Is the Gaming Industry Shifting to Free-to-Play?
Gaming has established a very strong seat for itself among end user application usage patterns—especially with the mobile penetration during the past decade. If we look at trends, very interesting data points show that games hold the interest of people of various age groups and genders, which breaks the notion that male population dominates game play.
The information technology world is leveraging games to increase the effectiveness of its software in reaching end users and being relevant to them. One domain that is already making very good use of it is the educational space—with zillions of educational games available in the marketplace.
One of the major mediums through which games are accessed by casual gamers is through app stores. A few years back games were typically introduced as pay-to-play games or game packages with a monthly subscription, but this model is undergoing a lot of change in order to attract more gamers. Organizations and individual game developers are actively scouting ways to provide games that are both free-to-play and profitable from operational cost and profit margin standpoints.
A couple of popular choices to enable both free-to-play and profitability include: making money through ad revenues and using in-app purchase strategies. In most cases, in-app purchases seem to be the more successful route, because gamers may find ads very distracting while actively engaged in a game.
While there are very successful games that were once pay-to-play but have recently moved into the freemium or free-to-play category, one common complaint with free-to-play is that the developer is more focused on the monetization strategy than the quality and creativity of the game itself.
It is not an easy decision as to whether to go the free or the paid route—especially if you are a rookie developer. But with experience, people are finding that there is no one right answer. It is really driven by your individual game and the need to have a hybrid strategy—whether you start with free and then move to paid or vice-versa or start with both with an in-app purchase option. In whatever category you launch, positive user reviews are a great asset to push your game to additional users and rise in the app store ranking.
Recently, companies such as Microsoft have expressed their intentions to consider free-to-play options for even their most popular and successful games—including Halo—which gives us a strong reason to believe that the gaming industry is heading in the direction of free-to-play games. Exciting times are ahead, even if you are not a gamer, as this also gives us cues about how application monetization strategy might change in the coming years.
