http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenLewisEvans/20130827/198975/Dopamine_and_games__Liking_learning_or_wanting_to_play.php

Its looks like all that dopamine pumping that many free to play developers are trying to do may be less benevolent than previously believed. Compulsion is different from enjoyment after all.

An acquaintance develops for Big Fish Games and got the following e-mail from them:

Changes at Big Fish.
The games industry changes rapidly and Big Fish has always adapted to address and lead the way to new opportunities in the market in concert with you, our developer partners. Sometimes investing ahead of the curve creates new growth opportunities (such as our entry into premium mobile andfree-to-play) but other times it does not. The reduction in the Big Fish staff announced today was primarily a reflection of our decision to discontinue support for our Big Fish Unlimited cloud premium game delivery subscription service. This business had avery high fixed cost to operate and consumer adoption was not growing quickly enough to justify further investment.

2013 will mark our 11th straight year of record revenue and we remain profitable and cash flow positive. While the market is changing and our cloud efforts were arguably ahead of the market in terms of commercial viability, Big Fish's other business continue to thrive. Today, revenue from our premium games (games you try-and-buy) remain very stable, especially from sales of Collector’s Edition (CE) quality content. That said, our revenue growth is primarily being driven by F2P games (free-to-play with in-app purchases).

What hasn’t changed is our focus on being the world’s largest cross-platform publisher of casual games, and we will continue to bring the world's best premium and F2P games to our worldwide customer base.

What is changing is a more intense focus and investment on our F2P game publishing business with our developer partners for PC and mobile platforms, while also narrowing the number of languages we support with each premium game and eliminating the premium game cloud delivery service.

State of the market.
Over the past year we have been very focused on growing our distribution strength in F2P. We have emerged as a leading producer and publisher of F2P content by leveraging Big Fish's brand, production capabilities, marketing reach and distribution strengths we havebuilt over the past decade. Our promotional capabilities, on PC and mobile platforms for both premium and F2P games, continue to lead the market. We are a top 10 grossing publisher worldwide on iOS with more than half of that revenue now coming from F2P.

We also run the world’s largest PC casual games app store with 90% of our revenue coming from Premium content. Notably, in the past 6 months, we have seen F2P games in that store grow from nothing to over 10% of our sales, creating anexciting new opportunity for both Big Fish and our developer partners.

Across all platforms, Collector's Edition premium games remain a steady source of income and they create a powerful network effect that we leverage to market all our games, both premium and F2P. While sales of premium games are a stable source of revenue and profits, the market for those games is no longer growing at the rate it has over the past 10 years. While we are seeing slow contraction in some of our smaller foreign language markets, revenue from our top tier languages remains very stable and predictable.

What this means for game developers.
If you are a premium-only developer building Collector Edition quality games, we are forecasting steady sales per title for years to come, and we will continue to focus investment in our four largestlanguages: English, French, German and Japanese. This focus will help streamline production, allowing you spend more time on quality or to take on new projects. For our developer partners in Eastern Europe, we will continue to support Russian language builds on both PC and mobile.

If you are looking to grow your company beyond the premium business, we are encouraging our developer partners to make thoughtful bets leveraging the F2P business model and design principles. Big Fish is actively growing our relationship with existing premium developers who are looking to expand into F2P. We bring the same value to the table whenpublishing F2P games that we do when publishing premium games – namely an increase in the likelihood of a game’s success through production advice, standardized tools, a PC app store for rapid iteration, dedicated analysts, and massive marketing reach across all platforms. If this is a direction you are heading, please contact your developer relations manager at Big Fish. If you are already heads down with the F2P opportunity, we are here to help!

To be clear, the changes we announced today come from a position of strength and were necessary to adapt to a changing market. As we continue to attack the new and increasingly large opportunities in the casual games market, I am confident our best days are ahead.