[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play

Free to Play video game companies, by the structure of their market, are faced with the choice to either A) create addictive products that rob a select group of users large amounts of funds, or B) exit the business entirely. This is because their model doesn’t work at all without “whales”—high spenders that are manipulated through product design.

Here again, Eghbal provides a framework that transcends the open-source context that inspired it. In a digital economy, goods are either excludable or not (meaning paywall-able, essentially), and rivalrous or not (meaning infinitely copyable at zero marginal cost or not). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix describes just about every way to make a buck onli... See more

For the foreseeable future, the most successful community currencies will come from games. What makes a virtual currency sustainable? The willingness of payers to convert and retain. Who has figured this out better than anyone? The free-to-play gaming industry, with annual microtransaction revenue of nearly $100b. What drives the willingness of gam... See more

Player retention in gaming is everything. Despite this, publishers optimize for company profit at the cost of player value and well-being. They are able to do this due to their end-to-end ownership and control over the development, distribution, and management of games.

As Web 2.0 companies began to deeply understand the powerful potential of their innovations — the game-ish reaction buttons, the follower graph, the algorithmic ‘newsfeed’ — they became adept at a clever stratagem. Rather than committing to perpetual openness, they could offer new user tools or developer APIs and encourage the community to use them... See more

There's been a major breakthrough in gaming due to the free-to-play games like League of Legends and Fortnite which act more like platforms, instead of $60/piece one time purchases. Low computational needs – you don’t need a gaming PC to play them.