Live Free: Freemium Thinking For Console Games

Among the various concepts which underpin the "freemium" business model, one of the most difficult for developers and publishers to accept is the idea that you're going to be giving away the vast majority of your work for free. Not only will most of the people who play a freemium game do so without paying anything - even those who pay will actually be paying for add-on content, consumables or customisation items, rather than directly parting with money for the core game you've laboured to build.

I suspect that that's part of the reason why some people in the industry have such a strong, instinctive reaction against freemium. To those brought up in the culture of spending years building a game and then selling it at a premium price, the suggestion that they should instead give that game away for free and make their money by selling cosmetic items or energy potions to a minority of players seems somewhere between farce and blasphemy.

I don't feel all that guilty about playing a copy of Arkham City I didn't directly pay for, because the game is an excellent example of a kind of "quietly freemium" title.

Those who recoil from the very concept of freemium, however, might do well to consider the proposition from another angle. It's popular to characterise freemium as a market-upsetting, disruptive approach to making money from games - but I think there's a more rational perspective which simply says that freemium is a way of describing and understanding something that's already happening anyway in this business. It's not an attempt to replace existing business models with something new - it's just a recognition of a reality that already exists.

Take, for example, Rocksteady's absolutely fantastic Batman: Arkham City. An immensely successful game which has sold millions of copies at a premium price point, it would seem like something of a stretch to describe Arkham City as being a freemium game - yet I'd contend that that's exactly what it is, to a significant body of its users.

Certainly, there are plenty of gamers who bought Arkham City for £30 or so, paying for access to the content up front. Equally, however, there are many users who access Arkham City through a service like Lovefilm or any other rental service you care to mention. Then there are users who bought Arkham City second hand, or borrowed it from a friend.

In all of those cases apart from the borrowing example, the users did pay some fee for access to the content - but from the perspective of the developer and publisher, all of those users are effectively accessing the content for free, because none of them paid for it in a way which returns revenue to the creators. Lovefilm makes money from its subscribers, and retailers make money from their second-hand trade, but publishers and developers don't see anything. From the developer's point of view, those users may as well have picked up Arkham City from "Free: Please Take One!" bins on high streets.

I'm one of those consumers, I'm afraid. Arkham City dropped through my letterbox from Lovefilm - a service that I'm using to keep me honest in my pledge to spend this year dispensing with, rather than accumulating, stuff on my shelves, games included.

Yet I don't feel all that guilty about playing a copy of Arkham City I didn't directly pay for, because the game is an excellent example of the kind of "quietly freemium" titles I'm referring to. Within an hour of play - and realising that I was really enjoying the game - I'd spent 800 Microsoft Points on the Catwoman pack for the game. Having finished the main story missions and embarked on the challenges - many, many hours of play down the line - I dropped another 1200 points on the pack containing Nightwing, Robin and various challenge maps and Batman skins. There may also have been a shameful incident involving a few hundred points spent on Batman avatar goodies.

Total expenditure? Almost £20 - not bad for a player who didn't buy the game and, in theory, should have been a dead loss to the bottom line of developer and publisher alike. Extend that kind of expenditure over a significant percentage of those who rent, borrow or buy the game second hand, and you're looking a fairly major chunk of income coming from what is effectively a freemium model - despite the price tag the game has up front.