This Week In The Business: Rage Against Free-To-Play

QUOTE | “It’s always struck me as a little odd how resentful players are in the F2P business model about paying a couple dollars when they don’t think twice about paying $50 for the same amount of fun or gameplay time.” – Veteran designer Steve Meretzky, talking about the evolution of free-to-play games

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “As game designers, we’re running bad code on people’s brains and trying to figure out where the bugs are and how it all works.” – Spry Fox’s Dan Cook, talking about the difficulties of game design

QUOTE | “You can do a tremendous amount of damage to your brand, your company, and the industry at that point.” – Microsoft’s Kevin Perry, talking about the consequences of shutting down a game service improperly

QUOTE | “Anybody in high tech or in content that sees Amazon jump into their bread and butter market and isn’t concerned… should have their head examined.” – IDC analyst Lewis Ward, talking along with other analysts about what the Amazon Fire TV console might mean to the game industry

QUOTE | “For us, games are not simply an ‘added bonus’ – they’re the whole point.” – Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman, responding to analysts who think Amazon’s Fire TV will hurt Ouya

QUOTE | “Instead of being impulsive, they were long-term thinkers, cool-headed, methodical, and they really supported the game.” – Ubisoft research scientist Nick Yee, talking abouthow heavy spenders on free-to-play games are not impulsive.

QUOTE | “It seems like the ultimate fair and honest model.” – Epic’s Tim Sweeney, describing why the company switched from its previous up-front fee for Unreal Engine 4 to a $19-a-month subscription plus 5% royalty

STAT | 108,000 – Number of Twitch broadcasts streamed by Xbox One owners in the first week the feature was available; by mid-March Xbox One users made up 22 percent of Twitch broadcasters

QUOTE | “You shouldn’t be afraid to cancel a game if you know in your heart or you see the figures and you have to cancel it.” – Torsten Reil, CEO of Natural Motion, talking about how they’ve canceled games in all stages of development

QUOTE | “Free-to-play isn’t going anywhere, but there are a lot of features of free-to-play that will go away.” – CEO Teemu Huuhtanen of Next Games, talking about leaving Rovio and trying to evolve the F2P business model with his next game

STAT | 25 million – Number of registered users of Crytek’s Warface free-to-play shooter; the game first launched in April 2012 in Russia, and is now in North America, Europe, Turkey, Korea and Brazil, with China coming this year

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