Live Free: Freemium Thinking For Console Games

Indeed, I'd argue that this looks very much like the model which many MMOs have preferred in recent years - subscription up front for the dedicated consumers, followed by a long tail of freemium for the less devoted. Although this is a business model which emerged from desperation - a last-ditch effort to save MMOs with collapsing subscriber bases from extinction - it actually maximises revenue very nicely, making the game expensive up front and cheap (even free) later on.

Perhaps publishers could make life harder for the rental market, but there's very little they could do about the second hand market, and absolutely nothing they can do about game borrowing - unless they want to risk completely destroying the console game market in the process. Many in the industry grumble regularly about these aspects of the market, but it's telling that people are very nervous, in general, about rumours that Microsoft's next console might be designed to prevent second-hand sales entirely. Nobody knows what actually happens to game sales if you deny consumers the ability to trade in or loan out their games. It's not hard to see how decreasing the effective value of a product, thus essentially making it vastly more expensive, might not exactly equate to sprinkling magical pixie dust on your sales figures.

Games are on shelves for a few months and then they're dead - except that now, they're not, because there's this ripe opportunity to exploit what is effectively a freemium long tail.

So instead of trying to destroy those things, the rise of things like DLC, online passes and so on suggest a market that's turning to freemium (whether it wants to call it that or not) for a solution. For the early weeks and months of a game's lifespan, the majority of consumers pay for it up front. After that, second hand copies - sold or borrowed - flood the market. You'll still make some sales, of course, but you have to accept that it's now possible for consumers to access your content in a way which may not be entirely free to them, but is definitely free to you - in that it generates no revenue. Instead, you need to apply freemium ideas to pull in revenue from those people - and perhaps from some of your premium customers, still playing after all this time, as well.

Denying this market opportunity and instead trying to find a way to shut down second hand sales or lending would be like a movie studio refusing to let its products ever be shown on TV, instead insisting that they should only ever be seen in the cinema. Games business leaders have complained for years that unlike movies, games only get one bite of the cherry. Movies sell cinema tickets, then DVDs, then pay-per-view and airline deals, then TV syndication. Games are on shelves for a few months and then they're dead - except that now, they're not, because there's this ripe opportunity to exploit what is effectively a freemium long tail, even after the games in circulation stop returning revenue to your coffers through direct sales.

Of course, the trick to this isn't an easy one. You need to make a game that people seriously want to engage with and don't mind spending a bit of money on as a consequence. That's why Arkham City is a good example - you get to the end of a very sizeable game but are left wanting more, and the developers have created content which scratches that itch. A game you're bored of half way through will never sell add-on content. A game that's simply too short but has a store full of extra content looks greedy and off-putting. The old rules of making great games still apply, then - build something amazing, something substantial, but something that leaves your players hungry for more. The difference is that today, you have the opportunity to feed that hunger - and in doing so, take advantage of the realities of today's game market, instead of just complaining about them.