Monetizing F2P stand-alone PC RPGs

I guess Path of Exile is a decent example, but the question would be about a completely offline stand-alone game.

Does anyone have any thoughts on things you could do to monetize the game. Nothing ingame besides cosmetic stuff.. but I am unsure if people will be willing to pay for attack special effects, vanity pets, decorations or clothing in a standalone game.

The other option would be website stuff. Donations on the website, forum upgrades, maybe some real life items like mugs, mousepads and shirts. The other thing we talked about is making having an affiliate Amazon page on our website, and basically tell people to help support our game by buying their Amazon stuff through our store.

Path of Exile has done pretty well financially overall, but it is hard to tell how much of that income came from ingame things that do give a small advantage ( bankbox size). Overall, we are making the game for fun and are not trying to become rich, so just some modest things to keep us going would be enough.

Have you seen any clever ideas people had to monetize an offline game?

 

Why not just charge for it, maybe with a demo?

 

This. Paying for PC games is still the dominant monetisation model.

 

It is a long-term business decision really, and mainly based on how well Path of Exile did. As a new developer without previous releases it is difficult to market a game. If you make a game, and put it on Steam for $20, or god forbid $40, you are going to either get compared to AAA games, or not be taken seriously at all. If you put your game at $10, you are going to get muddled into a sea of mediocre small games and won´t be found. In both cases you can make some money, but you are going to have a small playerbase.

So we decided to follow the Path of Exile model, even if it doesn´t pay off for the initial game. We show goodwill by spending thousands of dollars and a couple years of development and then give away the game for free, and hopefully develop fans who support us later on, either through this game or our future games.

This isn´t altruistic, I honestly believe that as a group of people who like making games and who want to do it for the next 10 years, we will make more money as an indy by following the PoE model then throwing up $10 games on Steam.

So back to my question. Have you seen any cool ingame microtransations that work in offline games? And what would you feel about a game that had an income source be something like an affiliate program selling gaming hardware on their website.

 

Monetization is hard. You are asking good questions, and unfortunately, there are no straight answers. I have used MANY monetization approaches including: hat-in-hand donations, up-front-cost, unlocks-in-the-game, advertisements, and straight up free. I've read everything, tried many things, and failed in many ways. Here's a few simple things I learned.

• Monetization is hard.
• Mobile users expect free products, with ads or IAP's.
• Steam is a viable sales platform - people will purchase Indie products
• iOS tends to be easier to make sales. It's easier to get lost in Android land.
• Kongregate, Armor, and others are similar to Mobile - free with IAPs
• Monetization is hard.

TL;DR - Monetization is hard.

Gigi

PS - Comparing yourselves to well-funded efforts like Path of Exiles is a dangerous road that will lead you to disappointment or worse.

 

And if you release a singleplayer PC game as F2P, you will be immediately be thrown into the same category as mobile garbage. This isn't the mobile market. PC gamer's can and will buy games if it matches their interests and looks like it was actually made well.

Here's the thing, what sells with singleplayer is content. There is no point in selling anything that doesn't add more reason to play, and the main/only reason to play a singleplayer game is to experience the content (be it story or gameplay).

 

But that is my point. Path of Exile kinda proved you wrong. They have made 10´s of million of dollars with essentially a free2play cash-shop that is very cosmetic in nature. The people who gave those millions of dollars did not get any content that completely free players got.

Also, Path of Exile was mostly developed undercover, and was not really well funded. I do not believe they received any money until they were late into beta, they were mostly just people who did it all themselves. We actually have it easier because contractors are much easier to get now.

 

Is it a single player game? If not, it can rely on social interaction to be a selling force. The only way you will get people to buy vanity items in a single player game is if you make the default so ugly that people are compelled to change it, a problem more than likely fixed by quitting the game. Player expression means very little if there is no real room for the expression to stand out.

Do you intend for this game to have a definite end? There's another factor that will make people reject the idea of spending money. If there isn't some expectation that they could be playing this game for hundreds of hours, over the course of months and years, people won't feel the need to invest.

 

As stated above, monetization is hard!

I'm a PC gamer (mobile sucks, consoles sucks). If a game has replayability, customization, and other perks I'm willing to spend some money in a cash shop but I would still prefer to purchase a game outright above all else. Whatever you do DON'T sell the game AND have a cash shop, that really pisses people off. Oh, and don't have any DLC's until later in the games' life cycle. <cough> Total War: Attilla <cough>

 

They developed PoE over 3 years before it was made public, then it took another 3 years of alpha/beta. I'm not sure how many people they had originally, but in order to float a non trivial development team over 4-5 years, they had to be pretty well funded. Also, they were able to raise over 2.2 million dollars in crowd funding during beta and had really significant hype due to how unsatisfied the hardcore ARPG crowd was with D3.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but unless you're well enough funded to put in that kind of time and produce a similar level of quality following PoE as a model might be really rough. Especially trying to do so with a single player game (people play MP games for thousands of hours, single player games are usually like 10-20).

There are tons of F2P games on pc that are really significant, solid games. You're also competing with these. Doing $20-40 on Steam may well be an easier, more profitable route. Remember, PC gamers still are willing to actually buy games, even indies. FTL made probably close to $10 million at I think $10 a pop.

 

^^^ What he said. +1 for Frost.

 

Just an aside, offline Free to Play is making it harder on yourself than you have to. The reason F2P is good is to get a large volume of players in a game, where the number of players total enhances the experience of the individual. IE: A PvP game or a co-op game. Where not having enough players around is a severe detriment to the game.

Plus there's this weird problem that offline f2p means you need to go online to make a purchase, which is just a little unusual.

 

POE did well because it was a better Diablo game than even Diablo itself. If you make a game that is better than POE you'll make good money, doesn't matter if you go f2p or one-time purchase. The problem with your team having nothing released so far isn't marketing alone, it is that in all likelyhood you won't be able to get even close to the quality that POE offered. I bought POE closed beta access for 10$ I think, it's been a while.
Usually I avoid f2p games like the plague. It takes a lot more convincing for me to try a f2p game than to buy a game in a steam sale, because I hate everything about the f2p concept.

A friend of mine said something today along the lines of "With the masses of good games available and the little time to play them, there is no point in settling for anything mediocre anymore."

 

Yep, I say the same thing about MMORPGs where people say ´why did you play WOW for $15 when there are so many free games´.. and my answer is that my time is more valuable than my money, up until a certain point.

I agree with you about PoE, and I am humble enough to say our game will never be the quality of PoE. But I think that is where maybe I ruined this whole thread by talking too much about PoE. My real question is just this.. could a f2p stand-alone game get close to earning as much income as it would if it was $20 on Steam. Or to bring it back to PoE, do you think PoE would have earned more money by actually selling the game like a regular game, or did the goodwill they built up by being free actually help them earn more money in the long term. I personally think a lot of the early media coverage and fans they got were mainly because they announced it as a free game and that it might not have gotten all that early coverage if it was a Steam type game for $20.

 

These days saying your game is free is likely to get as much bad press as good press...

 

If you're making an offline RPG here is an idea.
● Start by making an NPC that sells all of your monetized goodies for monetization currency. This way people can buy the monetization currency in bulk outside of the game and not need to keep leaving the game each time they want to buy something. Then the NPC can sell:
● Ticket/teleportscroll to an event map where you can hunt bosses or rare/tough enemies with a time restriction of 1 hour or until you die.
● Time restricted equipment that evaporates when timer expires.
● Potions that can change the character's gender, starting stats, name, hair color, etc...
● Elixers that permanently add +1 to a stat
● Special pets, mounts, color dye, auras, that are only for looks

 

You can't make blanket statements on that. You need to research how f2p monetization works. I know very little about it, but I believe the key factor are whales that spent 3 to 4 figure sums on a game. If you have no incentives in your game to buy so much stuff, then it won't work as well with a f2p model. But that's where the monetization influences the game and that is what people like me loathe.

No one can really know that. I think their game is good enough quality-wise and non-evil enough in the f2p monetization scheme, that it could have pulled in a lot more cash with a standard retail model plus cosmetic DLC. The thing is though, that the game might have aspects that needed a critical mass in the userbase. I never really played it as a multiplayer game, but others do. Sometimes it is worth it to give away a multiplayer game for (almost) free for a while, to ensure that the community does not die off. You're not gonna sell copies of a multiplayer game that no one is playing.
Also good will from players is a rare thing on steam. They might have gotten that because they were one of the first real free f2p games that wasn't pay to win. Now we have dota with the same model and people will compare new games with the existing games. Imho @BoredMormon is right, you are as likely to get bad press and angry users by going f2p. When I click through my discovery queue on steam it happens that I think "This looks interesting. Oh, its f2p, nevermind. Next." and I'm not the only one in in the world that does this.

If they had just made the same game for 20$ they'd have gotten plenty of media coverage too based on it being a better Diablo game than Diablo itself, imho. Also the concept of "free game" isn't as noteworthy anymore. I doubt it will do much good for you.
What I suggest, is to do research on how Pillars of Eternity monetized. I'm not sure honestly, but afaik it was a more traditional concept, is closer to the game you are proposing (offline rpg) and did well commercially.

 

You could try the Kickstarter method. But that is probably as crap-shooty as anything else. Although you can get it going cheaper and faster. I would recommend though having an army of social media friends ready to promote and talk up your product. Start with a realistic target (not too high, not too low) and have stretch goals. Make sure you have a video produced with a charismatic host and a story. This game was first written by Neil Gaiman's uncle... you get the idea.

 

The closest you could get in this case would be have it as a 'pay as much as you think' release & also provide a way for people that got it for free to donate money later, like patreon.

You could let people pay to make their own skins if they want or let them send in what they want & then you guys charge to do it for them & send them the patch but that seems like a lot of work. You might get away with the old mobile way of doing a 'lite' version & then asking them to pay for the rest but pc gamers don't tend to like being treated like a lowly mobile gamer.

 

So, I actually tried Patreon a while back. I learned some things about it.

1. Monetization really is hard.
2. Donations are harder, in their own way.
3. The way Patreon 'naturally' works, is that if you make a breakout cult classic something, people will tend to donate to your Patreon.
4. The inverse corrollary, is if you are unknown, Patreon will not pay out for you until you get known.
5. Conclusion: You need to make something that penetrates the market sufficiently, before you can get people to be your patrons.
6. Donations are hard.
7. Monetization is hard.
8. You should really get back to making that awesome game of yours. In fact, so should I.

 

Yeah, I do not thinkPatreon is really appropriate unless you are providing at least monthly content in one way or another. I think it is great for things like tutorial videos on youtube, I donate to two different guys who do tutorials almost weekly. I think a paypal donate button is much more appropriate for a one-time thing like a full game.

We have been debating this for weeks. I am thankful for the discussion here.

 

I think in-app purchases would be your best bet. For an RPG:

• Unlock extra characters
• Unlock extra dungeons
• New clothing/armor sets
• Respec character
• New/different pets
• Limited use items like mega-potions
• etc.

 

I don't have any stats to back this up, but IMO if you're going F2P, you'd have to be a lot more careful about how you do things. You've gotta ensure that average playtime is quite long (as people have to be engaged in the game before they spend money on it), you've gotta make sure that your game is more enticing to play than other similar F2P games (at least with paid games, some people will buy it just to 'see' it), you've gotta find the right balance with what you actually charge money for...

 

LOL - I was thinking about Oblivion when I read this - wasn't one of the selling points of the first Oblivion DLC to make the females look less masculine?

Jaimi's suggestions could also be DLC packs.

I fall into the offline rpg gamer demographic so I'm unfamiliar and uninterested in the quasi-mmo rpg gaming experience, and I have no knowledge how online players are enticed into paying for content after they've already purchased a game.

Wasn't Oblivion solely an offline rpg? I played it - but may have overlooked the multiplayer aspect of the game.
As memory serves - Oblivion had one of the most profitable / ridiculous DLC packs early on - the horse armor right?
If Oblivion can be considered and compared - being an offline rpg has no bearing to the viability of DLC later when the user base has been established and actively looking to spend money on cosmetic improvements.

 

As a semi-famous movie producer once said about what sells and what doesn't: "Nobody knows anything." We really don't. Just concentrate on making a good game, and good advertising. You may as well flip a coin to decide which business model to use.