Cash Trade in Free-to-Play Online Games

Abstract

The rapidly expanding ‘‘free-to-play’’ online game payment model represents a huge shift in digital game commercialization, with cash payments for virtual items increasingly recognized as central to ‘‘free game’’ participation. In this article, the authors look at implications of this trend for gameplay experiences (especially in terms of immersion, fairness, and fun) and describe a fundamental shift in player self-perceptions as consumers rather than members of a gaming community. This change is occurring at a time when the line separating game and physical worlds is becoming less distinct. The new business model entails a subtle but significant reduction in consumer rights awareness, which explains why some members of the greater gaming community are negotiating a new sense of fairness and arriving at a new consensus regarding legitimate gameplay.

Factors determining player drop-out in Massive Multiplayer Online Games

“…Game fairness, as proposed by Hamari [3], Paavilainen et al [4], and Lin and Sun [5], and latency/performance issues, spotted on by Yahyavi and Kemme [26], Chambers et al [14] and Achterbosch et al [2], community [41], service/support team and in-game features [27,41] are significant drop-out factors that can be controlled by product managers. From these, game fairness and latency seem to be the most important factors when deciding to quit a F2P MMOG, since both factors got higher scores in every test than the other three factors.…”

“…Thus, pressured by shareholders, who aim at short-term results, product managers' primary solution to finance all the resources spent on free-to-play MMOG is the addition of so-called premium features. However, pushing the need to finance the game to the limit by adding increasingly more premium features in core game mechanisms or creating premium features that grant huge advantages for those who decide to invest on the game (paying players) may break the players' vision of a fair game [3,4,5].…”

“…In fact, some players argue publicly in community forums that those who want to participate in the whole 6 experience of a F2P MMOG will have to spend more money on in-game currency than they would on P2P games and thus gain plenty advantage against non-premium players. Lin and Sun [5] go on to consider that in P2P games players are all equal, whereas in F2P games players are divided on premium and non-premium players. The latter case evidences the unfair phenomenon of "one game, two experiences".…”

“…Some studies mention that free game play is heavily influenced by those who spend money, creating inequality. As an example, Lin and Sun [5] state that, although the "balance" idea is vague and dependent on the context, the players' sense of fairness is imposing a balance in the games -meaning that "all player types should have equal opportunity to survive in and enjoy all game worlds". This implies that product managers must find equilibrium between the shareholders and players interests.…”

“…Those players may eventually stop playing the game and thus this sense of game unfairness may increase the drop-out rates. Moreover, there seems to be no tendency to find an equilibrium and so interests of shareholders towards profitability may conflict with users' interests [3,4,5].…”