Design Paradigms and Principles for Free-to-Play Games: A Developer Interview Study

This study examines the design paradigms and principles that game developers consider important when creating free-to-play (F2P) games, a revenue model in which the core game is free while premium content is sold through in-game purchases. Its central aim is to fill a gap in academic research, which has largely overlooked F2P design from the perspective of the developers who build these games. The work draws on in-depth interviews of 50 to 100 minutes each with 14 game developers from six Finnish companies, whose industry experience ranged from one to twenty years. Ten of the interviewees had worked on F2P games and six had experience with gambling games. Transcripts were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach and organized into five themes: generic paradigms, F2P paradigms, generic principles, F2P principles, and poor F2P design.

The analysis distinguishes paradigms, which are abstract design guidelines such as the principle that a game must be fun, from principles, which are concrete mechanics such as chokedown levels, and it separates generic design approaches from those specific to F2P. Developers emphasized paradigms including fair play, equality between paying and non-paying players, scalable design, the continuous production of new content for high-spending players, the ability to achieve everything through play in theory, and a loose economy in preference to a tight one. Commonly discussed principles included selling particular types of virtual goods, using chokedown levels to motivate purchases, offering comeback bonuses, and deploying reminders.

Interviewees also identified poor F2P practices that drew criticism, including shady offer walls, pay-to-win mechanics, paywalls, and aggressive monetization. The findings are presented as a design matrix crossing abstraction level with generic versus F2P-specific scope. The study is qualitative and limited to a small Finnish sample, so its conclusions reflect the perspectives of a particular group of practitioners rather than the industry as a whole.