whiny gamers demanded access to content without wanting to pay for it. They were made because going free-to-play is good business sense for a studio that’s hemorrhaging money and has no alternative for turning the tides. Every game played represents a choice by the consumer, and the great majority of online game consumers are not willing to pay $15 a month for every game they play. Launching with a subscription is effectively making a bet that players will give up on the subscription games they already play and divert those monthly payments into an unproven title. Frankly, it hasn’t worked a single time in any long-term capacity since World of Warcraft launched in 2004.
Simply put, free-to-play brings in the bucks in ways that are often unmatched by other payment models. The MMO and online niches are replete with stories of struggling studios that reversed their fortunes by transitioning their games to F2P. Turbine reported that switching The Lord of the Rings Online into the free-to-play bracket resulted in the tripling of its profits. SOE’s EverQuest saw a 150% increase in unique logins after dumping its payment barriers. Titles like TERA, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Aion might not even exist without the use of free-to-play as an emergency financial parachute.