Free for All: just slap "free" on it

I will admit it. I am just as guilty as anyone else, even though we are all coming from a well-meaning place. We see our favorite game seemingly going south, and pass judgment that nothing will save it. Or, we simply don't want to see a good game go to waste so we come up with the same solution almost every time. The idea is one part daydream, one part hopeful nostalgia and several parts unrealistically easy.

I can list the games that I have wished this on, for no other reason but for the fact that they are or were good games, and I want them to be frozen in time or want them to be there for me whenever I can make the time. Games like Ryzom, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa or The Matrix Online. How many hours have we spent writing up forum posts or dreaming up ways to implement this idea: just slap free on it, and the game will be fine.

The idea is so simple that it's understandable that so many of us presume that placing a "free" sticker on a game will somehow save it or make it better. We armchair designers are really good at presuming that we know how easy it can be to do something, being that we have seen it done. It's only natural to presume that the result would be the same for any game that goes free to play. But that presumption, while sometimes correct, was only proved correct through the hard work and many hours of labor that was put into the effort.

The effort it takes to even get a game off of the ground is pretty astounding. Next time you are at a convention ask the first developer you meet "Making your game is pretty easy, huh?" and you will be looked at as though you have lobsters coming out of your ears. When we presume that anything is easy in game development, we are basically admitting that we have no idea how the creative process, or the technical one, works. My wife is a graphic designer and is astounded at the ease in which her co-workers think she can cough out a logo or website design. "Just get me that by 5" they'll say.

"Just." That's the word that sums up the entire armchair designer philosophy. I see it used more times than not when complaining about a new addition to a game that someone doesn't agree with, or with a simple bug that needs to "just be fixed." We saw it with the World of Warcraft 25 dollar mount argument, players saying that it "just took them two days to make." By their estimation, that short amount of time disqualified the need for the price. The armchair designer forgets that the "just" part only comes after years of schooling, hours and hours of hard work, and as the result of natural-born artistic talent. There is absolutely no "just" in something like a pretty sparkle pony, and it is an insult to presume so.

So then why have I said to my wife many times "they just need to make it free to play"?

Again, when we do this we are presuming that the process is effortless. While it might be easy to transfer a game from a subscription based model to a free to play cash shop model when compared to something like actually creating the game, it is only easy because of the hard work of someone, somewhere. The web designer that has to implement the cash shop into the website, or that has to re-do the entire website is not looking at it as an easy task, I assure you. The financial wizzes that went to school for years and years are not laughing at the task, especially when they are busy trying to estimate just how many people need to spend just how much in order for the game to stay afloat. And the lead game designer or community manager is not waving off the effort it will take to tell the community that the game is going free to play.

We are also presuming that once a game goes free to play that money simply falls from the sky, or that the staffing for the game is suddenly taken over by free robots that require no salary, breaks or food. Remember the saying "There is no such thing as a free puppy?" I would like to find the woman that said that and shake her hand, being that there is nothing more true in this world. It sums up perfectly the fact that any game, even a game that is free to play, is not free. Someone, somewhere has to to pay enough or do enough to keep the lights on.

The worst thing we can do when presuming that going free to play is the best thing for certain games is to think that we have any idea what the developer thinks success means. If you look at almost any game that is still taking subscriptions and still being played, you are seeing a success. How long it will be successful for, or how much of a success the game is is up to the individual developer, but the simple fact that it is open and being enjoyed is evidence enough to avoid presuming it needs to be better.

We have even become so cocky in our presumptions that we classify Korean imports or other similar games as nothing more than lame attempts at real games. We never ask if the game is making any money, and we always wave away the fact that by the time we see it, it is coming over here only because it has already seen some success. That cockiness has also blinded us to the fact that even if a game is pretty much a grindy mess, there are parts of that world that were lovingly crafted by someone. We forget that no game is built to run on air, but on lines of code and bits of art that someone worked their tails off making.

So next time I want to say "just slap free on it," I am going to stop and think about the effort that it will take, the money that it still needs to make, and how the game got to be a game in the first place.

And then I will look at my dog Roy with his everyday need for walking, playing, eating and sleeping and his yearly need for check-ups at the vet and with his ever-increasing costs as he grows older, and I will remember that when we took him in from the abusive neighbor next door I thought "Cool! A free dog!"