Game design focused on Free to Play type game?

Started by
20 comments, last by Orymus3 10 years, 6 months ago

Hi.

I want to know superb and proven technique about free 2 play type game.

Of course I have been played many of them and know how they design paid items and etc, but copying them is not enough for theory.

So I want to investigate and research seriously before deeply make my game's design document.

So eventual purpose of this strategy and research is to know,

[how to earn maximum money by F2P type game?]

=

[how to make user eager to buy paid item continuously? how to make them fanatic?]

Any useful comments or information site, articles?

Thanks.

www.perfectionofwisdom.com

Advertisement

1: Never force the player to buy something just so they can keep up with the competition, everything in the game that changes gameplay, the player should be able to get by just playing the game and not spening a singel cent on it. You want to make the player want to buy something not force them.

2: You can use commercial ingame to make money instead of ingame purchases. I can't recall I have seen this in any game that is not a mobile game so I really can't say that it will work.

3: To make people "fanatic" you need them to be coming back every singel day to play the game. Here the balance in the game comes in. You do not want to make a chess like game with perfect balance because then you won't need to balance the game. Why do you want to make balance changes all the time? Because that require patches, people love patches and people love when a game changes the meta, because then they can discover the new strategy that work for that patch first. Extra Credits talks about this in one of their videos, worth a look. http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/perfect-imbalance

Cheers!

As we should all know, a huge successor of this type of free-to-play is League of Legends, created by Riot. Their only in-game purchases you are forced to spend money on is skins, which only change the aesthetics of the game. However, because I appreciate all the work and effort that is being put in this game; I spend plenty of my money on skins to keep their money going.

In effect, it's not about what you're giving your audience in terms of bought items; but rather putting them in a position where they WANT to support you. There are various ways to do this but, in reality, the simplest one is to put the player first.

If, at any point, what I post is hard to understand, tell me. I am bad at projecting my thoughts into real words, so I appreciate the knowledge that I need to edit my post.

I am not a professional writer, nor a professional game designer. Please, understand that everything you read is simply an opinion of mind and should not, at any point in time, be taken as a credible answer unless validated by others.

As ShiftyCake points out, vanity items is a very good way to make revenue in a F2P game.

Selling items that directly effects a players ability in the gameworld is risky to say the least.

A reason why many people are wary of F2P games are because of the unbalance these purchasable items causes.

Some of these F2P games are even refferred to as a P2W (or Pay to Win) games.

I must say that I dislike the way you are talking about your potential players.

how to make user eager to buy paid item continuously? how to make them fanatic?

If your aim is to make "users" fanatic in order for you to make money, I suggest not making a game at all.

you know,,, with no money, no devs, means poor quality, or break down of team or company.

www.perfectionofwisdom.com

you know,,, with no money, no devs, means poor quality, or break down of team or company.


I'm not sure I follow. Care to explain further so I can maybe help you with this?

You never enter the gaming development world with eyes on getting rich, you mkae games because you love it. If you can make a living on it, good for you! But you have to put that as a secondary "objective". Yes, making games cost money, alot of it, it's a sacrfice we do as developers.

If you are only after the cash, enter a business school and educate yourself to something fancy and join EA Games as a Production Manager, they don't know shit about games but they make alot of money :P

You never enter the gaming development world with eyes on getting rich, you mkae games because you love it. If you can make a living on it, good for you! But you have to put that as a secondary "objective". Yes, making games cost money, alot of it, it's a sacrfice we do as developers.

If you are only after the cash, enter a business school and educate yourself to something fancy and join EA Games as a Production Manager, they don't know shit about games but they make alot of money tongue.png

even if I do that, I just earn salary. and not my game, not my team.

Its not truly my thing.

At there, I don't have my own users, my real comrades.

Its just all for EA's owner.

I don't want to serve as slave to someone else for just a small shit salary.

www.perfectionofwisdom.com

The idea is to create something ahead of time on your own. It's really hard to get team members. If you make something substantial, you can start a Kickstarter - just make sure to get your friends and family involved as well, don't just rely on strangers for money, because that can sometimes fall through. With the money, you can improve the art and hire a composer. You might want to focus on a small, polished game, because large games are a pain and can really drain money you don't have.

As an example, this game cost me 100 hours of my own time, with 60 of those 100 hours just me lollygagging, and at least $80: http://games.softpedia.com/get/Freeware-Games/Block-Critter.shtml - the Postmortem story wasn't very successful, but at least I learned from it.

Extra Credits talks about this in one of their videos, worth a look. http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/perfect-imbalance

This is an interesting video. What I really got out of it was that you want an evolving more complex rock paper scissors game even though players always seem to complain about rock paper scissors games.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement