A 10 year old gamer has just hit the headlines for making £600 of in-app purchases on the free iPhone game, Hay Day.
Well, we say “free”, we actually mean “free-to-play”. There’s a distinction to be made, and it’s one that’s worth getting clear in your head if you have others in your household who may run the risk of racking up huge bills.
First up, a free game. A free game is just that: a game that is free. And that’s the end of the story as far as that goes.
But what about free-to-play? What does it even mean?
What is free-to-play?
It’s a concept that started back in the mid-90s, with casual/social online role-playing games offering the chance for people to play them totally free of charge.
It was the ideal way to lure in non-gamers – “here, you don’t have to pay £50 or a monthly subscription to start playing, so join in!” Purchases of items, clothing, powers etc were made with real money to fund the game’s development.
This model spread along with the internet’s ubiquity, to the point we’re at now: the majority of cash from mobile gaming is made through in-app purchases, and most of these purchases come from free-to-play games.
Take, for example, The Simpsons: Tapped Out – you download it for free, you play for a while, and you want to speed up your progress. You can either wait a while, or just put down some money to get the in-game currency of ‘doughnuts’, allowing you to skip the wait.
These packs of doughnuts range from £1.49 all the way up to £69.99 – they are not numbers to be sniffed at. But some people want to pay it for their own enjoyment of the game, and that’s fine.
Not just doughnuts
There are countless other examples, with new levels, powers, characters, clothing, progress and anything else you can think of locked behind a paywall.
And it’s not just mobile gaming: we’re seeing more console and PC games go down the F2P route, with titles like Team Fortress 2, Tekken Revolution and the upcoming Killer Instinct on Xbox One going that way.
Free-to-play tends to be just that – but only to a point. As long as you’re aware of the fact you will be nudged (gently or otherwise) to parting with some cash, you can avoid many issues people tend to have with ‘freemium’ apps.
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