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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Design rules for free-to-play games   >   Sell emotion, not content: Free-to-play Design Rule 13

Sell emotion, not content: Free-to-play Design Rule 13

By on October 31, 2012

F2P-design-rules-thumbSelling content is what content creators do, right?

Not any more.

Now that digital distribution has made it incredibly cheap to share content on the web, consumers are increasingly refusing to pay for it. (Recent research suggests, for example, that 49% of people think it appropriate to download music for free and 40% can’t remember when they last bought a CD).

This means that a developer making a game has to change the way they view their business. Instead of spending $2 million building a virtual world and charging people for access to it, they have to spend $2 million building a virtual world, give it away to build an audience, and find other things to sell in it.

Those things are unlikely to be expensive to make. They are most likely to be an entry in a database or a few days of art/programmer time. They might be selling:

  • Self expression (costumes, avatars, animations)
  • Progress (trading time for money, instant gratification)
  • Power (better weapons, better equipment)
  • Status (the ability to show off to others, whether aesthetically or within game mechanics)
  • Relationships (gifts, co-operative benefits)
  • And much more

These aren’t mutually exclusive elements. The point is that no gamer thinks about how much something cost to build when considering whether to buy it or how much to pay. They are considering how much it is worth to them. Whether they will enjoy it. How it will make them feel.

In the world of free-to-play, you are competing with tens of thousands of games that are totally free to play. In that world, you aren’t charging for content; you are charging for emotion.

The next post will look at game development itself, and how to survive in a challenging environment.

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