“These games put designers in a position where they spend their time not thinking about what is fun,” says MMO maestro
Developers working on free-to-play projects are too preoccupied with in-game revenue opportunities and don’t have time to focus on making games fun.
That’s the opinion of Jeff Strain, the decorated MMO veteran at the helm of startup studio Undead Labs.
“There are a lot of free-to-play games on the market. That’s kind of the new trend, but nothing is really free,” says Strain in the second half of his interview with Develop.
“No-one is doing it just for fun. In the case of an MMO, no-one is pumping 30, 40, 50, 60 million dollars into their product just so they can spend that money and people can laugh about it. The revenue has to come from somewhere.”
In the case of free-to-play MMOs, such revenues tend to come from ad space or microtransactions, where players are channeled into looking at adverts or compelled to buy miscellanea for their avatar. Freemium games, meanwhile, have gameplay limits that can be unlocked after paying for the full edition.
“These games put designers in a position where they spend their time not thinking about what is fun,” says Strain. “They’re not designing a game to be fun. They’re designing a game that can channel people into stores. They’re designing ways to tempt people to use in-game currency. They’re designing ways to channel people’s direction into advertising.
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“What concerns me with that is that I see more and more of a focus on alternate revenue streams. ‘Oh you want this in-game currency, well text this number and we’ll give you a code for it’. Y’know, I don’t want to do that. I want to spend all of our time focusing on making the most fun post-apocalyptic zombie game we possibly can.”
Strain revealed that Undead Labs’ debut project – a zombie-filled MMO for consoles – would ‘almost certainly’ be subscription-based.
This is so true. Having been involved in a game that designed to make money online, I experienced first hand how misdirected these games can be. The problem is, microtransactions are the food of the greed monkeys.
Even AAA titles are now plagued by the "lets make the gamer pay more, and more, and more..." syndrome, with the DLC fiasco that is so rampant. The problem is bosses who see dev studios as nothing more than financial steppin stones in their pursuit of riches.
Employees are expendable and the gamers money is more important than the gamer. Is that really what the games industry is all about?
I have played several MMO's that are microtransaction based, and while some of them lack any good gameplay features, there are still a lot of good MMO's on the market that employ that style of modal, and still produce a quality game. Implementing a microtransaction modal doesn't take a while lot more effort than building a subscription based modal. Personally I think the subscription based companies are the greedier ones, as they tend to have the viewpoint of 'we're the better game, we're not letting you play for free.'
I've played subscription games, and have nothing against them, I just think Strain's comments are a way of justifying his bussiness modal approach. I know first hand from playing WoW that the company was all about making money and not satisfying their gamers. To many times they implemented new features for 'new players', that left the existing higher level users hung out to dry. The changes wheren't meant for players, it was meant for their pocket book.
Jeff's bias is coming through loud and clear. As a free to play gamer I can attest that Jeff doesn't have a clue... China and Korea are the largest gaming markets in the world now and subscription MMO's don't work there. Even WoW doesn't have very many subscribers in these marekts. They have millions of pay as you go gamers, but games like Perfect World have much larger audiences and killer revenues to match.
For great free to play games check out Maplestory, Battlefield Heroes, Combat Arms, etc...
