They’ll want to maintain their status among gamers. Angry Birds Space ”cost a lot more” than the original, for example. That’s how they ”end up in an arms race.” F2P AAA FTW?
The former Sony, EA and DICE executive also thinks CCP’s DUST 514, Crytek’s Warface and Blizzard’s DoTA will prove the freemium model. Success means more investment.
Cousins points to Zynga’s FarmVille for Facebook which is hugely successful but nowhere near as well thought out and invested in as CastleVille. Freemium studios may start out with more basic offerings but once the money starts to flow they begin putting more into their products to stay strong in the market.
”In every other platform - whether arcades, consoles or PCs - there’s been a gradual increase in production values as everyone tries to get the next big hit,” said Ben Cousins now working for ngmoco. ”If you look at Zynga’s games, FarmVille is very basic compared to something like CastleVille, so we’re already seeing that transition over a couple of years.”
”When you get companies making hundreds of millions of dollars from their games, they’re going to invest that in their sequels. They need to maintain that position. Just look at Angry Birds Space; that cost a lot more money than Angry Birds - I’d bet five times as much - and that’s because they had the money and they wanted to maintain that positions. That’s how you end up in an arms race.”
”I think it’s inevitable. If that’s where the money is then there will be intense competition from very big companies willing to make very big bets… The next generation of freemium PC games will be indistinguishable from AAA games.”
The free-to-play model will be harder going on the consoles because of Microsoft and Sony but the same force that has driven it on PC and mobile will be felt by the platform holders. He adds no matter how fancy the next generation techs are they can’t ignore the huge rise and power of the open platforms. People ”moving away” from dedicated techs.
”What’s the true value of an Xbox?” Cousins asks. ”If you said to somebody, ‘I’m going to throw your Xbox in the bin or I’m going to delete your Xbox Live account and all of your gamer points,’ I think they’d be more upset about losing the service than the hardware. And I really hope that Microsoft understands that power and is able to execute on that idea.”
Will freemium give rise to AAA games? It would sure clear up that second-hand market issue. Valve has made tons more revenue from switching Team Fortress 2 free-to-play. Is it a luxury move for the already loaded studios?
