Parveen Kaler

I worked with Adrian Crook back in the day at Relic Entertainment. Adrian was the producer on The Outfit for the XBox 360 team that I was on for a few months.

These days, Adrian is working as a consultant on a number of games. He also runs FreeToPlay.biz. Adrian has become one of the leading experts in this space.

Adrian started his talk by mentioning Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. Anderson wrote the book called The Long Tail. His next book is planned to be simply titled, Free. Here is a good video explaining the content of his new book.

Adrian then spoke about free in the real world outside of games. Radiohead’s recent album release, RyanAir, and free-to-poop toilet on the corner of Richard’s and Davie were mentioned. Radiohead released an album over the web for free and relied on donations for revenue. RyanAir sells airline tickets in Europe for nearly free and then upsells for vacation packages and luggage transportation. The toilet in Yaletown allows you to poop-for-free and relies on advertising.

Free To Play works for video games by monetizing attention. Good examples of the free to play model are games by Nexon, Runescape, Webkinz, and Club Penguin. Jamie from Klei Entertainment just announced that they are making a FreeToPlay game for Nexon as well.

Currently, about 91% of Free To Play users are under the age of 18 years old. This can be seen in the subject matter in the aforementioned games. NPD says that a huge chunk of these users leave after they turn 18.

Adrian went on to talk about revenue models in the Free To Play world. A good overview of the topic is a post named Top 10 Revenue Models for Free To Play Games over at his blog.

Design Tips

To make a Free To Play game work you must respect all of your users. Most games rely on a very low conversion rate that hovers around 5%. You still need to build a community that respects the other 95% of users that won’t spend a dime.

Consider how a nightclub works. The five people sitting behind the purple, velvet rope are the ones spending thousands of dollars that night and keeping the club open. But the other 200 people are required to create ambiance. The other 200 people may pay cover and have enough drinks to get absolutely hammered. But they still will only spend $100 or so at most and more likely only $20. The five sitting behind that purple, velvet rope will be dropping $10,000 that night.