Free-to-play offers a compelling alternative to standard retail products asserts Gabriel Leydon, CEO of mobile company Addmired. He says that the pricing model for retail games means that those publishers can no longer afford to take risks.

“Mobile is the home of free-to-play and that’s the next big model for video games,” said Leydon. “The real problem [for consoles] is price fixing. Consoles set expectations for prices for thirty years. Nobody talks about how bad it is to charge somebody $70 for something they don’t like. You can’t know what you’re getting because it’s another sequel with $100 million of marketing. One day after Call of Duty is out the used section in GameStop is filled with them. You have an army of consumers who paid $70 and lost $40 by trading it in.”

“[Free-to-play] removes the risk from the consumer, the consumer pays nothing to try out the game. I want the consumer to play for months without paying. Good free to play encourages players to stay and that’s where the longevity is because the risk of an online pass, consoles that can’t play used games, DLC and all this stuff, after I’ve paid $70… Why would do I do that I can play lots of great games that are free. The risk is being transferred from the consumer to the developer. The developer has all of the risk now so they end up doing crazy stuff because it’s a new industry.”

Leydon doesn’t think that the offerings of console retail games is inherently better than F2P games. “Free-to-play is the MP3 of the video game industry and it will destroy all business models and it removes the risk for the consumer,” he asserted.

However, he concedes that quality is often an issue with free-to-play games. “The model for acquiring users is insanely complicated,” Leydon offered. “We’ve been doing this for three years and it keeps changing, it’s very hard. It can be profitable but we can also throw money down a black hole. Most of our players don’t play a second session. But the rest stay and play and if they stay long enough they end up playing and we can run a business.”

Source: GamesIndustry.biz