In the Name of the Game: Free-to-Play to Be the Wave of the Future?

In the 2008 MI6 Game Marketing Conference, a trio of massively-multiplayer online gaming icons were sure that the F2P business model was more than just growing, however - it was likely to be the 'way to go' from here on out.

"Free-to-play online worlds are the future," said Craig Sherman of Gaia Interactive, makers of Gaia. Daniel James of Three Rings Design (Puzzle Pirates) and Min Kim of Nexon (MapleStory) also shared similar sentiments.

Small ripples - the start of big waves?

Now that's interesting, given the timeliness of their opinions. You see, not long before MI6 2008 MMO panel was formed, a European game developer company, namely Digital Illusions CE (DICE), became one of very, very few mainstream Western companies to toy around with the F2P business model.

Known for their work on the Battlefield series on PCs and Macs, DICE soon wowed the world when they announced Battlefield Heroes - a free-to-download, free-to-play spin-off of the oft-boxed franchise.

Of course, people held their breath and forcibly kept their hopes in moderation, for many knew that Electronic Arts - who owns the rights to publishing any Battlefield game in existence - was unlikely to agree with the concept of "free".

But DICE has been steadily pitching the game to the superstar publisher. To the relief of thousands of gamers out there, EA - or "the new EA," rather - seems to have been nodding in approval since day one of the title's development cycle.

And there's little surprise there. Unbeknownst to many, the publishing giant gained some popularity with a slice of the Asian gaming population when they decided that the only way to defeat piracy was to offer one of their more popular sports games for a low price. A ridiculously low price, in fact - they went from retail tags to absolutely free.

FIFA 07, a game that topped the piracy download charts in Korea (if there was any), was given away to the many fans hounding the soccer title that featured national football superstar Kim Nam-II (of the Suwon Samsung Bluewings). EA simply charged for additional content and rosters, an idea that seemed to go well with their customers.

F2P transcending genres, markets

Just a couple of months later from EA's bombshell, the self-proclaimed "creative hub" that is THQ decided to market one of their more successful real-time strategy finances to Asia by way of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited.

Company of Heroes, currently disputed as one of many of Relic Entertainment's best war strategy titles, was to introduce itself to the Chinese gaming population in the form of a multiplayer online game. It appears that THQ found something favorable about the free-to-play model, for the publisher's top brass, Brian Farrell, claimed that the Company of Heroes online project was to adopt F2P and use the microtransaction revenue model to gain a buck.

And this doesn't even include the wealth of other Western independent gaming studios now wading around the F2P pool. S2 Games, makers of Savage, was noted for giving the thumbs up in the FPS-RTS hybrid's shift to free-to-play. Of course, S2 Games' marketing scheme was a different spin on the popular model. The latest Savage title was offered for free to download and play as long as you kept your multiplayer experience limited to local gaming networks. For the full online experience, there was a one-time fee to be paid.

You wouldn't have thought this idea would have been even plausible years ago - and from a money-making standpoint too - especially for a full-priced video game project. But it has finally come to a point that the stunt works, even on its own peculiar way.

Outright fun gaming - at no additional cost

Looking for bigger fish? How about Ubisoft and Electronic Arts? These major game industry players gave away a few of their video game titles for free last year.

Paris-based Ubisoft managed to strike a deal with advertising companies in order to offer Far Cry, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Prince of Persia at no additional cost. Of course, to play them, you had to have a UBI.com account that certified you as a US citizen to make the US-centric advertising deal stick. The download portion of the offer ground to a halt some time after.

EA, in contrast, served up a modern-PC compatible rendition of Command & Conquer in commemoration of the legendary franchise's 12th anniversary. In the superstar publisher's case, there was no real catch with this promo, and everyone everywhere was allowed to grab a copy and play.

But the game publisher stop offering the download for free at their official FTP site after a few weeks in order to make room for a new product offering.

They came up with a compilation called Command & Conquer: The First Decade and stuck all the past C&C games into a once-in-a-lifetime "compendium" package for RTS fans - a package that included the free downloadable game.

Luckily, file hosting sites continued to offer Command & Conquer for free, even to this day.

Revisiting ripe, uncharted territory

Are all these part of a growing trend? Perhaps, but it's way too early to tell. While we've had the general notion that the online gaming segment has been rising in the past years, the overall growth trend escapes the approximations of many.

The progress into the monitoring, surveying, measurement, and analyses of the online gaming industry only made real headway in early 2008, and thus many have yet to learn just how big the online market is from a worldwide perspective.

The NPD Group for instance, whose reports have been the basis for many performance estimations by industry analysts, has only released the results of their subscription monitoring program recently.

And its coverage is very limited. While it's focused on P2P, pay-to-play models are unlikely carried by the majority of online games available. The report titled "Online Gaming 2008," however, did prove one undeniable point: gaming on PCs wasn't gone or dying. Most of it has seemingly moved from retail and mainstream to online.

Matt Miller of NCsoft once said that MMOs should target consoles because it was bigger than the PC base - but I'm more than willing to digress. The base of decent, game-capable personal computers is much, much larger in essence than all of the game consoles' user base combined.

It's just the mainstream, high-end games that exclude many of these hardware out.

By how much PCs outnumber consoles is a question that has yet to be answered with certainty. While we don't know how big this side of PC gaming is, the old segment certainly hasn't stopped growing. It has been considered - at least in the MMORPG front - as one of the major scenes for global marketing practices.

The market was just so huge that in order to appeal to a grand crowd, a single franchise or intellectual property had to be portrayed in so many different ways. And they had to be arranged so that it seemed appropriate to local pop-culture.

Take for example, NCsoft's Tabula Rasa. The MMO giant tried to create an MMORPG that fused elements to attract gamers of the East and West. Though you couldn't say that Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa became an attractive prospect for the same crowd hoarding over NCsoft's more successful Eastern release of EverQuest II, it becomes a shining example of a big gaming divide.

Now that's not to say that some companies like Level Up Games, a multi-national MMORPG distribution entity, didn't know this for a fact. Level Up's experience since the days of Ragnarok Online pretty much makes them veterans in the field of multi-cultural marketing.

It's only now at the 2008 MI6 conference that the realization settled in for the rest of the industry.

Beneath murky waters

For MI6 panel member Daniel James, free-to-play will be "the superior business model" in the future. You can't help but stop and pop a second thought or two, though: with a growing number of game companies swimming in the sea of free-to-play dominated Asia, was the rest of the mainstream willing to risk entering crowded waters?

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) thinks it could and should. Last year, Sony's online gaming division knew the strengths and weaknesses to Blizzard's World of Warcraft, and they pointed out that one of its shortcomings was its low official presence in the eastern markets, which led to its overall low accessibility.

Blizzard's foothold in Asia is minor at best, but it's probably steadily growing as their efforts to enlarge their Asian footprint have accelerated. It's really no wonder - a significant portion of the world's MMORPG population resides there. But there are many other potential gamers to be tapped in other regions as well.

"There are 800 million teens in the world," said Craig Sherman, and added that WoW's 10 million user base wasn't even scratching the surface.

A surface of hundreds of millions, if DICE's Ben Cousins' estimate is suitably accurate. "If you look at the amount of PCs that are out there, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions," said the producer of Battlefield Heroes in an earlier interview with Gamasutra.

Wizet's MapleStory, acquired by Korea-headquartered Nexon, rivals that of WoW's coverage, and belittles Blizzard's core audience by as much as 50 million more users. 67 million is still not a significant portion of 800 million people, but then Nexon has got the longer end of the stick in terms of user base and service coverage.

What Nexon can't match is the amount of money bags Blizzard hauls into their vault on a yearly basis. The company's annual revenue drop of approximately US$ 200 million won't match up to Blizzard's recent US$ 1.5 billion end-of-year turn in.

The MI6 MMO panel admits that while F2P is profitable, it isn't as "monetizing" as pay-to-play (P2P) or subscription-based models. But then you've got to acknowledge that US$ 200 million comes from youth who fish for their pocket money and savings, and that's not half bad considering it hardly comes from costly fixed credit.

"There's a whole audience of tweens and teens out there who want to engage, but don't have access to plastic," said Min Kim. Kim, who Cousins refers to as "the dude" of the F2P industry, pointed out that free-to-play games fit well into this gap and accommodated those who've been locked out due to technicalities.

F2P - more than just a 'buzz' word

Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert, not exactly the fan of MapleStory and its ilk, thought of microtransactions - currently the best revenue model for F2P - as simply an industry "buzz term." And frankly, he hated it.

The rather outspoken developer, whose cross-platform MMORPG Champions Online recently entered development, said in an MMO panel discussion in GDC 2008, "Many people like paying one fee and not worrying about details."

But how "many" exactly? More than 800 million "many"? And are people really that indifferent to how much they spend and how it's spent?

I'm fully aware that a couple of WoW players themselves opt to purchase multiple WoW time cards in Amazon just because there's a way to get them cheaper in the long run than Blizzard's own monthly or even yearly rates, so we can't just agree with Emmert's one-tracked opinion.

In another point, the blossoming of the F2P-centric game markets show that it's definitely heading upwards in status and recognition. Obviously, you could question whether that momentum is slowing down or maintaining it's course, and that's fair enough.

In a list provided by MMORPG.com, you can find 89 free-to-play games in the list of 213 MMO titles which amounts to at least 41.78% share. P2P games, currently totaling to 66 (current and future), is a modest 30.99% of the market share. There's a huge void of 59 games that haven't made their minds up yet, but some are already taking free-to-play into consideration - if not joining the bandwagon outright - with microtransactions and advertising as optional revenue source.

I do take this with due skepticism, of course. There were some MMO titles, F2P or P2P, that may have yet to be documented.

I do agree, however, that the idea of F2P versus P2P is currently driven as a east-versus-west argument. A target nation where F2P or P2P is most popular would certainly steer a developer's decision to adopt that model for a localized game version, for example.

But the "east for east and west for west" opinion might be slowly waning if the recent developments are any indication.

Electronic Arts, the major publisher it is, has often expressed its love for the microtransaction revenue model. Their operations been a different sense of the whole F2P idea, though - they've been charging for extra services and content in games that weren't available for free initially. But if Battlefield Heroes is any indication, then they're definitely interested in the prospect. I guess you could say that the industry's dive into F2P is simply a question of who's willing to try.

After all, if none even braved their own steps in the first place, how else will they get to learn of it? Word of mouth, some would dare say. But by the looks of it, fewer are willing to even listen.

It's crunch time, folks

So will F2P be the wave of the future? That would probably depend on what happens in the immediate future - that being, whether the world would see major games finally breaking free of regularly paid subscriptions.

Many MMOGs have already converted to free versions and alternate avenues of money making, even after being very successful pay-to-play games in their time. And many of them are getting a steady trickle of outsiders logging in.

Why? Because in times of financial crisis, slimming down costs calls for practical measures. You have to remember that F2P isn't a way to cheat developers out of a great game - it's arguably a way to gauge if a game's really great and really worth the money spent on it.

And it will allow players to do so without immediately losing hard-earned cash or allowing the companies to reap the financial rewards before customers could fully comprehend the MMO game's full potential. A full potential, in fact, that can't be truly realized until the developers drop everything and say, "This is it. The game is done. There's nothing else that could make this game greater than it is."

So far, no MMO could really claim to have achieved that level of furnish. Not even Blizzard's money-gobbling beast could boast that.

Whether the game be oriented in F2P or P2P, it'll always be in continuous development. Changes are bound to happen, and gaming experiences that made it great in the first play through may have been drastically altered in the next months.

Now whether those alterations affect your overall enjoyment is up in the air. And take note that fun, in a sense, is the practical return of investment (or ROI for you business buffs) for P2P subscriptions.

At least in F2P, a value-seeking gamer doesn't have to worry about having paid for a game and then losing out on fun due to some dev quirks like unjustified balance changes. And that's besides some game universe-ripping controversies that would steal a gamer life's worth of work and real money - all in one huge upheaval.. "Jumpgate Scandal" - now who would've thought?

To make a long story short, put no financial investment into your actual playtime and find no need to justify ROI for game time. You'd rarely have much regrets in the end. If you argue that most F2P-based games are usually a waste of time, consider this: it's better than having regularly spent money and time with P2P, is it not?

Though some will definitely deny it, the move toward F2P is the noticeable shift happening in the gaming populace. For many out there, if an MMO game is not free from the get-go, it's likely to get the cold shoulder.

Just as the hardware enthusiast has evolved to a smarter, money-wise shopper, so have some gamers. Let's divert ourselves to a parallel situation here: How would you efficiently extract the value of unlimited broadband Internet access? The closest you can get to 24-7 utilization of the service, correct?

Now that kind of thinking would probably be the used similarly for most subscriptions. Paying a fixed amount for playing a month's worth of any MMO subscription won't sit well with the value-wary gamer if he isn't satisfied from the gaming experience his 40-hour work week would allow.

Fortunately for the penny pinching gamer, major publishers (the intellectual property owners) are definitely making moves to experience the F2P segment's offerings firsthand, albeit more carefully and slowly than some would have hoped.

And we're not just talking about the PC platform here either. The Agency, SOE's bid for MMO gaming on the PlayStation 3, is also going free-to-play. Take a gander at Hideo Kojima's offering of Metal Gear Online - isn't it great that it won't cost you a penny to play the heck out of it?

So the future of gaming and its ties with free-to-play all boils down to a couple of conundrums to ponder over. The one that looms over with varying degrees of prominence is: will this creeping momentum continue toward the future until it can finally be considered a viable business option for the mainstream segment?