Gabriel Leydon, CEO of Addmired, believes that the cost of AAA console gaming has forced the sector to concentrate on sequels rather than original IP and ideas. He also believes that the high entry price for console gaming (typically $60) has pushed more gamers into playing free-to-play titles with no upfront costs.
"Mobile is the home of free-to-play and that's the next big model for video games," said Leydon at the 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit according to GI.biz. "The real problem [for consoles] is price fixing. Consoles set expectations for prices for thirty years. Nobody talks about how bad it is to charge somebody $70 for something they don't like. You can't know what you're getting because it's another sequel with $100 million of marketing. One day after Call of Duty is out the used section in GameStop is filled with them. You have an army of consumers who paid $70 and lost $40 by trading it in."
While elements like DLC can affect the worth of a retail disc, free-to-play shifts the risk over to the developer, forcing them to produce the best product possible. "It removes the risk from the consumer, the consumer pays nothing to try out the game,” noted Leydon. “I want the consumer to play for months without paying. Good free-to-play encourages players to stay and that's where the longevity is because the risk of an online pass, consoles that can't play used games, DLC and all this stuff, after I've paid $70... Why would do I do that? I can play lots of great games that are free. The risk is being transferred from the consumer to the developer. The developer has all of the risk now so they end up doing crazy stuff because it's a new industry."
Leydon admitted that there are many poor quality free-to-play games out there and it can be hard to get users to try your product in the first place. "It's brutal. The model for acquiring users is insanely complicated," he said. "We've been doing this for three years and it keeps changing, it's very hard. It can be profitable but we can also throw money down a black hole. Most of our players don't play a second session. But the rest stay and play and if they stay long enough they end up playing and we can run a business."
He used Gree as an example of how a company can make more money off of 25 million mobile users than Zynga can off of 200 million players on Facebook, noting that it was evidence that the U.S. was behind Asia in making successful free-to-play mobile and social games. "They make better and better games than most western developers,” said Leydon. “There's something the Americans don't get yet, that the Chinese, Korean and Japanese developers are much, much better at making the next ten years of games than we are.”
