What some CEOs are saying about the "free to play" games market. (Choice quotes from Interviews)

The "buzz" around the game world seems to be "free to play" games but I think that at the risk of sounding too much like I'm some sort of communist is that I think that if you give stuff back to the world, it gives to you as well.

www.kenney-mencher.com/

Life is a game, so are games some of us play to win but I think the majority of us play for the team.  We care about others too and would rather take a team along.  I think we all think the future is making things better through interconnectivity and teamwork.  "Free to play" and "team based" gaming seems the logical future.


EA's Former CEO Says Free-To-Play is About Game Design, Not Business Models
John Riccitiello gets a few things off his chest about the gaming industry.  By Mike Williams

"If you think deeply about free-to-play, it's not just a business model, it's a game design," replied Riccitiello when asked about free-to-play. "So inherent in the game is a mechanic where the management of the money or the resources that you want them to spend is fundamental to what is enjoyable to the product. When you're trying to work out how far you can get in a game with a certain amount of resources, that is a game design feature. It's an enjoyable feature, the management of resources to accomplish a goal."

"My only point is that there is more to game design than resource management around the money that you put into a game. There are other things that are equally as good or better in terms of satisfying entertainment. In those circumstances, I don't think we're going to see a free-to-play model prevail."

Cevat Yerli CEO of Crytek 

Source: Crytek CEO: Our goal is to ‘transition entirely’ to free-to-play games in 2 to 5 years. by Jeffrey Grubb

“We’re looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans,”

“If you look at historically, the U.S. has primarily been about retail. That’s shifting a lot. There’s a lot more free-to-play coming from the U.S., but this has been mainly Facebook games.”

“We decided five or six years ago that we want to marry the quality of triple-A games with the business model of free-to-play,” Yerli told GamesBeat. “And out of that position, Gface and Warface were born. And at that time, we decided some other games, in some of our other studios, would head in this direction. But we kept pushing the quality bar higher on our console business, which is the main dominating business for the Western world, but we are observing, plainly — and we see this already with Warface — that the free-to-play market is on the rise. I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface.”

“So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles,” said Yerli. “But our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that.”

“This doesn't mean our main business will be driven by our platform business. We are just going to open it up and see how it works. We are always going to be a games-first company. We will always have our own development because we are all about making games. We provide technology, but technology is not our main driver. We make technology to make great games.”

Owen Mahoney CEO of Nexon,

Source: Nexon’s new CEO wants creative devs, free-to-play to be fair — and cloners to take a hike, by Dean Takahashi

I want to see more games that blow my mind with their differences. I love multiplayergames — we make multiplayer games exclusively — but every once in a while, I’ll see a single-player game that I really love. I was playing Transistor the other day and really just — I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s by the guys who made Bastion. It’s just beautifully done. It has great art, great music, great sound design, original gameplay. I didn’t like everything in it, but I liked most of it. I wish our industry would do more of that.

. . . ur philosophy is that if you’re trying something different from what’s out there now, and if the gameplay you’re going for is fun, then we get interested. From there, we go through an iterative process that simplifies down to asking ourselves, “Is this a game we’re going to care about in five, 10, 15 years?” If the answer is yes, we’ll invest and want to make it happen.

My belief is that we’re coming out of what I’d consider to be five very bad years in the games industry. The bad years started around 2007. There was this false dichotomy in the business. You had the big established publishers – not just in the west, but also in Japan – where they had a hard time understanding what the impact of online would be on their business. Even when they were forward-thinking and pushing into online, they had a hard time learning a new set of skills and how to make a synchronous online game work. To way oversimplify what happened, they put a lot of resources into graphics fidelity. 

On the other hand, you had a lot of people coming out of the Facebook world and into the mobile world who didn’t care about games at all. They were on record as not giving a damn about gameplay and game quality. The founders of these companies were not game players themselves. We all know who those were. What they never tried to do was ask themselves, “What’s a good game? What inspires me? What’s fun to do?” They might have asked, “What’s addictive?” But that’s different from what’s fun.

Scott Hartsman, the CEO of Trion Worlds,
Source: Interview: Trion Worlds CEO On The Move To Free - 'There Are So Many Lousy F2P Games Out There' by Daniel Nye Griffiths

A year ago we were a company with two games. This year we are a company with three of our own MMOs, plus our first published MMO, plus 10 other distributed games[through the Glyph digital storefront]. So, we’re seeing user numbers in the 12-13 million range. . .

There aren’t just big, massive open-world games. There are online arena-based games. There are online asynchronous games. And the massive worlds [i.e. orthodox MMORPGs] are still there. 

While that’s happened on the product side, what happened on the business side is that, as trust in the Internet has gone up, people are much more open to different business models. What we’re also learning is that different audiences respond very differently to different ways of pitching in for your game. Some want to buy a box, still. Some want to download [for free] and then subscribe. Others want to play for free and then pay almost like tipping – “Hey, you guys did great, I had some fun, I’m going to kick in.”

And on the funding side, it’s changed too. You previously only had games published by publishers. Now you have everything from self-funding to Kickstarting to venture investing, and publishers investing, to classic publishing deals. 

Our road has really been in a universe where all three of those things – product, payment and funding – are changing, how do we position ourselves to succeed? That’s really how we’ve changed. Where previously it was very much “we are the publisher, and there are the developers”, in a world where those three vectors have all changed how do we succeed in all of them? 

So, we have free to play games ,we’ve crowdfunded one of our experimental titles,Trove, we’re currently working as a publisher of external titles. We see all of those things as tools in our toolbox. Our experience lets us pick the right tools for the right product and the right audience.”

You mentioned free to play coming to the West – our goal is to bring a very refined, high-quality model to that. 

The first [element] is that it was a very all hands on deck process. The product teams – those with the most experience of the product, who had the most contact with the audience – led the charge and the technology teams and the traditional marketing and publishing folks were there as their partners. It was very much built around the idea of “how do we continue providing a triple-A quality service for an audience with a very specific idea of what triple-A and what “fair” looks like, while still making enough money for everyone to still have a job, and to be able to invest in products in the future? 

It’s been received very well by the audience – we’ve continued to deliver major updates every month and minor updates every week, as if nothing changed with the business model, as well as longer-term planning for things like expansions.
We’ve been busy!

Leonid Rastorguev CEO Kraken Games

We are definitely not playing with real-world politics, but we have taken some inspiration from real-world history while writing our world lore. Our goal was to create three factions battling each other without hope for a peaceful solution. So we decided to give them different political views to justify their actions. But honestly, they all fight for power and control over the galaxy.
As for the appearance of the red Commune and blue Corporation in the game, we are just playing on stereotypes. We see no need to be over-creative and over-innovative in this aspect of the game. The game is about fast-paced battles not about politics and ideologies. So we introduced factions that can be easily comprehended by players.

Honestly, balancing character progression is one of the most difficult problems we have encountered to date. In Warside our goal was to create a balanced mix of shooter and RPG. While a player expects a fair fight from a shooter he also expects that leveling up his character will make him more powerful. So we have divided players into leagues depending on their level. Character progression within a league is balanced so that the top-level player with the best equipment that can be acquired in this league is still a fair challenge even for a player who just entered this league. When a player advances to the next league he gets access to a variety of new skills and equipment and his character becomes more powerful.