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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Design rules for free-to-play games   >   Launching the Design Rules for Free-to-play games

Launching the Design Rules for Free-to-play games

By on August 1, 2012

I work with many games companies to help them make free-to-play games. In the last 12 months, those companies have included Firefly Studios (Stronghold Kingdoms), Square Enix, nDreams, Rebellion, Edge of Reality, 519 Games, Channel 4 (Misfits on iOS) and many others. On several occasions, I have been working on more than 15 games at the same time.

This has given me an insight not only into free-to-play game design, but into the challenges that different developers face when transitioning from traditional business models and design tropes to the new world. Today I’m launching a series of weekly posts that will present simple rules for overcoming those challenges.

This series is intended to provide a short sharp introduction to the key ways you need to adapt your game design to make successful, profitable free-to-play games. It will be helpful to AAA game designers, to creative and digital agencies, to producers and creatives in traditional media like broadcasting and publishing and, of course, to people working in free-to-play (or paymium) game development.

As always, let me know how I can improve this series in the comments.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com