游戏邦注：本文作者是牛津独立开发工作室Mode 7的Paul Taylor，其当前项目是《Frozen Synapse》，这是款备受赞誉的PC和Mac策略游戏。

Frozen Synapse from calmdowntom.com

我今早在Gamesbrief读到一篇帖子。

Mr Lovell仍旧继续宣扬免费模式的优点。我想说“高调吹捧”，但会略显不公。就像他自己承认的，他的表述有些夸大其词，目的是要吸引用户眼球，发起兼容各种观点的讨论。

我认为这个帖子的主要问题在于它竟称免费模式必将击败所有商业模式，呈现洋洋得意姿态，满心欢喜地晃动他们面无表情的面孔。

“未来10年，我们无法就所有内容进行收费。我们有望接触所有期盼已久的音乐、书籍、电视和游戏内容。当然有人会为内容掏钱，告诉我说我唯有付费方能获得。但选择非常多，不论是合法还是不合法，付费访问模式几乎无法维持。”（游戏邦注：此为Mr. Lovell文中表述）

这里存在明显对冲性：在短短文字中，我们从“认为没有可能”演变成“完全不可能”。

我只能礼貌地说，“简直是胡说八道。”

免费模式非通用机制

免费模式引领潮流：我们目睹Valve将热门“硬核”游戏转化成完全免费模式；也听到有谣言说有些平台所有者完全依靠免费模式；也知道有免费游戏和免费游戏公司（游戏邦注：例如《Moshi Monsters》和Zynga）取得划时代销售成绩。

棒极了！游戏行业创造一个能够以不同方式植入各种游戏当中的付费模式，这颇令人兴奋。

但这些趋势并不表示每款游戏都要采用免费模式，也不表示每款游戏未来都会基于免费模式。

免费游戏主要依靠庞大用户基础，其中有部分用户愿意支付特定游戏内容或地位（游戏邦注：这个比例大概在10%左右）。

为制作传统免费游戏，开发商需设计存在购买机会的作品。显然《Farmville》旨在让玩家通过花钱维持愉快状态。Valve巧妙发现，免费模式是个普遍社交机制，玩家通过掏钱表达自我。

但若你所设计的内容无法形成购买提示？无法获得广告支持？或者只是瞄准希望暂且忘却金钱的小族群？

那么免费模式就行不通。你就不该尝试。

假设我在制作诸如《星际争霸 2》之类的竞争性游戏，或者《Amnesia》之类的深刻作品，我不会每隔10秒钟就提示玩家进行消费。我不希望呈现“你在创建2座兵营！是否通过花费2英镑节省一半地堡创建时间？”

Amnesia from horror-video-games.com

我认为相当多玩家都不想购买帽子、虚拟货币、胡萝卜或魔术耳朵：他们希望像购买产品那样一次性购买游戏，然后到此为止。

我想这是Steam获得成功的原因之一。Steam本身就像一款大型免费游戏，“虚拟道具”是廉价出售的游戏列表。文章主旨在此就已非常明了，就连Gamesbrief也认为游戏领域存在各种不同“高终身价值用户”……

一旦你这么认为，我们就能够维护各种不合潮流的观念，例如给一款独立游戏设定一个相当高的价位。若你提供一个相当令人满意的独一无二细分内容，一款能让用户表现自我的产品，为什么不定高价？

免费模式游戏

下面就来看看免费模式游戏的闪光点：

1）免费游戏将比“一次性付费”游戏获得更多营收

若你是个投资者，你需在优秀“一次性付费”游戏开发商和杰出免费模式游戏开发者之间进行选择，你会选择免费模式。虽然现在有点为时过晚，但这将呈现另一番不同景象。

免费模式游戏瞄准广泛用户，旨在最大程度获利。

虽然随着免费模式的成熟，市场将会涌现更多“细分”免费游戏。我仍旧认为免费游戏覆盖的目标群体要多于一次性付费游戏。

2）免费模式游戏颇值得开发商借鉴

供独立开发商借鉴的一个重要经验是：“粉丝希望购买有意义的附加内容。”

例如，很多人向我表示，他们愿意购买《Frozen Synapse》附加内容。所以，我将研究如何制作这些附加内容，以合理价格推出。

很多独立开发商在向粉丝提供低成本有效DLC内容方面还有所欠缺。他们流失很多收益；而玩家则失去很多有趣内容。这应进行调整。

3）很多免费游戏都毫无价值，因为其免费模式不成熟：事实并非如此。

随着杰出设计师日益明白其局限所在，很多免费模式游戏的粗糙和反玩家属性都将大幅消失。

我认为免费模式游戏会吸引新玩家，该模式未来几年将得到较大发展。

“一次性付费”游戏的施展空间

但我认为免费模式游戏不会完全消失。有3个细分领域需采用“一次性付费”模式。

* 融入详细、连续叙述内容的游戏；“过山车”游戏。

* 瞄准小群体的竞争性多人模式游戏

* 植入特定机制的试验性游戏

这是否表示这些游戏不会有大型、创新免费版本，不会出售DLC或通过免费商品进行营销？不是的。而是说他们不会依靠广告或微交易，它们有自己的用户群。

过去我曾抨击免费模式游戏。这是因为常有人告诉我《Frozen Synapse》应该是款免费浏览器游戏，所以我想要对此进行反驳。

这不是因为我反对免费模式；我反对的是胡乱吹捧免费模式。免费模式游戏未来有其发展空间，但不能说放弃此类型就不明智。

最后，从创新和商业角度看，最大程度创收不甚明智。这只会形成瞄准创收，缺乏艺术美感且无人问津的衍生作品。同样，一味瞄准艺术美感只会产生孤芳自赏的不成熟作品（游戏邦注：所以我们需综合两个方面）。

单支持免费模式或仅反对免费模式的群体都不够成熟。我们应仔细审视免费模式的利弊。

若你想要推出单人游戏，那就采用“一次性付费”模式，因为免费模式行不通。

数字推广是MMO（大型多人网游）游戏的通用模式，你的作品定能够出类拔萃。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Why free-to-play is not the answer to everything
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By Paul Taylor

This is a guest post from Paul Taylor of Mode 7, an indie development studio based in Oxford. Their current project is Frozen Synapse, a critically acclaimed multiplayer and single player squad-based tactical game for PC and Mac.  Check it out at www.frozensynapse.com.

The post originally appeared on the Mode 7 blog, and is reproduced with permission.

I read this post on Gamesbrief this morning.

It’s Mr Lovell’s usual evangelical pro-F2P…I was going to say “trolling” but that’s unfair.  As he himself will freely admit, his writing tends towards the hyperbolic in order to draw people in and start a conversation in which all sides of the argument are welcome.

Indeed, I’ve written for Gamesbrief myself in the past, which was great.

My main problem with this post is that it boldly asserts that F2P will inevitably slaughter all of the other business models and emerge triumphant, brandishing their expressionless, sorrowfully hatless heads with furious gusto…

“…on a ten year view, I don’t believe it will be possible to charge for basic access to content at all. We will all expect to have access to all the music, all the books, all the television and all the games that we could ever want. Sure, someone could invest in content and tell me that I can’t have it unless I pay. But there will be so many alternatives, both legal and illegal, that the model of paying access will be close to impossible to sustain. ”

There’s some noticeable hedging here: we go from “I don’t believe it will be possible” to “close to impossible” in the blink of a paragraph.

However, I’m going to take this at face value.

Then I’m going to say, respectfully, “Bollocks.”

Free-to-play is a juggernaut

Free-to-play is a juggernaut: we’ve just seen Valve take a very popular “core” game and convert it fully to F2P; we’re hearing rumbles about other platform holders bringing in F2P support; we’re all aware of the world-changing sales figures that titles like Moshi Monsters and developers like Zynga generate.

Fantastic!  It’s great that the games industry has produced an exciting new payment model that can be used in all kinds of different ways by all kinds of different titles.

But what these trends don’t mean is that every game should be F2P, and they certainly don’t mean that every game will be F2P.

F2P titles rely on generating a very large audience of players, a percentage of whom are willing to pay for specific in-game experiences or status.   Let’s say that percentage is roughly 10% of your total audience.

In order to make a free-to-play game in the traditional sense, a developer therefore needs to design an experience that lends itself to purchasing opportunities.  Obviously, Farmville is designed around pushing players into paying money to maintain a pleasurable state.  Valve have very cleverly identified that TF2 is now a large-scale social system in which people will pay money to express themselves.

But what if the experience you want to design does not lend itself to purchasing prompts?  What if it can’t be supported by adverts?  What if it’s targeted at an extremely small audience who want to forget about money for a period of time?

Then you can’t make that game F2P, and you shouldn’t try.

Say I’m creating a competitive game like Starcraft 2, or a deeply affecting experience like Amnesia…I don’t want to be badgering my customers for money every ten seconds.  I do not want to display, “It looks like you’re doing a 2 barracks pressure build!  Would you like to spend ￡2 to cut your bunker build time by half?”

It’s my belief that a significant number of people who play games do not want to buy hats, pretend money, carrots or magical ears: they want to buy a game once, as a product, and then leave it at that.

I think, actually, that’s one reason Steam is such a success.  Steam itself is like a giant F2P game, and the “virtual items” are the individual experiences on sale in the catalogue.  That’s the theme apparent here, proving that even Gamesbrief accepts there’s many different kinds of “high lifetime-value customers”…

Once you start thinking in this way, it might be possible to justify all kinds of hideously untrendy thinking, like setting a reasonably high price for an indie title, for example.  If you’re offering a desirable niche experience that can’t be found elsewhere, a product that will make users stand out, then why not aim higher?

What I believe about free-to-play games

Let me now clarify a couple of things I do believe about free-to-play games:

1.)  Free-to-play games will consistently make more money than “pay once” games

If you are an investor, and you are about to chose between a hypothetical brilliant “pay once” game developer and a hypothetical equally-brilliant “free-to-play” developer, you invest in F2P.  Although, you’re probably too late now, but that’s a different story.

F2P games are for large audiences and they are designed around maximal money extraction.

While I think more “niche” F2P games will emerge as F2P development matures creatively, I still believe that the overall target audience required is larger than for a pay once title.

2.) Free-to-play games have lessons for all game developers

I think the key lesson that indie devs in particular need to learn from F2P is this: “Your fans want to pay for additional content that is meaningful to them.”

Many, many people have told me, for example, that they are happy to pay for certain additions to Frozen Synapse.  So, naturally, we’re going to look into ways in which we can develop those additions, and release them for a sensible price.

Low-cost MEANINGFUL DLC for your fans is not used enough by many, many indie devs.  They are missing out on a lot of revenue; gamers are missing out on cool stuff.  This should be corrected.

3.)  A lot of F2P games are rubbish because F2P is immature: that does not have to be the case.

I think the crude, anti-player nature of many F2P games will largely diminish as talented designers become more familiar with its constraints.

I believe new audiences will come to F2P and it will grow significantly in the next few years.

The place for “pay once” games

I don’t think “pay once” games will ever be stamped out completely, though. Here are three examples of niches that are not going away any time soon that I believe require “pay once”…

* Titles that require discreet, uninterrupted narrative; “rollercoaster” games

* Competitive multiplayer titles for small audiences

* Experimental games that focus on a small subset of mechanics

Am I saying that those games can’t have large, innovative free demos, sell DLC or be marketed via the use of free products made by their creators? No.  I’m saying that I don’t think they can be supported by advertising or microtransactions, and that audiences will always want them.

I have said rude things about free-to-play games in the past.  I felt frustrated about being told that Frozen Synapse should be a free-to-play browser-based game so many times, so I vented my spleen.

That is not because I am anti-F2P; it is because I am anti-Evangelical F2P.  I can imagine making an F2P game in the future, but I cannot imagine telling everyone else that they are stupid for not doing so.

Finally, creatively and commercially, sometimes it’s not sensible to aim at The Biggest Possible Amount of Money.  That leads to exploitative, derivative, artistically-impoverished products that nobody wants.  Equally, aiming for artistic brilliance can lead to self-important, inadequate drivel, so there is a balance to be struck here.

The rabidly pro-F2P camp and rabidly anti-F2P camp both come across as a bit silly.  I think it’s time to be intelligent about F2P, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to aim at selling a singular experience, aim for “pay once”, because it’s not going anywhere.

Digital distribution is the MMO, your game is the Heroic Purple Moustache of Peacockhood.（Source：gamesbrief）