A free-to-play game earns nothing the moment someone installs it. Every dollar comes afterwards, either from something the player buys inside the game or from an advertiser paying for a slice of the player’s attention. Space Ape Games’ mobile racer Fastlane: Road to Revenge shows how large that afterwards can get. The game launched in May 2017 and fell short of its own targets, shrinking to a skeleton crew of two staff. Within a year it had passed 16 million installs and was earning about $80,000 a day between adverts and purchases. It had become Space Ape’s most profitable game.
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Free is not the same as free-to-play
The video game ratings board ESRB draws a line between the two. A free game costs nothing and asks nothing further, usually paid for by adverts the player cannot avoid. A free-to-play game, sometimes called “freemium,” costs nothing to open but sells extras once the player is inside it: an outfit, a boost past a hard level, or a chance at a rare item. Fortnite, Candy Crush Saga and Genshin Impact all run on this second model, even though the three games look nothing alike.
What does a loot box actually sell?
Some purchases buy a known item outright. A loot box buys a chance instead. ESRB compares one to a coin-operated toy machine: put money in, turn the handle, and find out what comes out. Genshin Impact leans on this to fund itself. Players earn the game’s currency by playing, or buy more of it directly, and the rarest characters go to whoever gets the most chances at them. Most storefronts now require a game to publish the odds behind a loot box before sale, so a player knows the size of the chance they are buying even without knowing the outcome.
Turning an advert into revenue on its own
Fastlane’s turnaround came from the advertising side of the model. Six months after launch, ads and purchases combined brought in about $40,000 a day from 200,000 daily players. Growth lead Nicolas Boulay and chief operating officer Simon Hade then rebuilt the ad system. Adverts alone came to make up roughly half of Fastlane’s revenue, far above the 5 per cent at two of Space Ape’s other big games. Boulay’s point was that an advert pays out only once someone acts on it. “What they are buying is install,” he said, not a view.
The design choice behind that shift was letting players decide. A player who chose to watch an advert, in exchange for a reward such as faster refuelling, generated about 85 per cent of the game’s ad revenue.
The founders who paid before the players did
Digital Extremes took a slower, gentler route to the same destination with Warframe. The studio built the game after deciding the traditional publisher model would sink it, then launched in 2013 as one of the first free-to-play titles on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Early numbers were thin enough that studio manager Sheldon Carter said staff checked the player count every morning to see whether they could still afford to keep the team on. Warframe survived on a founders’ programme, which the studio built from a prototype with a single tileset and four suits of armour. Art director Geoff Crookes said the founders are why the game still exists. Polygon called the result one of the few free-to-play economies that does not pressure a player to spend. By 2017, Digital Extremes’ daily player count had doubled from the year before, supporting a studio of around 160 people.
Whether free-to-play matches what a boxed game earns
EA thought so as early as 2011. Frank Gibeau, then head of EA Games, said a free-to-play title could be “as profitable” as one of the publisher’s console games once it reached scale. He pointed to 17 million users across EA’s free titles at the time. Part of the appeal was geography. Need for Speed World’s two biggest markets were Russia and Brazil, places where piracy made boxed sales difficult but did nothing to stop a free game finding players. That same year, World of Warcraft opened itself to free play up to level 20 and Team Fortress 2 dropped its price to nothing. League of Legends and World of Tanks were already held up as proof the model worked at scale.
Whichever route a studio picks, the player never sees a price until after they have decided the game is worth their time. Digital Extremes leaned on its founders. Space Ape bet that a rewarded advert beats a forced one. EA reasoned that a market piracy had closed to boxed games was still open to a free one. The install stays free either way. What a studio has to work out is what a player will pay for once they have already stayed.
