Industry Analyst Explores The Reasons Developers Are Moving Away From Free-To-Play

We've all noticed it at some point. After several free-to-play titles, Blizzard decided to make Atlas Reactor jumped from free-to-play to buy-to-play shortly after its Founder's Packs first went up for sale. Industry analyst Jake Parmley of Red Fox Insights explores the reasons why these three titles ended up going the buy-to-play route.

According to research done during the creation of Red Fox Insights' Exploring the Esport Gamer report, it was discovered that, despite the runaway popularity of many free-to-play titles, 82.80% of US gamers surveyed and 87.69% of UK gamers surveyed prefer the "one time fee" business model to free-to-play and microtransaction models. A mere 14.34% of US gamers surveyed and 8.90% of UK gamers surveyed prefer the free-to-play model. Both sample sizes are under 600, but the results are intriguing nonetheless.

In of the games mentioned, Overwatch is a buy-to-play because the game's hero-swapping mechanics are an integral part of its core gameplay. To this model of play in the best way possible, all of the game's heroes would have to be available to everyone.

Cliff Bleszinski of Boss Key Productions once stated that part of the reason LawBreakers would be buy-to-play is that "a lot of core gamers have a negative reaction when they hear free-to-play because they think they’ll get ripped off." Parmley notes that this statement aligned with Red Fox's research, having discovered that many players are wary of potential paywalls.

Scott Hartsman of Trion Worlds stated that Atlas Reactor went buy-to-play because, of the they received, there was a pervading sense that players "really just wanted to be able to just pick up the game and have all the options open to them." The move was about "what customers want."

Parmley also provided a breakdown of preferred business model by genre. Despite all of the recent changes in the genre, the subscription model ranked highest among MMO players. Furthermore, free-to-play ranked highest among MOBA players while a one time fee ranked highest among FPS players.

You can find the original article, along with more information and graphs, here.