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Uhhh ... You got an intro?
Nothing fun, do you have something? We need to say our names that's for sure. Why don't we just say our names?
Do we need our names or are we just going to do the thing where we put the ... okay, we'll just go fast.
I'm Danny! I'm Dorianne! I'm Marc! I'm Rodain!
Yeah, together we are QCF DESIIIIIGN!
We wanna talk about Free To Play today. We don't want to, we have to.
We're obliged to. We're obliged to talk about Free To Play today,
lamenting the energy costs of Free To Play games. Yeah, you have games that are "No, you can only play so much of me today."
Yeah but some of them feel good and some of them just don't.
Well, there's probably reasons why they feel good and some don't. Let's talk about it! Let's have a twenty-minute conversation!
So our goal is to try and talk about free to play from a
perspective of people who design games for a living and
are they things that we feel as designers
we can get our hands around and start doing cool things with? Although something that I've realised
even just in our prelimary chats about this is that it's very difficult to nail down
one example of what free to play is because everybody
pays attention to the most abusive aspects of free to play
especially on about the mobile platforms. You mean like the remake of the game
that shall not be named? Where you have to wait 24 hours to destroy a block
or pay an exorbitant amount of money? Something like that, yeah.
And then again, it's like: if you wanna play that game
then it's okay, right? If you want to play the original,
then there are other ways to play it. If you want to play a game
which is inherently different. I do agree because there's a lot of games like that where you
you kinda are forced to wait for a day before you're allowed to do
anything else but that's because those games are built from the ground up with that understanding.
It depends because if your turns are against the machine,
like you have a certain number of actions before something happens, that's fine.
But I'm thinking, now that you say "Pay for your turns", about Triple Town, and that was not abusive.
Yeah but in multiplayer games you always have to be so much careful.
Yeah multiplayer's a big thing but I mean Triple Town-
-I mean that was paying for turns- Yeah, you had a number of turns
and you got those in the beginning. Triple Town's actually really interesting on the free to play side
David Edery at GDC, last year or the year before,
he was talking about how Triple Town
wasn't effective enough at being a free to play game.
Like it wasn't effective enough at monetizing.
Yeah, it's like they tried something and they felt like it didn't work.
Yeah, they gave away too many turns.
Wow, as a player that was one of the games where I was like:
"These guys did it really well-" Yeah, but did you ever pay them?
Yes I did, and it stopped working on my phone
the day after I paid them my money, the phone just hung every time I played!
And I still don't regret the decision. To me, they did really well.
Well you know what, maybe with that decision they got more players to pay who
wouldn't otherwise, but they cut out their own whale market.
Yeah. I'm probably going to get it wrong now
because it's a memory thing but there was a Gamasutra article recently that said
1.5 percent of your free to play players
actually spend money, and of those something like 10 percent
of your market payers are whales
that spend more than ten or twenty dollars. And they make up something like 70-80%
of your income. So there's just this enormous amount of money that comes from
0.15 percent. I would love those stats for people who play
more than an hour of the game. That would be very interesting.
And how many people have played for more than four hours
but then didn't buy something. I'm going, well, are people actually having fun?
Well it's not always seen as a point of decision.
A lot of people justify it by saying, "Well, all these people are playing
these games, therefore they must like them. Yeah, the idea that
good business automatically means good game design.
If you've hooked people, suddenly your game is now "good".
Yeah, its merit as a design is directly tied to the idea that
everybody has perfect judgment about,
you know, all the games that they are playing and that they're not simply
picking up Flappy Bird because it was shoved up into the top 10 by rampant botting.
That implies that Flappy Bird is a good game,
and I think we all know that it's not. Well, some people do argue that it is
a good game. Compared to all the people that copied it,
and tried to copy it, it was a lot better.
Idunno, I saw an analog Flappy Bird that was made in a shoe box.
That was my favourite Flappy Bird. Oh yeah, the Arduino one, that looked pretty cool.
The thing with Flappy Bird is that the game is essentially a tutorial that most game designers
go through when they're first messing around making games.
It's not by any stretch of the imagination a design innovation.
Flappy Bird has more commercial success than
all of those games and is seen by many
to be a great game just because of its commercial success, straight up.
So we have players, who are called these "whales", basically propping up the financial
base of the game for everybody else and
Valve recently released that video about, uh, external happiness.
Yeah, positive externalities.
Yeah, like Valve goes, "No, we don't want to be like everybody else
who is making free to play games. We are sure we can make free to play games that don't
feel exploitative and that aren't something that gets in the way
of actually enjoying the game." So the idea of positive externalities is that
people who are not paying for the game
ONE: enjoy it when other people are paying for stuff and
TWO: that the people who aren't paying are also providing value.
Which is the thing that isn't necessarily said when people are
doing the whole, "There's whales and non-whales." Yeah, whereas in a Valve game, because
you're generally doing things
that impact everyone you're playing with, they can provide the
player who does decide to pay with positive feedback for having paid.
And also everyone else gets positive feedback, and that means you can't do
pay-to-win stuff. You look at something like League of Legends, and they
also do positive externalities as far as the skins are concerned,
because you're not gonna see those skins if you don't buy them,
but you can see other people playing with them.
And people, you know, comment, "Ahh, nice skin" or "That's cool".
A lot of people when they're talk about free to play
as, you know, when you're talking to other game designers,
say free to play is good because, well, Valve and DotA and League of Legends
and Team Fortress 2 and whatever. And somehow that is supposed to translate
from this PC market that is multiplayer-centric
that focuses on very specific groups of players, and is this team-based
thing where there are people you're trying to help and people you're not trying to help.
Where positive externalities are much easier to generate. Exactly, like in a
multiplayer setting, there's a scope and a metagame that's going on
that is independent of the actual fun gameplay, whereas something like Farmville
or Candy Crush, the metagame is non-existent.
If you're playing a game because you're standing in a queue at the bank,
and all of a sudden you need to pay to get to the next section in order to just carry on
playing. That's not fun. That's not
a positive thing. You were already doing it because something else in your life
was interrupted. You were standing in a queue, now you're doing this.
I think that's my point, saying that there's
this PC market where the "good" free to play
is different, means that the exploitative
and "feeling bad" free to play on a lot of
mobile titles comes from. You can't really
conflate the two, they're not the same. And so saying that this one
allows, justifies all the rest of the free to play stuff ...
Yeah, quite right. When you're buying a skin in LoL
it's not the same as buying to destroy
a block in Dungeon Keeper. Thinking about Desktop Dungeons
being Free To Play, we knew we couldn't do it on PC.
because we've been taking pre-orders. And we had our Steam deal,
we were sorted, we knew we were going to be selling the game that way
and we were already working on the beta, et cetera et cetera. But as soon as you go to the mobile market,
you suddenly have to compete with free to play, and you have all these games where
loads of people are downloading because
they're free. Yeah, it's much easier to get onto the
Most Played or Featured chart when you're free,
because in Most Played, even if people only play for two minutes
they still played more than, generally, a game that has to be bought.
So that thing that people say, that free to play is good for discovery,
is technically true because it lowers some of the barriers. People don't have to buy
the game upfront. But it's not a panacea to get people to be aware of your game,
you still need more focus, and you still more
visibility on people knowing, "Oh, hey, Desktop Dungeons is a thing
"that is coming out on iOS, is coming out on Android."
So, we were thinking of doing the secondary currency
where you have certain buildings that can only be upgraded if you pay
an extra something on top of the normal upgrade cost.
So what this would do is limit the number of classes you have access to,
and obviously we'd look at something like having a rotating roster
of other classes that you don't have yet, maybe play them once a day,
wet your whistle. You know, that sort of thing.
So it's like, is that going to be a worthwhile thing to do in the game, or do we wanna do a thing where it's like
"Okay, you can upgrade and play, but
maybe you can only play one or two dungeon runs." But the big thing for us,
I think the major thing for us, is being able to do something where there's a cap.
Well, this is the thing. The big companies, the companies that are making the most off free to play,
they specifically DON'T have a cap.
Because they want you to continue paying over and over and over again
to keep getting benefits. What we're looking at,
even if it is just the fact that our Kingdom has a finite number of buildings,
that would put a cap on how much you spend.
But what if we were to make a cap that just said
that once you spent X amount of money the entire free to play thing falls away
and you now own the whole game? Desktop Dungeons has always felt like
a game that, well, we made "this game". It's not that we made "this game on PC"
and now for this "other version" ... it doesn't feel true to it.
Yeah! Like, is it a service or is it a game? I actually really hate that question.
Because it's a very weird thing to say that-
Does it need to be either? Well, if it's neither a service nor a game I wouldn't buy it.
Anyway, so thank you for joining us, this has been QCF Design talking about free to play!