If you look at the GDC Europe schedule, it’s packed with talks about free-to-play game design. It makes sense. Many companies out there are trying to figure out how to replicate the success of Riot with League of Legends and Wargaming with World of Tanks. In some territories like North America, despite the growing acceptance of the model, some still feel there’s a certain greed driving the game design that overshadows whatever entertainment value or artistic merit might otherwise be present.
By listening to someone familiar with the Chinese free-to-play browser game market, you’ll get an entirely different perspective. The much maligned ‘pay to win’ label in the West, where users can only really advance by handing over money, is pretty much a standard for distribution and financial gain in China. As described by Jared Psigoda of Reality Squared Games, something like the seemingly omnipresent energy mechanic in Western social games, which caps the amount of things someone can do for free in-game, is the most innocent thing in the world. They make Zynga look almost saintly when it comes to the transparency of their revenue-driven intentions.
“When I talk to Chinese game designers,” said Psigoda, “they say, ‘I just dug this new pit, this monetization pit, that somebody could spend 10,000 dollars or 50,000 dollars in and not reach the highest level.’ It’s all about the monetization of the game.”
Chinese publishers hope to earn back the development budget within two weeks of launch, so everything – armor, pets, equippable angelic wings -- can be upgraded, and everything costs money. And users pay it, because they want to be first on the leaderboards. Psigoda provided statistics showing some gamers would spend over 100,000 dollars on a single game. In some games, botting is a built-in feature, though the service will only remain active if you pay a small fee while away from a computer.
Competition drives everything, and gear purchased for real money in any number of online games bestows substantial statistical benefits, a system that hasn’t found a lot of success in attempts to open these types of games to Western audiences. The keys to success in China, according to Psigoda, are endless progression systems and higher and higher price tags on items that will eventually secure a player’s spot atop a server’s leaderboard.
There’s also blatant game cloning, a topic that’s bought up increasingly often in the United States, most recently with Electronic Arts and Maxis actually suing Zynga for copying the design of Sims Social. In China, says Psigoda, games clone each other all the time, back and forth, until the quality of the product’s originality is wiped out completely in a system that, as Psigoda characterizes it, seems to prize profit above all else. “The question is, why would they do this? And the answer is, it works,” he said. Within the span of two to three months, these cloned games can begin to make 10 to 15 million per month.
Yet these aren’t the only kinds of games that find success in China. Wargaming’s World of Tanks is extremely popular there. With around 35 million registered players over its lifecycle and around 800,000 peak concurrent users, the success of World of Tanks has allowed Wargaming to expand from a company of less than 120 employees to over 1000 in offices worldwide, from San Francisco to Seoul. Though World of Tanks differs quite a bit from the styles of browser-based games Psigoda was describing, like Gunbound-type experiences such as DD Tank, city builders and action-RPGs, those titles and World of Tanks do share a competitive nature. They both fall into the mid to hardcore label, far away from the thinner gameplay of many popular free Facebook games in North America.
“We have companies like Zynga out there, who have essentially trained tens of millions of non-gamers to start playing games,” said Psigoda. “As we move along, some of these gamers are going to want to take the next step from FarmVille or CityVille, try something with a little more meat in the game.”
For Wargaming and CEO Victor Kislyi, building a successful free-to-play game isn’t about praying for a successful launch and hoping to price gouge players eager to climb the leaderboards. It’s about finding a balance between game design and pricing model. “Today, we can hear ‘goes free-to-play’ literally every other day,” said Kislyi. “They think, ‘hey, let’s take this game and add some virtual item shop and do some monetization and we’ll be free-to-play, right?’ Some pull it off, but really very few.”
What some in the West still don’t get, according to Kislyi, is that game design is inextricably tied to pricing model when building a free-to-play game. The approach of building a game as subscription-based and then transitioning to free-to-play, or offering multiple tiers of payment that put various pricing walls in front of consumers simply isn’t a reliable way to generate significant new revenue. “Hybrid is a fancy word. They’re so emotionally attached to the old days of retail and the box, which is guaranteed revenue day one. This is wrong. As soon as you have a fixed price point, you cannot overcome that. Even if it’s like two dollars, even if it’s 99 cents for your mobile application, still you have the price point, and only a certain amount of people are willing to pay this price. So it’s a very narrow corridor.”
Kislyi cautioned this is exactly how to turn off potential customers. “The people who are not willing to pay 50 dollars, or 10 dollars for subscription months, or 99 cents, you lose them. They just don’t enter. Never. They don’t have a chance to look at your game, to enjoy your game, they just don’t come. Interestingly enough, you also reject the people who want to pay more. There are some people who would pay for a box of StarCraft, 300 dollars, why not? Free-to-play does not have that problem. There is no entry barrier. Why would you reject those people?”
Properly monetizing a free-to-play game, according to Kislyi, takes collaborative planning around a free model from the outset of development on a project. “You cannot first make a cool game, and then monetize it. Why would people pay us money? Who will pay? Who will not pay? If you squeeze too much money from them, they leave and they do bad publicity. On the other hand, if you’re too kind, too soft, they just play the game, they enjoy your game and they don’t pay. So you don’t make money and you go bankrupt. So this really, really fine, tiny line between paying and not paying. There is no one universal formula for any kind of game.”
According to Kislyi, establishing a competitive game that is skill-based helps. If you’re knowledgeable about the game, you should be able to have a shot at winning, even against someone who has spent more money. It’s when the “wallet warriors” always win that causes other players to get frustrated and bail out.
So even if the level of quality of some Chinese browser games (Psigoda freely admits there are quality issues in Chinese gaming sector, with one or two new games launching nearly every day, most of which fail) differs from World of Tanks, it seems that global successes like World of Tanks and League of Legends have one thing in common. Much like Qi Xiong Zheng Ba, which pulls in 24 million USD per month, all of these games were conceived and launched as free-to-play, not reverse-engineered post-launch.
In the West, we’ll have to wait and see how games like Star Wars: The Old Republic deal with this kind of trend, and if major online games still on the horizon, like The Elder Scrolls Online, follow along over time with what seems to be the inevitable shift in not only pricing, but design.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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