I'd Prefer If Stormgate Cost Money (Part I)
Free-to-play has the drawback of being free
Stormgate, a much anticipated competitive real-time strategy game from a bunch of ex-Blizzard folks, made its official public debut a few months back. But only recently did I notice that it was officially launching as free-to-play. (If you’re curious, here’s Tim Morten expanding on the rationale for that.)
I think there are tradeoffs with the free-to-play business model that make it work for some games and not for others. I also think it’s important to clarify what “work” actually means in-context, because “working” in the sense that a game is profitable and sustainable in the long-term is different from “working” in the sense of re-creating a very shitty digital Bellagio.
With Stormgate specifically I think the business model is a mistake, at least as a launch decision. Despite the fact that we live in a veritable golden age of real-time strategy, the genre as a whole is still an order-of-magnitude less popular than stuff like MOBAs and first-person shooters. To take a random example, looking at Twitch right now, World of Tanks, by itself, draws more viewers than the entire RTS genre put together. For reference, World of Tanks is not even among the ten most popular games on Twitch.
My intuition is that in this kind of niche genre, the sort of person who’s going to install an indie competitive RTS game at launch is probably not going to be dissuaded by being forced to pay money for the privilege of doing so. It’s counter-intuitive, but the advantage of being niche is that your players are more passionate, have fewer competing options, and are generally more willing to put up with friction. Quality RTS games don’t get released everyday and there’s nothing like playing a new competitive RTS at launch.
(Age of Empires IV sold a million copies and you couldn’t fucking click on things at launch!)
In his interview with PiG, Tim Morten mentioned barrier-to-entry as a key reason to adopt free-to-play. I find this interesting because it unintentionally contradicts some of Frost Giant’s other marketing material; but I think it’s fair to argue that even though it’s niche, the RTS market is at least well-served, so convincing players to jump into a new game may be difficult.
The problem I see with this angle is that Stormgate is going to be an order-of-magnitude worse at launch than anything else that’s out there. Age of Empires II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II - to name a few examples - have been in development for decade(s). Frost Giant won’t be able to deliver an equally compelling experience, at least not at first. And it’s not fair to expect them to, so there’s really no reason to force the comparison. Let the folks interested enough to pay money go ahead and purchase Stormgate at launch, and get everyone else with free-to-play later when the game is in a really good state.
The StarCraft II Example
I think people (including the Frost Giant folks) like to point out the success of free-to-play with respect to StarCraft II. And I think while that’s a fair example, the details matter a lot. As I tweeted back then, a month after the game went free-to-play:
Upon going free-to-play, StarCraft II gained a large number of returning players (tens of thousands), gained a handful of truly new players (<10,000), and shed a bunch of folks who were still playing WoL / HotS and didn’t want to make the transition from Legacy.
The huge engagement win StarCraft II drew from going free-to-play came from people who had already at some point in time spent money on the game already. The free part was less relevant than the frictionless part; they had already shown a willingness to fork over money for the game, they just weren’t going to will themselves to do so to access newer content. And they probably weren’t even aware how much the game had improved over the prior seven years, so making it free was an easy way to close that gap.
Now it’s definitely true that there are people out there who stopped playing StarCraft because their friends stopped playing StarCraft. Introducing monetary friction into the experience causes that to be more likely. How do I convince my friends to play Stormgate if they have to pay money to do so? And while I think that that’s a fair point I also don’t think it’s a very strong argument.
Firstly, I think it’s easy to imagine a system that works around this by, say, allowing party members to play together if at least one person in the group has already purchased the game. I wouldn’t be opposed to that sort of thing and I think it’s a pretty smart way to get people into the game because it incentivizes newcomers to enjoy the game in the company of a veteran instead of getting catapulted off the ladder by whatever bullshit cheese happens to be popular at the time.
But the broader disagreement I have here is that if people are only playing Stormgate because it’s free, I just don’t think they’re going to get into it in a meaningful way, not at scale. And while it’s all well and good to try and reach new people and expand your audience, development time and resources are limited and therefore ought to be first prioritized toward people who are already on your side.
By refusing to take money from said people, I think Frost Giant is leaving quite a lot of money on the table. It’s hard to say exactly how much, but we can look at some comparable examples. Steamdb estimates Grey Goo, an independent RTS launched several years ago, has anywhere between 140k to 365k lifetime owners, based on review counts. Dawn of War 3 (which was awful) launched with around 350,000 copies sold (although I can’t find the source anymore). Northgard hit two million copies sold around two years after release.
Even if you assume the lower end of these estimates - let’s say, 100k copies sold in the first three months after launch at a $30 price point, at a 70/30 rev-share with Steam - you’re still looking at a cool $2.1 million dollars; enough money to fund quite a lot of additional (paid) content. More optimistic estimates - let’s say, a Dawn of War 3-sized launch of around 350,000 copies at a full $50 retail price - nets you six times more money, or around half of what they raised in their last Series A. For a small studio like Frost Giant, it’s enough money to fund a year or more of additional development.
RTS definitely has a large, monetizable audience (as the success of Age of Empires IV demonstrates), but it’s nonetheless niche compared to what else is out there. Quality games don’t come out everyday and the ones that do, people will (generally) buy. It doesn’t make sense to walk away from this kind of money without a good reason.
(Now, granted, there also games like Warparty or a Year of Rain that sold basically nothing. But having played those games, they were poorly executed and sat on top a weak creative base. In this case, I think we have to assume Frost Giant will do a lot better, and even if they don’t, they’ve already proven they have the marketing chops to build hype and interest in their product.)
I can sort of understand a couple years ago, in the heyday of low interest rates and free flowing VC cash, the notion that it’s OK to risk a blood red balance sheet your first couple of years as long as you have a solid business plan. But times have changed and I don’t see how that risk is prudent anymore. I also don’t know how Frost Giant can explain leaving so much money on the table the next time they go around to raise cash from investors.
Based on developer interviews, my impression is that Frost Giant’s strategy here is to play the long game - spend multiple years building a better and better product, slowly soaking up profits from long-term monetization. The odd thing about this, to me at least, is that charging money upfront is by no means at odds with a healthy long-term monetization strategy. I guess one risk is that if the player base is too small at launch, there won’t be enough of a population to snowball as the game gets more content; and therefore, maximizing the initial player count trumps other considerations. It’s an interesting strategy and one I discuss a bit over in part two.
Until next time!
brownbear
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