Game Design Deep Dive by Bycer Joshua;

Author:Bycer, Joshua;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Note

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56614281#:~:text=The%20link%20between%20gaming%20loot,and%20psychologically%20akin%20to%20gambling%22.

9 The Ethics of F2P

DOI: 10.1201/9781003265115-9

9.1 Anti-Consumer Practices

Welcome to the book within this book, as the topic of Ethical F2P design is one that deserves its own separate book. Throughout this entry in the Game Design Deep series, I have talked about the benefits and downsides of F2P design. These games have walked a very tight rope between simply being a game that earns a lot of money and being a gateway toward gambling and abusing their consumers (fig 9.1). Throughout the 2010s, there were many examples of exploitative F2P games by developers who either didn’t know what they were doing in the space or fully well knew what they were doing and tried to fleece people out of their money.

Figure 9.1 There are plenty of tactics that F2P games use that seem innocent at first but have darker motives. In Figure Fantasy, their beginner’s VIP is a good deal at 99 cents, but if you notice, it’s only available for a few days after starting an account. This tactic is not only an example of FOMO, but also gets someone to spend money in a game even before they started to really play it and start to build investment in the game itself. It is no secret among people in the game industry that the companies that got big in the mobile/F2P space explicitly hired people from the gambling industry to assist with or create their monetization systems. There are plenty of mobile games that were designed around a slash and burn mentality to get as much money by exploiting people before they would shut down.

The act of designing a game to be F2P as opposed to a retail purchase means that there must be concessions made toward monetization. However, that doesn’t excuse putting in manipulative systems designed to get people to spend money. When these monetization elements found their way into retail games, this was when the straw broke the camel’s back for consumers. A game that became famous for this moment was Star Wars Battlefront 2 (released in 2017 by Dice). In its original version, players could acquire powerful upgrades and new characters through the loot box system. However, this was not a free game, but one that cost $60 at launch and still used these systems. The backlash was huge and led to a huge negative media blitz for Dice and EA who published the game.

This led to the adoption of the term Pay 2 Win as the unofficial worse way to describe a F2P game. In Section 9.3, I’m going to discuss why this term isn’t as easy to use as people think it is. Anti-consumer practices come in many different forms in F2P games. Some of the ones I’ve talked about already in this book include having major content only available by spending money, confusing the player with different purchases, incentivizing purchases with VIP systems, and loot boxes and gacha design in the last chapter.

There are subtler examples that can be hard to spot if you’re not familiar with F2P and game design.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.