My issue with "Free-To-Play"

Today I would like to rant about the Free-To-Play model which is becoming more and more prevalent in gaming and visual novel mobile market. For those less...informed, Free-To-Play is a gaming model where the game is essentially free (Meaning you CAN play the whole game without spending a dime). Free-To-Play (Which shall from this point on be simply acronymed "FTP") was rarely seen a few years back, but since the popularity and success of FTP games on platforms such as Facebook (Where the first major "outbreak" of FTP games spawned; I'm talking about games like the well known Farmville), they have become more and more common on both the PC and mobile market, with the PC market mainly seeing online FTP MMOs and online games.

Now, I'm not talking about actual FREE games, like the ones you used to come across on Newgrounds or any other run of the mill flash game websites; There is a major difference between actual free games and FTP games.  Sadly, many casual players, who dominate the mobile market, do not know the one giant difference that separates the two and is cause for these kinds of games to be coined FTP instead of just free (Even though they often get marketed as "free"). These games work off of micro-transactions for "optional" items, but in the past few years, these "optional" micro-transactions have become less and less "optional". This, ladies and gentlemen, is the heart of my rant.

FTP games are essentially free. As stated in my introduction, you can play them for free; In the case of visual novel FTPs, you can read the whole story without spending a dime. HOWEVER, FTP games feature "goodies" that can be purchased. For VN FTPs, stories are broken down into character arcs --> chapters --> sections. To read a section, you must use "Energy", or some similar equivalent, and you consume one energy for each section you read. These FTP games give you a certain amount of energy for free per day, and you can purchase items that replenish energy by using game currency that you purchase with your actual money via what we call "micro-transactions". Other common purchasable goodies include clothing or accessories for FTP VNs with customizable avatars, items to pass checkpoints, story and photo save/unlocks, side stories, etc. Sounds pretty awesome right? Only if you have Buddha's patience and the ability to control spending impulses.

Somewhere along the way, FTP became all the rage within what is considered "heavy casual" markets. The VN mobile market is heavily dominated by Otome games, and almost all of them have started going towards the FTP model. Why? Because they are cash cows plain and simple. It's a great marketing strategy, I'll give it that; Lure casual players in with a seemingly "free" game, get them hooked on it, and dangle a convenient and simple offer in front of them; Fork over some cash and you can keep reading the story, accessorize your avatar, or the slew of options in online games such as special items for your farm, unique weapons for your MMO character, that extra stove you really want in Cafe World, etc. It's especially tantalizing to VN fans who gawk at a "full" VN price, which is usually $40+ for a fairly lengthy VN (Even more if you're importing). Localized Otome games are also a minority in the already niche market. 

What makes it even greater is that most of these come in small "cheap" packages, but that's where they really bite you in the ass. You buy that 5$ package saying to yourself 5 bucks isn't that much so you should be ok, and continue into the next chapter of the story after getting yourself some energy items. You end up getting to an exciting part of the story only to hit a major cliffhanger with no more energy, so you convince yourself to buy just one more cheap package so you can end the story on a good note for the day. Before you know it, you've gone through this same thought pattern 4 times this week and don't even realize that you've already spent $40 on a "Free" game. A lot of these FTP VNs have "daily rankings" for who used up the most energy for the day, and some of these numbers could only have been achieved by people spending $100+ IN ONE DAY on energy items. What's that you say? "But Rillania, it's their money, if they want to spend it like that, what's the big deal? You CAN play it for free, but they made a choice to spend their money instead of waiting and being patient"

Indeed reader, indeed. That does not change the fact though that it is a setup scheme that preys on casual players and works on hooking the reader, or player, into spending far more money than they would buying a full priced VN that is more than likely longer in length and better quality. So far from the FTP VNs I have played, each section is roughly about a minute, give or take depending on your reading speed, worth of "gameplay". So, with your free items, you get around 5 minutes of free play time a day. All good and fine I suppose since you're not paying anything for that 5 minutes of content. HOWEVER, the price for "additional time" is so exorbitant and rediculous in its price to content ratio that it makes me want to punch the company and not give them a single penny of my hard earned money. It also evokes feelings of slapping anyone who doesn't think it's a rip-off and a scam as well.

Take this "Sweet Honeymoon Special Set No.1" for example, which features 15 rice cakes (Energy item), Pass x5, and Bow and Arrow x1 (Checkpoint/Minigame items). This pack contains everything you need to complete one of the Sweet Honeymoon "side stories" that is currently going on in Destiny Ninja. Now, look at the price (1,610 DC, which is the "in game currency"), and then look at the screenshot before this one that features the DC packs and their prices; You'd have to buy the $15 dollar DC pack to buy this set. Now, at first thought and glance, $15 dollars doesn't seem too much for a complete side story right? Wrong. This is an example of where the "perceived price" (The pricetag to what you -think- you're getting for it at first glance) is used to distract you from the "actual price" (What you actually get for the price) and lure you in for the purchase. Remember how I said earlier that each section is roughly about a minute and costs one energy? Well, if one actually spends a minute to think about it, you'll realize that since this is a pack to complete a whole side-story. If the side story takes 15 rice cakes, or energy items, to complete, and each section is a minute, that means that you are getting in all actuality a whole 15 minutes of content for $15. Whats worse is that its NORMAL PRICE is 2300DC, which means it is normally, not on sale, 25 dollars. FOR 15 MINUTES OF CONTENT.  Doesn't seem so cheap and a good deal now eh? 

Let me break it down further for you.  That means that you pay roughly $1 for every minute of content just going by the sale price. It's more than that per minute if you buy it when it's off sale. Now, lets compare it to an example of a longer, story oriented VN that you pay for completely upfront. Let's say our VN is $50 dollars for roughly 50 hours of content. At a quick glance, a lot of people in the English VN community would turn away from this VN simply because they "perceive" the price to be too expensive. However, if you take the time to think about it, you'd be paying in "actuality" about $1 dollar for every hour of content. To further present my comparison and viewpoint, that $15 dollar side-story you bought pretty much has little to no replay value because it is for one character and one character alone. You want a different characters side-story? You'll have to fork over an additional 15$ for it. That $50 VN you bought however has 5 other routes you haven't explored or read and branches off early, so there's a ton of replay value and even more content that you don't have to pay additional for because you bought the whole VN. Think about it a bit, and ask yourself which one is actually the better "deal", the $15 dollar story, or the $50 dollar story?

Maybe you're still not convinced that FTP VNs are a complete rip-off, or are thinking "You could just be patient Rillania and use your free energy to do the story and spread the story out in three days instead of one" (Destiny Ninja gives you 5 free energy a day) Yes, you could. But this brings up probably my biggest point as to why I do not like the FTP model, why it's a rip-off, and that they are indeed set up in such a way to coax the reader into forking over too much cash for too little of content. In addition to energy requirements, many of these FTP games also toss in some "Mini-games" (Which are not really mini games) and "Checkpoints" randomly throughout the game. While you can complete a mini-game just using energy, you need items, such as a Gold Key, to unlock the checkpoint. Until you clear these checkpoints and games, you cannot continue on in the story. Generally there are multiple checkpoints as well, using different checks and/or items. Not only that, but if we're talking strictly side-stories, most of them are only up for a limited time, and combined with the checkpoint, minigame, and energy requirements, it's nigh impossible to finish maybe more than a couple of these before they're gone. Maybe only one if you're lucky if you don't have all of the required checkpoint items beforehand.

You -can- get these checkpoint items for free in the daily login bonuses orrrr...You can buy them in the shop! To make this offer tantalizing and get people to buy them, the games make checkpoints rather...frustrating in my opinion. Let's take My Sweet Prince for example; MSP uses Gold Keys for it's checkpoints. Your first checkpoint requires one gold key to pass, which you can get for free on your 9th day login bonus (consecutive), or you can buy one for $5 dollars in the store. I reached the first checkpoint in two days not even spending a single dime, which means I have to wait a week in order to continue with the story if I don't want to spend any money. And I haven't. You can also buy a gold key with the ingame "free" currency, but the amount of Ingame currency you get, it would take about as long to save up to get one as waiting for the free login key. Not only that, but you also have to pass charm checkpoints, which are tied to your "avatar". 

In MSP, you have an avatar that you can dress up. Each clothing item has a "charm" level, with higher and more expensive clothes giving higher charm. If you don't have a certain charm level, you can't pass the checkpoint. And to get more charm, you have to either spend your "free in game currency" or buy them with purchasable currency. So it's extremely hard, if not impossible, to split your free currency between both keys and clothing and still read some of the story even just every other day the longer you go into it. For those curious by the way, the snapshot prior is from Destiny Ninja, which requires multiple passes for one checkpoint. It's still just as much of a pain in the ass AND requires friendship checkpoints which, you guessed it, is from another avatar dressing little "addon". I've been playing Destiny Ninja for about 4-5 months now and I've only completed two characters. And each route is only roughly a little longer than an hour in actuality. I'm close to finishing one or two others, but I've hopped stories frequently when I come across a checkpoint I can't pass yet. 

 "If you think so badly of them why do you play them Rillania". Yes, I play them, I play quite a few. I like otome games, the otome market is pretty much exclusive to the mobile market, and a vast majority of them are FTP. It doesn't mean I have to be happy dandy and sing it's praises though. I also haven't spent a dime on a FTP otome game either, but I still maintain my right to bitch because I won't spend my money on them DUE to these reasons. I have a pretty good ability to control my impulses and looks past the perceived cost and see the actual cost, I take the time to research titles, and I have to be very frugal since my "play" money is very spare and very precious because I have bills to pay and a child to clothe, feed, and take care of; I don't have the luxury of throwing my money away on stupid shit. And before anyone says anything, I don't view entertainment in of itself as "stupid shit". Yes, it's not a need to survive, but I think as human beings, we need to enjoy ourselves, have fun, relax, and do things outside of what's "needed" to survive and live each day in order to be happy and enjoy life. I make a living off of peoples desire for entertainment, and as a supervisor in the retail entertainment industry, I have to deal with customer issues and concerns about the differences between perceived and actual costs and use this to discourage, or encourage, people to buy a certain product based on this. If I find something a total ripoff, I refuse to try and convince a customer to buy it just for sales numbers. If a customer is unhappy with what they got, I have to make the judgement calls on how to remedy the situation and either please the customer or aggravate them further. So I refuse to encourage people who are consumers of a medium I love to spend their cash on something like this.

Even the slightly, expensiveish "pay per route" Otome VNs are better than this. Even at 6 dollars a pop, at least you're getting the whole damn route for one price instead of being tricked/coaxed into spending that same amount for one small sliver of a character route. Why not let people decide if they want to pay for cute novelty items for an avatar, etc, and if they don't want to play like that or don't care about that stuff pay to play in a different way. I don't think it would be so bad if these FTP games offered the choice to buy the whole game, buy routes or character packs, as well as do it FTP if you'd prefer, but most don't. I mean, why offer all of the routes to someone for say, $20 dollars when you can dangle the FTP model and milk them for so much more?  I'm not against the FTP model as a whole, I'm against what it's become and how it is being used.

I'm not sure how to imbed this starting at the time they start talking about the subject, but watch this video from 1:13:30 to about 1:18:00, as they discuss FTP/Micro-transaction games a bit, and they talk about some of the reasons why I feel the way the FTP model is being used nowadays is such a scam. These kinds of setups are set in a way that "you don't have to pay, but you might have to". These micro-transactions have gone from being optional novelties to essentially being needed/required to continue without actually being technically "required". It's getting so bad that it's even expanded out of "Free" games into games you PAID FOR, like Plants Vs. Zombies 2, to where in addition to actually buying the game, you hit frequent roadblocks in the game where you can "micro-transaction" past it, or grind for the items/xp, but set up the grinding in such a way that the player gets so frustrated they opt for the micro-transaction. It's nothing but an elaborate scam to milk more money out of a customer.

World of Warcraft is one of the few games around nowadays that I think does a great job with handling micro-transactions, and is the way I feel that most micro-transaction and FTP models should be; Focusing mainly on novelty items. You don't have to buy their mounts or pets to continue the game or save yourself from the agony of 40+ hours of grinding just to pass one small portion of the game. It's -optional- in every sense of the word. It doesn't force you to choose between forking out a lot of cash or slamming your head against a wall/giving up the game entirely. Sure, companies have to make money, and if they go for the FTP model, they have to do it in a way that they still make a profit. But this is not the way. Games can make good money just off of offering novelty micro-transactions, like avatars and clothing for them, since plenty of people like that sort of thing. They COULD STILL make a good bit of money in my opinion by allowing people to purchase these novelty items and play the game FTP for them, AND offer those of us, like me, who would prefer to just buy the game outright and not deal with micro-transactions because we don't like that model, or just don't care about the novelty trappings. But as I said, there's so much more money in luring people in with cheap increments and packages or frustrating a player to the point they give in. It's a scam, plain and simple.

I'll open my closing statement with this random, awkward, yet hilarious, image. Funny thing is it is being advertised in a 15+ OTOME GAME. I guess dirty words/erotic text don't count as pornography in google/apple's book eh? He is pretty hot though > : D. Anyway, maybe you still don't feel the way I do about FTP games, mainly VNs. But I seriously think that it is a very bad and threatening move for an already niche market that struggles with the issues of perceived costs Vs. actual costs. High priced story VNs struggle in sales in part due to their perceived high cost, and I don't think that this model will help that fact at all, and may in fact make it worse if this model becomes more wide-spread. Because this model is so successful in the otome VN market, I fear that this will become the norm for how they are released in the Western market. Why should they risk a huge flop with a full-length, full price otome VN in the market when they can release short, mediocure ones on the FTP model and make a killing off of it? While this model is mainly isolated to otome games as of right now, I also fear that if this trend continues, it will spread into "regular" VNs. My fear of this is compounded by the fact that a good chunk of otome VNs on the mobile market were originally released as "pay per route" or "character pack" games FOLLOWED by a FTP version, but as of late new ones are ONLY released on a FTP platform.  This is vastly different from VN companies like Mangagamer who release a ton of nukige because they sell extremely well and use some of those profits to bring us longer, bigger content story titles. I have no problem with that, and I completely understand those kind of moves. But this...As I've stated several times, this is just a scam and a rip-off, plain and simple.