Designing free-to-play games requires more thought, says Will Luton

okay so it's pocket game mode up beers we're traveling the world we're in brighton for the development conference the first day's gone we had the evolved conference developed tomorrow and we've come across a famous famous author in the world of free to play games mr will newland yes how are you guys i'm very well yeah i've had a lovely day in the sunshine so um you've written a book correct came out like last week two weeks ago uh yes yeah staggered worldwide release the name of your book it's called free to play how to make money from games that you give away okay and what is your book how does that put onion skin like unfeel the free-to-play collaboration why should people so the book itself is the complete book and free to play and it breaks down into into five chapters and those five chapters give you upping up building more and more upon a basis of the very theory behind why the

business model exists and then goes into how to actually monetize or how to make money from an operator free to play game based on that so initially you start with the economics the first chapter is economics so the first of five you can start off i've read the book yeah and we have acronyms so a few of those exactly well even before that's a little bit of economic theory about actually what's the difference between a physical and a digital good and how does that change the market and actually free to play itself is a necessity of a digital market i believe then we talk a little bit about the acronyms as you say some of these uh art dao aqua mao all of these things that you've heard and if you've been to a conference that you will be very very aware of the silicon valley buzzwords and it's kind of so obviously gaming we're all about mobile but you you take a slightly wider kind of range of kind of approach to it so i think it's like three games you look at this kind of like touchstones yeah so it's the book itself is platform agnostic i don't ever really talk about

individual platforms because i believe that free to play will eventually uh end up existing across all platforms and anything whether it's digital delivery but there are three um examples in the book we should uh refer to time time again the first one being farmville which is just a synonymous with free to play it's so well known and widely regarded as a as an archetype for free to play then there's also dual blitz which is something which is a little bit more unusual it's across multiple platforms it's mobile and web and that itself has um a much more classic arcade feel to it and then finally there's dungeon dragons online which is more like an mmo a classic pc hardcore type of game and so i guess you know can we read the book and kind of see kind of how the industry was kind of built up and kind of where kind of the push points are where's street going now i mean it's like an economic basis basically paying a certain amount of money for currency at the conference today we've been talking about aggressive monetization and there's still a bit of backlash i mean are we still in the early days it

was maturing now whereas as a kind of all over right it's going to just become bigger it's going to become more uh accepted i mean widely and it's accepted as a thing i mean this the half of guys still hate even on twitter today it was like guys you tweeted from the goblins free-to-play evil yeah is that ever going to go away yeah it will go away yes i mean that's nonsense right i mean it's unsustainable to call free to play evil forever right it will disappear eventually um so i think that that's it it will become the dominant model i mean paige is not going to go away there's this whole kind of rivalry between free to play and paid is ridiculous right um they're two business models and they both function and they both have advantages and disadvantages there's no doubt about that free to play has drill backs it's harder to to to make money from it it's harder to think it affects the design there's much more thought that needs to be put to a product which is free to play than the paid products it's easy just to decide game and put it out and put a

price tag on it it's not simple but it's easier i think that's the kind of thing i think the last couple of years maybe not so much now but a lot of people thought free to play was easy i mean i think farmer was the example where you kind of thought oh you're just going to create a racing game and you just make loads of money yeah and it's clearly not the case now at all it's not and i think that free to play more than any other any other business model necessitates a good game if your game is not good and people are not coming back and loving it and kind of really enjoying it then they're very they're very unlikely to ever spend any money in it and if they're not spending any money and then the game fails where years ago the paid model or even today is about the promise if the promise of the game is good enough and you can get people into the game and they've paid the money then you've proven you've been successful whereas free to play is much more about uh proving that you've got a game that the players want to come back to want to love and want to spend money in i hope cool good lovely time thank you you