作者：Stephen Richards

免费游戏经常被当成是一种冷酷无情的资本主义副产品。就像书籍采用心理手法去诱导读者沉浸于其中一样，免费游戏也会采取类似的方法将毫无戒心的用户带进游戏中；然后玩家便会因为遇到各种障碍而不得不将手伸向腰包，以此维系接下来的游戏过程和乐趣。

从设计师的角度来看，我能理解为什么免费游戏被当成是一种烦人的理念。当技术到达一个临界点，即当互动体验能够以独特的叙述形式和艺术表现形式呈现出来，那些带有“商业”职称的人便能从之前企图模拟好莱坞动作电影的想法中脱离出来，并意识到能够采取更简单且低风险的方式去创造游戏。

Free to Play(from outofhp)

所以设计的关注点发生了转移。为了面向更广的用户范围，开发者需要确保较低的最低配置需求，从而让游戏变得更加简单。为了不让玩家只玩几个小时的游戏或者避免他们感到无聊，开发商添加了一些人为的时间限制：即让玩家花几个小时或1天的时间去等待某些内容的“建造”，而不只是15秒钟。最糟糕的是，设计师还在交易中抽出了付费内容而创造出较为糟糕的体验。基于免费模式，游戏设计的基本目标都是关于扩大利润，似乎主流游戏将从娱乐服务过度到艺术领域是件让人匪夷所思的事。

除了娱乐与艺术之间的争论，我还想要考虑免费游戏的本质是否具有剥削性或资本主义性质。一开始，让我们假设最近出现的剥削型免费游戏都是源于发行商/开发商的贪婪，而不是它们的本质属性。

从这一角度来看，免费游戏便不具备邪恶性。对于一款带有各种漏洞，频繁提供微交易或非常糟糕的免费游戏来说，大多数玩家都可以不受任何损失地抛弃它。对于那些呈现出资本主义性质最糟糕一面的游戏来说，它们是带有罗宾汉的好奇心态。这是那些成功的免费游戏开发者为了提供给非玩家长期的乐趣体验，并帮助他们意识到游戏价值而采取的做法，例如提供内容定制，较小的竞争优势，或者减少等待时间等。

我认为我们可以乐观地看待游戏的长期盈利，即更接近罗宾汉的心态而不是资本主义心态。当我们着眼于Steam上最成功的一家免费游戏开发商的内部运作时会发现，付费玩家，特别是鲸鱼玩家并不是因为沉迷于游戏才花钱的，而是单纯地为满足自己的兴趣。而一个月花费10磅或20磅仍不足以支持玩家的兴趣，他们还需要投入大量的时间（游戏邦住：更别说那些有钱人可以通过更多方法去花费他们的金钱）。

实际上，我认为免费游戏只存在一个严重的问题，即对于整个游戏产业的主导式影响。近几年来，许多评论者都带有一种看法，即产业中的所有游戏都是免费游戏，或者就是基于微交易模式。对此我感到十分惊讶。一方面是因为仍有许多游戏因为微交易模式而遭遇失败，另一方面是因为我认为免费游戏的名气都是被炒出来的。举个例子来说吧，当我们着眼于任何应用商店的畅销游戏排行榜单时会发现，免费游戏总是占据着较大的比例。但是要知道，只有5%至15%的玩家影响着这些排行，而主要的影响则来自于比例更小的玩家。

如今的免费模式可以说是最佳盈利模式，特别是对于应用来说，但是这并不意味着它将主导整个世界。毕竟还有许多用户还不能理解应用需要花钱的理念，也有一些用户讨厌应用内部购买，但却仍会选择免费游戏而不是一次性付费的游戏。但我认为市场中已经有够多反对微交易模式的声音在限制免费游戏的发展了，特别是当一次性付费游戏进入物以稀为贵的年代之时。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Free to Play: a socialist alternative?

by Stephen Richards

Free-to-Play is often regarded as one of the more cold and ruthless byproducts of capitalism. Unsuspecting consumers are tempted in with the promise of a free game before every psychological trick in the book is employed to make them as addicted as possible, and they’re then rinsed dry of cash through the inevitable introduction of constant barriers that make regular in-game-payment a virtual necessity for continued progress or enjoyment.

Well, quite.

From a designer’s perspective, I can see why F2P is a loathsome idea. Just as technology is reaching the point at which interactive experiences are able to experiment with unique forms of narrative and artistic expression, freeing them from their prior attempts to emulate Hollywood action films, the people with ‘business’ in their job title realised there was a much easier, less risky way to build a game.

And so the emphasis of design shifted focus. To keep as wide an audience as possible, minimum specs had to be very low, and so games had to be extremely simple. To keep people from playing a few hours, getting bored and moving on, artificial time constraints had to be introduced: now you had to wait a few hours or a day for something to ‘build’, rather than fifteen seconds. Worst of all, designers had to deliberately make games worse than they could be by syphoning off premium content for use in transactions. Under the F2P model, where the end goal of game design is always maximising profit, it seems inconceivable that mainstream games will ever make the transition from entertainment to art.

Setting aside the entertainment vs art debate, I want to consider whether F2P is inherently exploitative, capitalist, evil… insert further adjectives at your discretion. To begin, lets be sympathetic and suppose the recent flood of shoddy F2P games can be attributed to the genre’s obvious attravctiveness to greedy publishers and/or developers, rather than its inherent nature.

From this perspective, F2P actually looks pretty good. The majority of players get a free game which they can put down at zero loss if it’s full of bugs, throws microtransactions in their face too often, or is simply a bad game. This puts a heavy responsibility on developers: games that don’t work properly on launch don’t merely get a consumer backlash and a bunch of forum trolls, they won’t generate any revenue. (Compare Simpsons: Tapped Out to Sim City.)

More significantly, because online multiplayer is generally engrained into F2P games, the paying players are effectively subsiding the server costs of non-payers. For a genre that supposedly exhibits the worst side of capitalism, it has a curiously Robin Hood mentality. This is especially salient given the most successful F2P developers are careful to make their games remain fun for long term non-payers, recognising their value. This is done by carefully controlling how much players are badgered and what can be purchased through IAPs: aesthetic customizations, small competitive advantages and reduced waiting times seem to be the most successful.

I think we can be optimistic that the games that remain profitable in the long term, and thus become models for future developments, will be closer to Robin Hood than capitalist leech. Certainly having glimpsed the inner workings of one of the most successful F2P game developers on Steam, I’ve noticed a supposition that paying players, particularly the mega-extravagant whales, are not driving themselves into debt through addiction, but simply funding a keen hobby. And ten or twenty pounds a month isn’t a great deal to spend on a hobby you’re investing a lot of time into. (Not to mention the rich have far more wasteful ways to throw away their cash – I’d rather have them pour money into the games industry than build up collections of sports cars.)

In fact, the only serious problem I have with F2P is its spiralling dominance over the industry as a whole. Many commentators are getting very carried away with the idea that in a few years, all games will be F2P and/or supported by micro-transactions. That I find frightening. Partly because there are uncountable games which would be utterly ruined by the introduction of microtransactions, and partly because I think the popularity of F2P is often blown out of proportion. For example, you might think, looking at the top-grossing list on any app store, that F2P is clearly what the public has chosen. But remember only about 5-15% of players are influencing that chart at all, and the majority of the influence is coming from an even smaller proportion of them. Subsidised games don’t come for free: the cost we pay is a reduced influence over how they’re made.

F2P may currently be the most profitable business model, particularly for apps, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to take over the world. A lot of consumers haven’t yet grasped the idea that apps (or any games for that matter) are worth paying for. Others may detest the idea of making in-app-purchases, but still choose to play F2P games as non-payers rather than making one-off purchases for games. This just my own hunch, but I think that enough of the market is opposed to paying micro-transactions to limit the expansion of F2P, especially as single-payment games will inevitably become more valuable the rarer they get.(source:gamasutra)