The Ethics of "Freemium" / Free-to-Play Design

[Salacious Snake]

A funny tidbit related to this topic: http://www.cultofmac.com/196247/developer-has-game-rejected-for-pointing-out-in-app-purchases-are-nonsense/

Terry Cavanagh had a game rejected from the iOS app store due to his description containing the text:

This is a completely free game, not “free to play”; there are no in-app purchases or any of that nonsense.

Snap!

[Roderick]

Haha, classy!

[Henroid]

That's hysterical. It's also awful that he can't make his commentary that hurts somebody's butt at Apple.

[Lu]

To be fair, it's a little petty of both sides. Still funny.

[Henroid]

To be fair, it's a little petty of both sides.

Probably. But his comment is more of just a flippant joke. At most Apple's letter should have said, "Hey man, don't be a dick," and leave it at that. They backpeddled as soon as the thing became public. Not that it's a huge thing - as was said, it's just silly.

[The Claw]

I've been thinking a bit about this over the last few days. In particular these few quotes, including my own.

... it is gambling. Minus the potential for monetary rewards. So it's arguably worse.

I don't think the gambling analogy holds water precisely because there is no monetary reward for playing these games.

Because it exploits the same compulsorily psychology, I think. Why would money need to be involved for it to be unethical? Edit: Having thought about it a bit more, I think the aspect of money does push it over the ethical line for me. I think I agree, but I'm not sure yet.

I think I've changed my mind on gambling. Sno might be right in saying that the fact that there are no tangible rewards and often no win condition makes these games worse than gambling in that they resemble confidence tricks, where players cannot win but are given the false impression that the game is simple, winnable and therefore worth playing. Typical freemium games achieve the same effect by gradually distorting the player's sense of value through the promotion of successive tiers of artificially rare prizes (like badges) and displaying these prominently to other players. The design goal is to establish a feedback loop where each payment moves players closer to the next opportunity to pay for prizes of increasing rarity and thereby increase their status amongst other players of the game.

If the only goal is to capitalise on greed and engineer a community that fights over worthless crap then I guess the game is ethically wrong because it is more regressive than progressive.

[syntheticgerbil]

If the only goal is to capitalise on greed and engineer a community that fights over worthless crap then I guess the game is ethically wrong because it is more regressive than progressive.

I love you.

[TurboPubx-16]

Speaking about free or low-priced games with in-game purchases, as an iOS gamer I find these design choices frequently ruin whatever game they're in. Infinity Blade 2 was pretty fun until I hit a sheer wall of grinding. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that what I was suppose to do was use real money to buy in-game money, but in my defense it was the first iOS game I really got into and I was pretty naive about the whole thing. Doodle Jump was another game I enjoyed playing for ten minutes a week, but the developers put an end to that when they introduced collectible (and purchasable) coins into the game. Coins work for something like Temple Runner but in Doodle Jump's case the game was totally broken after that,.

[Henroid]

I wanna do a little comparison between what's been revealed, in general terms sadly, about TOR going free to play vs. City of Heroes, which was nearly the most harsh free to play system I've seen. It certainly has the most complex system.

There were two point values associated with CoH being freemium; tokens and Paragon Points. Paragon Points were the things your cash actually converted into, and things you bought in the store cost Paragon Points - costume pieces (NEW costume pieces, not existing ones), new power sets, enhancements for powers (enhancements are... think of them as items, but applied directly to powers), that sorta thing. The tokens were the complex part, used to unlock some aspects of the gameplay and other rewards similar to the Paragon Points. Tokens were earned for the following:

- Making a new account (or registering your existing account to the new freemium system; it was forced)

- Becoming a "premium" account, which means you've subscribed for at least a single month

- Purchasing Paragon Points for the first time

- Applying a retail box code to your account (if you purchased the game prior to the freemium model)

- Every purchase of at least 1200 Paragon Points (I forget the dollar amount) earns a token; cumulative; larger quantities in a single purchase earn bonus tokens

- Every month you subscribe (not retroactive, see below)

You basically could get 3 coins pretty easily just by making an account and buying a pack of 1200 PP. 4 coins if you bought the game prior, effortlessly. And you get a 5th for subscribing for the first time. This unlocks a substantial amount (see below).

Note: They did something for people who subscribed to the game already, where every 3 months converted to a token, and every 12th month awarded a bonus token. So basically every full year subscribed to the game prior to it going freemium got you 5 tokens.

Okay. Now to explain what all these goddamn tokens means.

There were 9 Tiers of rewards on the token graph. Each Tier had slots for tokens - the higher the Tier, the more token slots. The slots themselves would unlock content (inventory slots of varying amounts, exp bonuses, costume pieces, that sort of thing) and filling a tier completely would unlock more rewards. Below is a list of just the first few tiers, and I'm only listing the benefits of the Tier bonuses (not slots) - and I'm only listing the unlocks to the basic functions standard to an MMO, ignoring the CoH specific rewards (since I'd have to explain those).

Tier 1 contained token slot 1. This unlocked most chat functions (just for account creation, no money down), joining guilds, you have two character slots (of which have low in-game currency caps).

Tier 2 contained token slot 2. You can trade with players directly, you get access to the mail system, and the currency cap for your characters goes up pretty substantially.

Tier 3 contains token slots 3, 4, and 5. This is where being a free player could take you up to with little additional investment. It would grant you access to the last couple channels, which were global, and I consider this substantial because the CoH community was excellent. Plus your in-game currency cap shot up tremendously.

Tier 4 had tokens 6, 7, and 8. Once you filled it out you could have lifetime access to the auction house.

Tier 5 had tokens 9 to 13, and filling it out permanently unlocked the Master Mind and Controller classes (which were locked behind having a subscription when the game went freemium).

Mind you, having a subscription allowed access to all the Tier rewards (not slot rewards) regardless of how many tokens you actually had.

It's complex, and yeah you had to pay for access to basic functions and core pieces of an MMO, but the way CoH did it was at least less evil than the TOR approach. For starters, the token rewards were just benefit to you buying other things that freemium or DLC usually sells. Like I never squatted on Paragon Points just so that I could have the tokens associated with it, because there was a lot to buy and it was permanent unlocks all around. I spend money to unlock the Laser Rifle powerset, and now I have a token or two as well. That's actually more or less the point; CoH was permanently unlocking things fairly rapidly.

So when I see what is going to be held hostage in TOR, and that there's merely the one currency (the store points), it makes me worry about what you get for your dollars. $30 on freemium CoH would bring you shy of the auction house being permanently unlocked. That's not bad, you're paying the price of a DS game for an MMO and almost having the full experience. But with TOR, what if that $30 is only getting you a couple of standard features?

I'm sure this all reads as jargon for people who have never been involved with freemium games at any level. It's just a little more perspective to have on freemium, and on how bad TOR may or may not be. Hopefully their cost of unlocking functions is cheap. From what I can see, $15 (subscription free) will get you 200 to 250 of their point system?

ugh, that's an aside I want to make by the way - the most obnoxious thing about freemium games is their varying currency values.

Edit - By the way, TOR having a charge for character customization is the actual evil aspect of all this. Unless they're designing new choices and making you pay for those. But even then it's shady because customization only goes so far. But if they're locking out existing options, fuck EA so, so much.

[Wodenpwn]

I have become more aware lately of the fact that my life is going by each minute. Consequently I have become very reluctant to give my time to a game unless it is going to deliver a significantly compelling experience. Most if not all MMOs and Free to play games want my time foremost, and seem reluctant to deliver a compelling experience in exchange. I am guessing a lot of free to players do not have much of a metric to compare their game experience in farmville with. Additionally, it seems like most free to play developers do not have any real point of reference for their own games, and to them the real game is their job.

as an aside, in the previously linked video, I really liked Jonathan Blow's quote about the players of farmville being the tennant-farmers for their landlord Zynga (my paraphrase)

[theGreatjon]

I really have a problem with assimilating free to plays with farmville. Tribes Ascend is a free to play. It's currently one of the best multiplayers FPS out there. It no doubt is a compelling experience. Mechwarrior online is a free to play, and it's not a subpar game. Free to play is a business model, not a genre. And we are seeing more and more quality "free to plays".

[Lu]

I was watching a talk and a very familiar quote came by. Anyone interested in the GDC talk from the OP, it's called Ahead of the Game - Ethics of Modern Game Development. It should be available for free. And I don't know why I don't just link it. So there you go.

[Forbin]

I wish i read this thread a bit earlier.

I think people are too dismissive of the F2P audience. Both of the Free players and the paying players. It seems like everyone assumes that they're weak minded fools being taken for everything they're worth, and that they've got terrible taste in games because they don't like the hardcore stuff they enjoy. I think the later argument was more applicable a few years ago, but it's a bit dismissive. Spend the time to understand your audience, and you can serve them ethically and with respect. If you have GDC Vault access I suggest you watch Laralyn McWilliams talk from GDC Online 2011. She talks about her history of building games for other people, and I think it's fairly appropriate. You don't need to be a "crack dealer". That being said, just saying you respect your players doesn't mean you actually respect your players.

I think that a lot of people have overblown the "manipulation" angle in free to play. Often it's nothing more than an attempt to have players return in their first few days. It's tough to cut it in the free marketplace, your users have no sunk cost to guilt them into sticking with your game, you'll lose more than half in a short period of time. There are a few outliers, where games capitalize on pain points in order to grab a couple bucks, or capitalize on guilt when a friend sends you a premium gift. But a lot of those things haven't spread, because they're short term. If you're not tying your monetization to things that players perceive as real value, then you're basically taking a short sighted slash and burn model and you have to have extremely high numbers or you won't succeed.

One thing that I do think is done extremely poorly is the viral aspect. As someone who's passionate about UX, it's painful to see people doing bad things. I don't worry so much about the players (though it does make their experience frustrating), but it's damaging to the entire industry. And really, people like Zynga are trying to trick you into accidentally advertising for them. It feels like malware, and what's really disappointing is that people are ignoring the benefits of doing virality well. We had an amazing experience using game center leaderboard challenges in our office with Super Hexagon. It wasn't built into the game, and I feel like Terry wouldn't have given it much thought, but it absolutely was an improved experience. But word of mouth is important and converting your friends is a high value target, so we'll probably see people make a few more mistakes with that before some solid role models emerge.

I also think that the "think of the children" angle is also thrown around without much thought. There's almost no store place out there that allows uncontrolled transactions. iTunes requires a password, can be child locked, and is extremely responsive to charge backs from parents of kids who managed to get through both hurdles (likely with the parents help, the same way they buy mature console titles). If you want to make money off of kids, and you chose a F2P model, you're probably making a mistake. Kids have more time than money, and studies show that if you want to convince most parents to pay, then you have to make your game a compelling experience that they see their kids dedicating a lot of their time to. Short sighted cash grabs just don't work, and the idea that people are making mountains of money off it seems a bit naive.

[Kolzig]

A funny tidbit related to this topic: http://www.cultofmac...s-are-nonsense/

Terry Cavanagh had a game rejected from the iOS app store due to his description containing the text:

This is a completely free game, not “free to play”; there are no in-app purchases or any of that nonsense.

Snap!

The funniest part about all this is that the text had to be removed in iOS store, but in Google's Play Store it has been since he first released it there and still is.

https://play.google....re.dontlookback

[TychoCelchuuu]

Another tidbit related to the topic. Everyone has been talking about the more important ethical questions like "is this exploiting people" but here's a tiny but still relevant ethical question - if you did this shit to XCOM, would you be evil? I think you'd be pretty evil. We're talking at least Darth Vader evil. Ruining a game seems pretty bad.

[Orv]

I feel it's not hyperbole when I say that you would share the same circle of hell as Pavlov if you did that to XCOM.

[sclpls]

That XCOM post is interesting because it does sort of point to what the problem with the free-to-play model is from the perspective of strategy game design.

A game developer trying to design a strategy game is trying to balance various risk/reward decisions to make an interesting game to play. In a free-to-play model, you basically throw that balance out the window by allowing the player to buy his/her way into success. Congratulations! You've broken your game!

I don't have a lot to say about the ethics of a business model. I think everyone really ought to be skeptical of a business model that tries to skirt a rather simple transaction of purchasing a product for a fixed amount of money. Alternatives to that generally involve trying to hide costs & fees, which makes it more difficult to determine if consumers are getting their money's worth.

[Henroid]

The thing is, that whole thing is written from the perspective of making more money as opposed to making the video game the devs set out to make.