TANSTAAF2PL

[quarrel]

Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Markus “Notch” Persson (Minecraft) conspired to bring some game freakonomics to Twitter.

Take two hypothetical games. They’re identical except for how they’re supported. Game A doesn’t cost any money to play, and there’s nothing to buy within it either, but it includes ads. Game B has no ads, but you have to buy it to

Comments

[shaterri]

There's a small fallacy in the initial Blow/Persson argument; it's true that game A will result in more *total* money spent, but that doesn't imply that the average person will spend more money on A because the sample sizes are different (the classic "make it up in volume" marketing concept). You could make an argument that "100,000 people might have played your game if they could, but only 5,000 were willing to spend money for it, so the average interested-person spent $.50 on it", but that's a meaningless figure *to the player* because it doesn't have any bearing on player experience. It's immensely relevant to the game-maker that their game makes more money, of course - but that's why that particular discussion should be phrased in terms of total revenue / total money spent. Player-to-player comparisons make sense e.g. within the freeemium market itself, but F2P vs. paid games are so vastly different that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

[quarrel]

Good catch with the math. In all likelihood, the fault lies with me misinterpreting the gist within the small number of 140 character talking points, not with someone's arithmetic.

[rowyn]

Oooh, good point.

It also seems to me that even if Blow's audience of "people who would rather pay for a game directly than look at ads" is a niche, that doesn't mean it's not viable. If, say, there are 10,000 F2P games competing for a market of a million customers and 100 for-pay games competing for a market of 100,000, it's perfectly rational to make a for-pay game for the comparatively under-served niche, even though it's a smaller market.