How Free Games Trick You Into Spending Money

You already know that modern games want to empty your wallet more than they want you to have fun. But why are these monetization tactics becoming more and more popular? The answer is more complicated than you think…

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📃 Research Links
Book - Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
“Let’s Go Whaling” talk
Origins of Farmville
Gamecraft podcast on the rise of free-to-play
Lootboxes
GDC talk of F2P design

[GoingIndie]

What's a good free to play game that isn't pay to win?

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[potato_dbd]

It's hard to get tricked when you have no money.

[kaseynorth]

Mark my words, in the future indie devs and studios with small and loyal communities, will be making your favorite games down the road.

[cosmicspacething]

Crazy how things have shifted from “piracy is bad, and the game devs deserve to be compensated for their work” to “piracy is good, and the people need to fight back against the greedy publishers”

[patchgatsby]

The arcades weren't pay to win. They were pay to play. You didn't win. You didn't expect to win. Often you competed for high scores. How long you got to play on one payment was skill based. It was expensive, but the entry cost was low and you had many choices. It was a very transparent system and there was a ton of competition. The arcades were great!

[slydevil]

The thing about the old coin based "pay to win" games is that you could finish the whole game with only one coin. In fact i had a lot more fun playing with one coin and seeing how far i can go. Even when later emulators were a thing and you can just get infinite lives it was much more fun to play with one coin and try to beat the game.

[proverbialking]

What's worse is that I constantly run into people (especially the younger generation) who go crazy over "skins" willing to spend enormous amount of real world money to play virtual dress up. And get annoyed by games that don't have battlepass/skin bundle systems.

[demontamerbf]

Dude, this video was mind blowing, watching Twitch streams of people spending money on games is just like standing behind the kid playing the arcade game back in the day, you like the game but maybe you don't have the money to get better at it. Loved the video btw.

[laurentiuprodan]

Like it or not governments have to step in. We saw this happening in Netherlands and Belgium. They classed CSGO's containers as gambling (which it is) and forced Valve to remove 'em or face consequences. It's been a while since this happened but let's hope more countries will follow this example and step in.

[coachmcguirk]

Honestly the best model is the win to pay design. The game is free, but once you beat it, a guy shows up at your door with a bat and forces you to pay him $60.

[Colorado-Coyote]

This is why I and so many others love indie games. You pay and just get a good game!

[TheChickenLorde]

Terraria:
- One if the most popular games ever
- $10 for access to all of the endless content
- great devs always involved with community and actually cares
- free mod loader, mods and resource packs
- No in-app purchases
- still makes quintillions of dollars
Be more like Terraria

[MacrossForvever]

Deep Rock Galactic has a really enjoyable model for monetization. I don't know how well it works, but they put out the base game at a fair price and then offer free to pay expansions and advertise cosmetics you can get to "support the studio" these cosmetics are typically under $10 and I have gotten into the habit of getting them whenever they come out. The gameplay is great, the model is solid, I just hope that from a studio perspective it is sustainable.

[bloatedbacklog]

You hit the nail on the head, it’s about conditioning. When we start giving leeway to “just cosmetics” or micro-transactions being only a couple of dollars, it becomes a slippery slope that leads to the results we have today.

[imaboud]

I love how you used Valhiem as a great example of an indie game
To me, it's even better than most AAA games that I've played the in the last 10 years

[AlexJames-jvem]

The arcade pay-to-win model was not a purchase model but a rental one: The player rented the right to play the game until either the timer ran out or the player ran out of lives (shortened by the difficulty level of the machine).

[marcroy]

Hello Games and NMS's second arc are a good example of what you talk about at the end of the video. They keep on adding games for a fixed price to their game. That's what happens when passion drives you.

[TJM]

I have a hard time imagining some new system that is both lucrative and ethical.
If Warframe taught me anything. A game made with care that respects you and has a developer backed community are your key ingredients. That isn't isn't really ground breaking, it's just not doing bad things. It's a game I'm actually happy to support, it's like how you describe Doom's success of earning it.

[Justfillintheblank]

I'm glad I got to experience the "golden age" of video games. When games had none of these BS, P2W features, and launched as fully fledged games, with minor issues (if any at all). Games like Halo 2 & 3, Gears Of War, MW2, Destroy All Humans, to name a few. More & more AAA studios are releasing half-baked games, and it's just sad. It's up to the indie developers who publish their own games to bring those "golden age" experiences to the table.

[darkmoon]

Update indie studios are facing a dilemma. "Unity" a engine for coding games is now charging developers for every install in app purchases they make from their games. The executive in charge of that idea was formerly from EA "John Riccitiello". So now indie studio making free games or even one payment, forever, perfect games are now losing money for even making games using Unity.