Is the future of gaming free?

Free games have become a critical part of the wider landscape of gaming over the past few years, and their success suggests that free games may become a bigger and more important part of gaming in the future.

With games like Among Us, Fortnite, League of Legends, Apex Legends, and more all achieving massive success at the low low cost of $0.00, it suggests that the traditional model of selling games may not last forever.

The rise in free games has put even the most basic element of selling up for debate, and at the moment, it’s uncertain whether or not games are sold at all.

The two major models for games, either as a product or as a service

At the moment, there exist two major models for games, those which are made as a single product, bought and sold like any other commodity, or those which claim to be a service. Games-as-a-product is perhaps the easiest to understand and explain. This model is the one which has functioned for games for years.

Under this model, a person who buys a game has full ownership of that copy of the game, has the freedom to use, trade, sell, and otherwise manipulate it for personal use, however they choose.

Inversely, under a strict interpretation, these games will never change or update after the purchase is made. This means that if something in the game is broken or unbalanced, players will have to live with those with no chance of them being patched out.

But today very few games are ever sold as pure products, and most games will have developer support for at least some time after the game’s release. Starting with the release of the seventh generation consoles, the Xbox 360 and PS3 particularly, the importance of having an internet connection in gaming has only risen.

Seventh generation consoles incorporated the internet into their functionality in a way that allowed developers to patch their games post-release, fix bugs, and add content. While this was occasionally done for free, as part of the game’s natural lifespan, most content updates were done in the form of DLC.

Leaning away from the product model, towards free gaming

It would take years before some games would begin to shift their model entirely towards DLC and away from the traditional product model. This is where the first service based games began to appear.

Free-to-play games began to exploit the fact that they could get players to play the game for free, but then charge them for various items in their game, oftentimes requiring them to purchase some kind of in-game-currency beforehand.

Early free-to-play games earned a negative reputation as many games were soon labeled with the “pay-to-win” moniker that still gets weaponized to this day. It is a means of criticizing games which offer paying players an advantage over free players.

Other free games were constructed in such a way that, despite being technically free, they effectively required player payment in order to play the game at a reasonable pace.

While these kinds of free games still exist, recent free-to-play games have achieved a certain degree of success and recognition, and the free-to-play label doesn’t only get attached to mobile games anymore.

League of Legends spent a number of years as the most played esport and most streamed game on Twitch in part by being free. Free players would get a small collection of base champions in the game, and earn some currency through playing.

They could use this to buy more champions, earning its money by allowing players to pay for quicker access to champions, in addition to cosmetic features like skins.

Games like Among Us and Fortnite exist in a truly free-to-play environment, with the game in its entirety available to players by simply downloading it.

For Among Us, the free version is only available on mobile, and does come with (temporarily removed) advertisements as a way of making some money. In Fortnite’s case, the game makes enough money from its paying players that it can eschew advertisements, letting its free players enjoy the game without ads.

Should games be a service or product?

Today, it seems almost every game releases with the expectation that the developers will continue to work on it for at least some time, if only to fix any bugs that slipped through to release. Today, almost every game has a “service” sold alongside the actual product.

This service period during a game’s lifespan allows the developer to tune the game shortly after release, address previously undiscovered issues, and delay making significant decisions until after the game is in its players’ hands.

But in the process, games are losing a certain degree of customer autonomy along the way. When a developer updates a game, the customer effectively loses the product they actually spent money on.

Worse, if the developer doesn’t include a way to play on older patches, those previous versions can often be completely and unrecoverably removed.

Games in the future may more heavily weigh the benefits of being a free product with an attached service, and it’s likely that more game developers will find the benefits of being free to be greater than the benefits of being sold at a cost.

It’s likely more accurate to say that the future of gaming will include free games, with those sold at a price being limited to those where a service model is less compatible, such as single player games.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how free games grow within the wider industry.