Micro-transactions.
They’re becoming increasingly prevalent. You download a game for free, but you have to pay for anything from health boosts to entire chunks of vital content. The model has come into common use in the age of the incredibly average MMO, games like The Old Republic, TERA and LOTRO that simply can’t sustain themselves on subscription fees, instead opening the gates to all and offering, in some cases, experience boosts, aesthetic improvements, and in-game currency in exchange for physical cash. That way, the game’s hardcore fanbase is likely to drop more than enough funding into the publisher’s coffers to keep the game afloat (and profitable).
RPGs might have begun the micro-transaction trend but mobile gaming has embraced it wholeheartedly and it works much more efficiently on the smartphone/tablet market than it is for larger products. Considering that platforms like Google Play and the App Store essentially rely upon micro transactions for success in the first place, it seems a natural fit, especially when it comes to games. Things we usually research – like quality, longevity, etc – don’t seem to come into play when we’re looking at things to play on a bus to avoid talking to our fellow commuters. The presence of a price at all more often than not prohibits us from taking the leap with a mobile game, but somehow, when we’ve already downloaded it, and we’re already out of energy or we have to wait five hours for our next building to finish growing, suddenly dropping £1.49 on some tokens to speed things up doesn’t seem so bad. Then before you know it you’ve gone and spent much more on the little time-killing “free” game than you would have on a premium title that would have cost you a fraction of the price.
That being said, it’s high time we stop underestimating the freemium market. You only have to take a look at our previews of games like Might and Magic Heroes Online and Kartuga to get a feel for where this particular sector of the industry is headed. Freemium games are fast catching up on premium games in terms of quality, and the massive rise of browser titles is removing the need to even download the game in the first place. Sure, no-one’s going to be playing Crysis 3 in their browser any time soon, but remember, there was a point in time where Snake enthralled a generation. Stranger things have happened.
So will this become a trend in triple AAA gaming? It’s not likely. Developers are happy to milk consumers for more cash with DLC after they’ve already paid for the main game but the manpower and finance that goes into developing a title like Bioshock Infinite or Halo 4 is never likely to be replaced, or even subsidized, by people paying real cash for in-game boosts and aesthetic enhancements. It’s a model that can be applied to increase income from a game’s audience, but it’s not quite potent enough to replace it entirely. Not yet. Certainly not with the booming increase in game production costs that has seen PC games, usually a comfortable £10-15 different from their console equivalents, slowly catching up to the modern pricing model.
It’s likely we’ll see some drastic pricing increases on the console market at first, much as we did at the beginning of the previous generation, but in time those retail prices will decrease. We’re probably going to end up with a considerably less painful middle ground inbetween the £40-£60 mark, with premium prices on PSN and Xbox Live.
Where do you think the cash-hammer will fall? Is is true that we’re not going to see freemium pricing in triple AAA games? Or will the gaming industry, as the film and music industry before it, be forced to adopt new ways of delivering itself to survive in a hostile, recession pitted financial world?
