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Designing Free-to-play games with AAA Developers
By Nicholas Lovell on June 27, 2012
Working with traditional game developers is an interesting challenge for me as a business model designer. I am working with several different studios on a total of 15 different games. It is making me re-evaluate how I think about free-to-play game design and explaining how it works to traditional designers.
Here are some quick bullet points about what I think about when working with clients:
- Replayability is key to F2P. Either of a repetitive experience (e.g. simulation games like CityVille) or of the core game (e.g. arcade games like Bejewelled Blitz).
- WOW! moments, so beloved of scripted narrative game designers, are much harder to achieve in F2P
- Many (not all) narrative games use “experience” – meaning new artwork, bigger explosions and more exposition – to cover up a game mechanic which is not compelling in its own right. Free to play games struggle to get away with this(although admittedly they sometimes cover up poor gameplay with “Skinner” box designs that use operant conditioning.)
- Creating assets is very expensive. Free to play games need to be cheaper than traditional games. So my clients need to learn how to solve their design issues through the creative reuse of assetsnot through throwing more levels, more assets and more explosions at the problem
- Polish isn’t important; Pizzazz is. (More on that in a future post)
These are just some initial thoughts while I’m sitting at the Game Horizon Conference. I plan to delve deeper into these issues over the next six months.
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