You need to make players feel that they can “just pop in for a quick go”. Then you need to lock them in for much longer. As game designers have been doing with traditional games for years.

This is a critical consideration for any game being designed for a smartphone or tablet. If your free-to-play game is in the browser or on the console, it may be less crucial, but “short loops” remain key...

The first rule of free-to-play is make the game fun. It shouldn’t need to be stated, but it does.

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...

It can be very easy to see marketing and game development as separate disciplines - that creating an awesome game and drawing in new players are separate tasks requiring separate sets of skills. The reality is that...

For the past twenty years, developers have had to ask permission before they could make a game. Those days are over. You no longer need anyone’s permission to publish.

A free-to-play game is fundamentally different from a traditional game. There is a simple rule - the rule of 0-1-100 - that makes for a successful F2P game.