# Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

Most free-to-play games, especially mobile free-to-play games, use similar models to extract revenue and keep players coming back. These models work by creating toxic trade-offs that are central to their functioning. This post highlights the main three, and will act as reference for future gaming posts. Note that some games that can be played for free, such as the excellent [Path of Exile](https://www.pathofexile.com/game), mostly do not do these things and are not fundamentally ‘free-to-play’ games, rather they are games that are free. But they are the exception, the extreme end of a continuum from ‘so friendly we just give you this great experience in the hopes you’ll want to throw us money’ to ‘[made a pact with the Canadian devil](https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s18e06-freemium-isnt-free).’

For an analysis of Magic: The Gathering Arena in particular, [this remains the central point of my analysis](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/02/10/eternal-and-hearthstone-economy-versus-magic-economy/), centered on what I here call the third trade-off. Arena counts as free-to-play in bad ways, but is on the less toxic end of the spectrum, especially with regard to the second trade-off, which I am seeing over time as more central. However, while Arena remains relatively friendly, it is moving _towards _being more toxic, with things like the second wildcard for historic card creation and with the mastery track.

### The Three Trade-offs

The first key trade-off is to make games less fun in order to cause you to pay them huge amounts of money to make them less not fun, aiming at extracting extremely large payments from a few whales as the primary revenue stream. This prevents them from giving you the version of their game that would be the most fun, even if you are paying a lot of money, because they still want you to pay more. If you are not paying any money, and aren’t going to bring in new players, they almost want to drive you away.

The second key trade-off is between success in the game and your life, focus and time. The games use timers and delays to force you to constantly pay attention to the game if you want to accomplish the maximum. Not doing so lets valuable resources sit idle, whether they are free resources or paid for resources. Thus, the back of your mind becomes infected by the need to constantly check and perform tasks, and there is a sense of panic that you are delaying starting something because that delays it finishing which delays starting the next thing, and so on. This is not healthy. The game is telling you when and how to play, rather than you deciding, and it’s preventing focus and relaxation and other good things in life. Such games have the power to make your life worse rather than better, and often will do so.

The third key trade-off is that they give players tons of different resources and currencies and items that they need to gather, make many of them rare and hard to get, require those elements in order to advance or to advance efficiently, and they do not allow trade in these items in any reasonable way. If you get bottle-necked in one of them, you can be very screwed, and often players will get into this spot because they did not realize what resources need to be conserved, or because some are simply made super hard to get.

### Better and Worse

There are more and less toxic versions of all this. Better versions give you optimization problems to solve but do not put you under felt pressure to change your other patterns of behavior. Worse versions put you in race situations and force a steady stream of clicks at specified intervals to not fall behind. Ideally, the game is presenting an interesting optimization problem, but not one that tempts you to make crazy out-of-game sacrifices.

This system of forced delays makes sense in light of selling speed-ups and other ways to get around the restrictions. What started happening a few years ago was that regular games that charged money up front started incorporating these elements as well. So in addition to the endless grind tasks that many games used to prolong length, one was forced to leave on one’s gaming counsels and not play them, in order to make progress in otherwise fun games like Bravely Default or Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Before this round of trying free-to-play games, I was focused on the first problem and not as worried about the second problem, with the third problem as a hard problem that needs to be handled responsibly by some games, and solved via robust markets for other games such as digital collectible card games. Now that I have had the chance to play with a game designer’s perspective, to think about what the game is doing to its players and their brains, I am now more worried about the second problem than the first problem.

The first problem leads to games that force a bunch of grinding and don’t offer as many fun opportunities, and which a few players will spend far too much money on. That’s bad, but it’s not _that _bad.

Similarly, the third problem locks your players out of being able to find the components they need to do the things they want to do, locking them out of much or most of the variety your game has to offer. This is bad, but it’s bad in the _players not having fun _sense and the _players putting in money they will never see again _sense, rather than the _players ruining their lives _sense.

The second problem leads to ruined focus, days and lives, as people are unable to get the game out of their heads, despite nothing really being at stake. I flirted with this a little bit in order to better understand how it works. It’s more pernicious than it seems, and after stopping (or scaling back to where one does not care about being much less efficient) one feels a great relief. So I now consider this to be the thing most important to avoid, and to speak up against.

Delays, steady streams of income, time and resource optimization problems and other similar mechanics can lead to interesting games and game play. Many of the real life problems I most enjoy thinking about are similar optimization problems at heart. If a game uses the flow of time and resources, and the efficiency trade-offs of gathering them in different ways, to generate interesting problems, _and the good ways to do things are fun and not life disruptive, _that can lead to some great experiences. If they are not fun, and/or they are too disruptive, what results can be far more toxic than one might think.

Both of these dynamics point to additional reasons to essentially never put money into free-to-play games unless they are selling permanent changes.

If there are features, stories, regions or other elements that are fully payment locked, then that is like a non-free game that one should be free to pay for. Alternatively, if the game has a ‘maximum spend’ that allows you to fully unlock its components that are relevant to multiplayer competition, and this enables playing the game without its resource optimization elements, and you’re willing to pay that price to exclude those elements entirely, and your eyes are fully open on all of that, then that is a reasonable thing to do.

However, if the game is true free-to-play with payment options, then you are dealing with an optimization problem of how to make the most of your resources, where the game is constantly trying to exhaust them via log scaling of costs to get you to keep paying.

Thus, paying them money _likely makes the game worse rather than better. _

Suddenly, your optimization problem provides a few more resources, but does that make the problem more interesting, or only highlight the dollar values of what is involved in destructive ways? Likely the latter. And they have all the same reasons to quickly run you out of resources again and put you in the same place, except now your free options will clearly be not interesting.

Having a game constantly available on one’s phone also adds all the standard temptations and distractions of other potential phone activities that offer steady streams of small reward. Phone games are doubly more toxic than non-phone games, because they are both available on your phone, and because they tend to embrace toxic implementations in order to succeed in the cutthroat mobile market where one must prioritize lifetime customer revenue in order to make mobile advertising of the game profitable, which is what allows one to scale.

Thus, when encountering free-to-play games that are built around some combination of a whale-based revenue model, time-counter mechanics and a wide array of collectible but not easily purchasable or salable in-game assets, one should be reluctant to play even for free, but even more reluctant to pay money.

In particular, _the more often they require you to ping them, and the more they punish you for not pinging them when they want you to, _the more scared of them you should be, and this consideration should be more central to your threat level assessment than you think.