Pay to Win is mostly a Shadow Fear
Many players, that have been burned by bad game balance on a game or two in the past, race to the assumption that devs will create all kinds of “must-have pay-to-win” items in the marketplace so that players just have to buy stuff to play the game competently. They then also seem to imagine the devs cash-diving through vaults of money like Scrooge McDuck. To them, F2P = P2W.
But when’s the last time you even heard of a pay-to-win game like that?
That pay-to-win approach doesn’t work unless you assume your players will quit out in just a few weeks or gaming sessions (for example, the games designed with the “one-armed bandit” mentality that we saw in many early Facebook games).
Quite simply, gamers that think of themselves as gamers won’t play a game like that for any serious length of time. It’s not merely losing to another player or being outpaced by another player because they outspent you. It’s also that their ability to outspend you undermines the flavor of the victories you can attain, cheapening them somewhat because now no one is sure whether the “best” players are really the best…or just the most willing to spend money.
Only the most dedicated will hang with a seriously unbalanced game for long. Thus, using a “pay-to-win” item approach is a poor choice for most games, and especially bad for long-lived games like MMOs which is why we just generally don’t do it.
So in general, there’s not much of a reason to fear pay-to-win suddenly being introduced into your existing game because it’s a really bad business move and the clever in the industry won’t do it to you. Once you adopt a marketplace into your game, you have to be oriented toward “unique and desirable, but balanced and in sync with the game” for all of your offerings.
Still not Convinced?
But that may not be enough to convince some of you, so let’s try another angle on why pay-to-win isn’t commercially viable. I’m still using the starting assumption that obviously unbalanced pay-to-win games will fail beyond the short-term, and right now we’re talking about longer-term games.
So let’s talk about a game’s marketplace. Around 5% of a game’s population (it varies, but many games are between 3-8%) will buy things from the marketplace. In other words, if 100,000 people play the game, then about 5,000 of them are buying items from your marketplace with any regularity.
These 5% are not necessarily your “most skilled” gamers. They’re a cross-section of your gamer population and include just about every type and personality of gamer. Not all players desire to buy pay-to-win items, so you won’t sell to that entire 5%.
Extending that logic, that means that you have to craft your game’s item balance and appearances to be extremely attractive to that pay-to-win elite, while somehow magically keeping the other 96%+ of the players from rage-quitting every time they get one-shotted by a pay-to-win item.
If that sounds risky, nearly impossible and more than a little foolish to you, then you’re correct. Which is why you don’t see it very often (and not usually for long).
In Summary
I don’t personally have anything against pay-to-win games. I’ve played several good ones and lots of smaller ones for research purposes. They’re not my usual cup of tea, but in the games I enjoyed, the “pay-to-win” was incredibly obvious going in. There were no surprises. Pay-to-win is only annoying to me when I’m somehow surprised by it, or if the game I was playing changes underneath my feet.
But in any case, I burned out on the P2W games quickly. I enjoy skill-based and tactically-minded games and I like to know that if I lose, I got beat by a player’s skills, not by the size of their wallet. I also don’t like feeling required to make a purchase to play competently and most of the P2Ws I’ve played are balanced that way.
On the other hand, I do like free-to-play as a business model because it puts all of the responsibility about whether I like the game or not squarely on the shoulders of the dev team and they don’t make money until I’m entertained. Also, the more common F2P becomes, the easier it is for me to sample through games and find the ones I like. I love Steam, but the list of games I spent money on and then played twice is discouraging when I log on and look at my Library. It’s like my own little “Hall of Shame/Cash Singularity” list.
I’ve heard just about every possible discussion about ways to run F2P games, hybrid strategies, pay walls, pay walls with trials, elite club memberships and so on. Out of those, I’ve reached a few conclusions:
- I really like the simplicity of developing for a “pay wall” strategy. It feels like the old days of box products and it’s just nice not having that constant noise in your head of developing the never-ending month-to-month strategies. I think this is the best of all player experiences also.
- I think free-to-download plus subscriptions alone is mostly retired as a model for the majority of companies, simply because most game companies can’t afford to leave microtransaction revenue on the table. Projects are too costly and it’s not smart to ignore the potential.
- With all the information at my disposal, I’d choose free-to-play as the model for any new online undertaking. I’d work hard to minimize the cons on the list (almost all of which are possible to overcome) and then get it into as many countries and onto as many platforms as I could competently manage.
The goal should be “Nail down a great game and then go as big as you can with it.” Free-to-play helps you go big. It’s as simple as that to me. Everything else is just an obstacle to overcome.
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