Free to play comes in different flavors and various types of games. A while ago Dungeon Keeper was released, EA got a lot of heat for their greed. An issue that has since been forgotten it seems, except for fans. Because developers seems to be on that greed train.

Before I go on, there are a couple of key terms that I need to go through. Even if these are obvious, just want to go through them so a potential reader knows what I am talking about. They might have a different meaning to someone else out there, so it’s just so that we are clear.

Free to play means that the initial cost of the game is free.
Premium means you need to pay an initial cost to play the game. In some cases there’s additional fees in-game. But mostly you can enjoy the game without paying more.
Pay to win means that you pay in order to win. Often referred to games where you pay to get advantages that non-paying customers don’t have.

After graduating I have spent quite some time on free to play, of various types. Crossy Roads, Jelly Splash, Peggle Blast, Dragon Mania and Hay Day are just a few, but these are contain examples of what I want to bring up.

Greed

Back to the greed train. Now I’m by far no real expert when it comes to game design, I have a degree in the area, but I have yet to get professional experience from my degree, apart from my current internship. Still I often like to look at games, see what is wrong with the different games, do a mini analysis and see what can they do better. But in the process of playing a lot of these free to play games, I’ve discovered some really greedy developers.

The worst in the class have to be Dragon Mania. I checked the prices to buy gems in the game. Now I wasn’t actually going to buy anything and I didn’t, but I looked at the pricing. 100 gems costs you about 11-12$ (99 Norwegian Krone – hence forward NOK). 3800 gems costs you around 110-120$ (949 NOK). For arguments sake let’s say that it would give you 100hours of gameplay. Let’s be generous and say it is 1$ an hour, not that bad. But no. For 3600 gems you get a single dragon. That leaves you 200 gems. And it costs you 150 gems to upgrade a hatchery.

Read that again. 150 gems, that is around 15$ to upgrade a thing in game. Sure you can get gems through achievements, but you get maybe and this is generous, 20 gems a day. Most I got in a day was 16, but the other days I’ve gotten 0 or 1 gem. But overall 20 gems a day. However at some point the achievements will run out. Also gems is something you use to speed up stuff. Right now I have food that takes 12 hours until they are complete. I got a free egg that takes 1 day and 2 hours to hatch. So they are betting on peoples impatience to buy those gems and make things go faster.

Alright so what’s the solution to this? Players can’t play for hours on end can they? They should meet bricks that tempt them to buy stuff. Right?
Wrong. If you have a system that is dependent upon players needing to wait for stuff, you have a broken game design. You have made the game fundamentally flawed. Bold statement, I know, but let me try to explain. The first phase of the game you train the player in how they should play their game. Give them the mission list and a small story to drag them in. The first hour of the game you are occupied, you are having fun. The first impression is good and you want to continue breeding those cute dragons. And awww you can pet them.

The first hour of playing is up, you were taught how to pet the dragons, how to speed up building stuff, how to hatch dragons fast, how to get food fast and how to fight your first battle. A thoroughly planned tutorial, so that you, the player, feel right at home and those gems, pfft, of no consequence. I used them at the start, why should I care that I use them up? So you are taught that gems don’t cost a thing. Then suddenly you have zero gems, you see that it costs you only 3 gems to speed up the process of getting some food and voila, the game kindly reminds you that the gems aren’t free and is in a finite quantity unless you buy them. Then you look at the prices of the gems and you think 100 gems, 10 bucks, I can afford that and once you are there, you find out that those 100 gems don’t do squat.

Now I have never done this myself, but I can see the temptation. But back to the flawed game design. Now why would you want a player to wait? Other than the reason that you have a limited amount of content? Other than the reason you want people to wait, be impatient and then sink some money into your game. Right, there is no other reason. Money and limited content. You limit your players, you slow their pace down so you can push more and if players absolutely want to they can sink money into the game, but not so much that you have problems pushing content out. There’s always new dragons, you always need new food. You can always combat other players. Basically to be able to have fun in the game you need to pay. That’s just poor design.

The greed however gets worse. You can buy VIP which gives you more. You have battles vs NPCs which costs energy. This energy you can upgrade with, you guessed it, gems. You also have another type of energy which you can spend to combat other players in a ladder system. In that system you get another type of energy and when you are empty you can buy more. It also has a 20 minute timer on win streaks, up to 20 win streak. But you will only get to 3. Because there’s a 40 minute refill on one energy. Buy MORE, with gems of course (or with an energy token, which I haven’t found out how to get yet).

The right way

I mentioned Crossy Roads before. The game itself isn’t ground breaking. In fact it’s just frogger in 3D, different wrapping and slightly different mechanics. It’s simple, it let’s you play for as long as you want. There is no limitation to how many times you play, what you do and there’s not a lot of resources to keep track of. In fact there’s only 1 resource, as opposed to Dragon Mania which has 5 (gold, gems, food, and 2x energy), excluding the dragons. Anyway back to the resource, the one simple resource you need, coins. You can get coins from playing. The more you play the more coins you are likely to get and collect during the playthrough. 100 coins gives you a spin in the machine that dispenses all the different skins that you can play with. Easy, you don’t have to pay for the skins, you can win them all. You can get coins by watching an ad, but you don’t have to. Each skin is about 1$ (8NOK), there is however 2 special ones that gives you 1000 coins and a special model which you can only buy. Which is about 7$ (around 54 – 55NOK).

The model makes you able to play as much as you want, the longer you play a game, the more invested you become. The more likely it is that you want to buy that last skin that you cannot get in any other way. Maybe not even because you want the skin, but because you put so many hours into the game that you feel that the developer deserve to get something in return for their work. I mean 7$ for a game you put 20 hours into is not much.

Looking at Geometry Dash, which also has the right idea. It has a free to play model, although you get bombarded with commercials, you can play as much as you want. There are some limitations, but it is enough to see if the game is fun and if it is worth having. The Premium version lets you pay a small fee and you can play without any commercials at all. Great system. I loved their idea so much I actually bought the game on both PC and Android. Good way to treat the customers, even if most of the reason was 1) It was dirt cheap. 2) Commercials were really annoying. 3) I was happy with their Android and PC price.

What about Dragon Mania, the gameplay is sooo different and they need timesinks

No. It does not. Remember SimCity? Seen Cities in Motion? Or other games which has resources where you build up a world? That’s what they can do. The timer isn’t your enemy. You get money at certain intervals from taxes, or maybe even you can keep on doing what you do with being able to get gold from the dragons as you do now. But make people able to take on as many dragons as they want. Get rid of the energy against other players and against the NPCs, why are they even there in the first place? At some point the dragons require so much more food than you have. Heck maybe even make it so that you have to level them up yourself. It’s even in the game, a combat system where you have to use your own skill. Make food do the same as the dragons, it generates depending on the number of farms. You don’t need to speed up or slow down the production. As long as you play, you generate coins and food. Or limit the amount of dragons by the amount of farms. Or let farms be like electricity in SimCity, Gold be as is and remove the gems alltogether. Let people buy dragons for real money if they want to have that skin, but let players be able to get the dragons through minigames. But don’t make them better. Just make it a different skin. Because as it is now, it is pay to win.

As long as you play you can build if you can afford it. It then becomes a strategy to find a way to build stuff faster. You still needed to wait for stuff, but you could still do stuff. That’s what is missing in Dragon Mania and those type of waiting games. Waiting 5 minutes is fine, waiting 1 day for something is just dumb. It reeks of greed. Let people play and give them something to do all the time. Let them rather have too much to do than too little, just waiting for stuff to be ready.

Sure you need timers, but you don’t need to wait for days. You want people engaged in your game. You want them to play as much as you want. You want them to be busy. The more they play, the more likely it is for people to invest in your game. So as much as some developers (Gameloft, Zynga, Supercell, cough cough) like people to wait forever for them to do stuff, don’t. Players aren’t the enemy. They are the customers, your friends, your bread and butter.

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Next time I hope to share something about what I do in the company I’m interning for. I was actually thinking of doing that now, but this has been bugging me for quite some time, so I just had to get it out there.

As Wil Wheaton says: “Play more games!”