Free To Take Over the World | Brian Conmy

Brian Conmy looks at how the free to play model is taking over.If you’ve spent more than a few minutes on Facebook in your life you undoubtedly know how annoying incessant game invites are. Farmville, Marvel Avengers Alliance, that murder mystery thing everyone is suddenly playing… The invites can turn to plagues if you don’t know how to block the apps. Why has Facebook seen the sudden increase in people, who may never have been gamers before, to suddenly become nigh on addicted to these free generally simplistic games? Well one more obvious answer may be simply that they’re free. Free in almost every sense of the word, while they require a computer or laptop that’s generally it. Even free indie games may require a certain level of graphics card or tech savvy that people aren’t likely to have.So is the success of these kinds of games limited to Facebook? Perhaps as a direct result in recent years we’ve seen an increase in free to play games, most notably may be the rather popular Real Time Strategy (RTS) game League of Legends (LoL).A friend of mine recently got me to try the game that looks like a large array of other PC RTSs, of which I don’t know too many, at least on the surface. What separates LoL from its compatriots though is it is completely free to download and play. Apart from being a rather interesting game with a strong focus on balances between its wide arrays of playable characters is the ability for players to voluntarily pay with real money to get some in game currency. This can be used to permanently unlock a character from the random playable character roster that changes daily, or to buy currency to purchase relics or other upgrades. This makes perfect sense in the context of a game like LoL, as currency that you can buy with real money can just as easily be earned by playing the game and investing enough time. Using real money does not make you better at the game than someone who has invested their time.What many people may not realise is that a lot of Facebook games have a similar system in place. While they may not be as advanced or expensive as League of Legends seem to be they can often be just as addictive and time consuming as a game like LoL, many include energy systems that limit the amount a person can play in one day.For the impatient or perhaps completely addicted there is often an ability to use real world money to buy energy or other resources in game. At first without having paid too much attention to these kinds of micro transactions in games I wrote them off as silly, believing that gaming was what I did at home on a console I’ve spent a considerable amount of money on. Gaming is a much broader ideal now, whether done on a mobile device or in an internet browser. The inclusion of Facebook games in the gaming spectrum adds more and more people to a gamer community and the ability to pay into these types of games adds a certain amount of legitimacy.