Do you remember the old times when a game launches, you would pay a fixed price, and it was fully ready to play with all its assets available for everyone? That was until free-to-play emerged. “But how do they make money if their game is free-to-play?” you may ask. The answer is simple. Those games are just free to get into but not free to fully experience.
F2P games were originated in the late 90s and early 2000s. The model was a bit different back then, but there were popular titles like RuneScape or Furcadia.
With the increasing popularity of some free-to-play titles, game economics have changed. Games have started aiming to catch players’ interest within the first few hours with easy-to-dive-in game mechanics to strictly attach players to their game so they will be in a spot willing to pay whatever offer is thrown at them.
With the conventional pricing model, players pay for an expected return on their investment, usually a return of some fun time. Free-to-play games took that and offered the game seemingly free-to-play. Once players have realized there are more to it than what they had, they were offered with microtransactions. These are usually but a necessarily smaller amount of payments that provide players further benefits and thus a better experience.
But it’s not easy to convince your player to pay for something that they initially think that is actually free. This is where projects rely on players’ ambition to advance to higher levels of the game. Every once in a while, developers strategically implement some levels that are very difficult to clear. Some levels are designed in such a way that without the extra benefits that come with the microtransactions, it would take more and more attempts to clear and move on to the next level.
Then frustration kicks in, and in order to move on, players instinctively makes a small purchase. With the satisfaction kicking in after clearing the level, deep down inside, they feel a small amount of payment is the easy way to pleasure. After a few levels more, when they encounter a similar issue, their first instinct is going for that extra payment in order to get that satisfaction once more.
As mentioned above, key to the player engagement is having your game be easy to dive in and throw a lot of rewards on their face early on. After spending hours on the game and finally realizing they need to make a small amount of payment in order to progress further, they will be thrown great offers for their money. That initial deal will be the hook for getting them to the “pay zone.” However, after that benefit is depleted, players will be more inclined to make an additional payment because they will feel that they invested so much time and some money as well, so they feel if they quit playing now, all their efforts will go to waste. Actually, truth is whatever they do, all their money and time investment is going to be a waste but that is the sunk cost fallacy most people have hard time overcoming.
Blockchain games doesn’t necessarily mean that these games will provide earnings to every player in every situation, but the biggest potential is these games having decentralized assets on blockchain technology, meaning that assets -items, in-game money, etc. can be traded freely so they can convert these assets into real life earnings.
This though, shouldn’t be perceived as a financial investment method but more like a fun time experience that you can have without worrying about your time or money investment put in the game knowing that you can cash out your in-game earnings any time you want.
Web3 games are not all about winning in-game because even if you can’t defeat the hardest bosses or rein on other players, you will still be getting some items and tokens in return for the quests you completed or enemies you defeated, and each can be traded so you can get yourself some return on your investment in the end.
