Never On Sunday

An article I read this morning on the success of freemium models for online games is rather creepy. The freemium profit model abandons the monthly subscription model of MMOs for a kind of pay-on-demand service: play is entirely free, but much of the gear you’ll want to equip your player is available for real-life cash money. This shift in business strategy can be good or bad news for players, depending on what they really want from the game, and how aggressively the game pinches its players for cash. A very casual player willing to wear rags, or one of the hard-core types who wants to earn everything the hard way get a great deal, while a semi-casual player who likes to identify with his in-game character and values the prestige of good gear pays more. If the game makes you cough up money for basic necessities like sufficient healing potions to complete an adventure successfully, or to lift an onerous death penalty, then the freemium approach hides a rip-off behind the fig leaf of “you don’t have to buy them…” There’s also a problem for PvP play, if any: gear can give enough of an edge in battle that victory goes to the richest kid, not the most skillful player.

That the freemium model should be successful is no worry; that it should be this successful is, a little. Like casinos, it begins to develop the whiff of predation on people who can’t help themselves, either because they’re too foolish to watch their expenses or because they have addictive personalities. Not strictly illegal, and making it illegal would require measures worse than the problem, but still… sleazy and abusive.

The family of four to plunk down $35,000 on gear for its MMO characters might be filthy rich, and I doubt they’ll go hungry over gaming purchases. They should, at least, be comfortably well off; as the interviewee says, “We actually called their bank to make sure they could afford it. Apparently they can.” But you never can tell—we’ve seen a lot of news on families living way beyond their means in the Reaganomics generation. I know there have already been several disturbing cases elsewhere: families whose rent money is in jeopardy over games, or parents whose salaries have been gutted by kids using a credit card without sufficient supervision.

Still, nobody has to play these games if they don’t want to. Nobody has to let their kids play with the family fortune, and nobody has to pay $20k for the matching chainmail outfit. So long as viable contenders with different profit models exist, we’re fine. If the freemium model remains this successful, however, I’m a little concerned. Big business is firmly at the helm of game design these days, and if the freemium model makes more money, that will soon be all we’ll see, whether or not it makes better games. Even WoW has succumbed to temptation, although its freemium offerings remain strictly esthetic: you can buy a prettier mount, but not a faster one. The news sounded like the first soft crackling of the ice under our feet.