While at GDC, I heard a lot of people who were pitching free games that, well, aren’t. Most of them are free trials of games that hope to monetize quickly. You are only a free game if your evangelists say you are.

Free play games depend on evangelism of the players (usually kids without access to credit cards), in order to build larger and larger audiences. Free play games work by shovelling in as many customers as is humanly possible, and often get any cash at all from a very small percentage of them (I’ve heard percentages in the 1-3% range for some games). But they work because a kid says to his friend, “Yeah you can play for free!” — even if, at a certain point, the player hits a roadblock he has to pay to surpass.

Free play means that even your most devoted fans feel like they can play for months without having to pay a dime if they don’t want to – one of the reasons why character customization options and clothing remains popular in the free play models. Designers of free play games consistently say over and over again that first and foremost, they worry about building the community, and figure they’ll find ways to monetize it later. It’s hard to do the opposite without players seeing transparently through it – the people who like ‘free’ are numerous, but they’re also stingy, and they have lots of places to go nowadays.

Consider Magic: the Gathering Online. While you can play for free, your play experience is limited to a handful of preconstructed decks. Players are enticed to monetize quickly with the idea of bigger, better cards and more interesting play patterns. MTGO is not a “free play” game — and they never pretended to be so. Psychologically, everyone knows it’s a money game, and the population/spending patterns are exactly reversed from what the free play people shoot for: MTGO has a relatively small population pool, but actually get money from a lot more of them, and get a lot more money per customer than your typical online experience.

You can play to level 20 over up to 10 days in WoW for free via the free trial, but no one would call that a ‘free play’ game. Players would not try to entice their friends to play by saying, “Yeah, it’s free! Come check it out!” – the limitations of the demo would kick in too quickly. But what if you moved that bar? If Blizzard allowed you to play til level 40, would it feel free then? What about level 60? Would the psychology of ‘free’ still kick in if you couldn’t use features like raiding or battlegrounds?

And would they end up making more money, or less? I worked on one game that switched to a free play model, and our user numbers went up about an order of magnitude after the initial announcement. But we then had higher support costs, lower revenues, and a less stable community (Free customers appear to be more likely to be dabblers, and less likely to commit to one space). We also had to deal with the fact that our game design didn’t particularly deal well with highly disposable game accounts.

As one more aside, I remain convinced that the people who should be interested in free play models should be designers with weird and unusual game design ideas. At Ubisoft some years ago, we were working on a turn-based strategy MMO. It was a fun game, but a very, very weird idea. It seemed unlikely that any player would want to hand over a credit card and sign up for a monthly subscription unless they knew we had managed to pull it off.