Influence on game experience

According to the interviews in Article I and Article V, the effects on game experiences are an acknowledged problem in the free-to-play model, but the problem was not seen as overarching. On the positive side, when the player keeps on making purchase decisions during their entire playing career, the game developer has a higher incentive to keep improving the game. However, there are typical problems with the model that have a negative effect on the game experience: namely boring and repetitive gameplay, artificial hindrances and paywalls, interruptions and spamming, aggressive monetization, and toxicity and cheating.

Boring or repetitive gameplay

In Article II, where social network games were evaluated with heuristics, boring gameplay, where similar tasks and quests were constantly repeated, was the most commonly found playability problem. Connected to this, a “click fatigue” problem was related to the typical gameplay mechanic in social network games, especially simulation and strategy games. Players would need to interact and tend the game world by clicking items numerous times. This problem increased as the games advanced, as there was more content to take care of. Continued clicking was seen as tedious, frustrating, and unrewarding. Repetitive gameplay was also noticed in Article III, where when analyzing mobile free-to-play games, the main gameplay of some of the games could include a lot of simple and repeated tapping to start or finish tasks. The boring or repetitive gameplay problem seems to be an issue especially in mobile and social network games, but less so with competitive computer games or MMO games.

Artificial hindrances and paywalls

Free-to-play games use artificial hindrances in an attempt to monetize players. Hindrances can include patience mechanics and sessioning mentioned in Chapter

5.1.2 or they can try to make playing the game tedious without money. If these hindrances are too cumbersome or stop playing altogether if money is not used, they are seen as paywalls. While some hindrances are tolerated, paywalls were considered as especially negative in both Article I and Article V. While any game type can include artificial hindrances, they are more common in social network and mobile free-to- play games.

Interruptions and spamming

Especially when games were thriving on social network services, they included interruptive popups and spamming of advertisements and game events. These games could typically include multiple pop-ups during a single game session, connected to different events and updates in the game, as well as advertisements to buy in-game content and encouragements to share game events on social media. As these pop- ups must be addressed before continuing gameplay, they stop the flow of the game. Players can post on the social network service about different game achievements and events, filling the social feed, but this can be considered as intrusive. These problems were evident in the social network games studied in Article II.

In the mobile free-to-play games studied in Article III, the interruptions often came in the form of advertisements that must be watched in order to continue playing, causing a similar type of disturbance in the gameplay. However, these typically last longer than a simple pop-up. Mobile games’ connections to social network services, especially Facebook, still exist in some mobile games, allowing and encouraging posting on the social network service.

Aggressive monetization

Aggressive monetization can mean trying to sell as much in-game content as possible, by putting a price tag on as many features as possible and advertising the paid content aggressively. In Article III, some of the top-grossing games were experienced as somewhat aggressive. For instance, in The Simpsons: Tapped Out this emerged through frequent advertisements of limited-time purchases, while Game of War - Fire Age crammed the user interface with offers and monetized content as much as possible, including asking for a payment for renaming the player character or their city.

Aggressive monetization can also include the paywalls and interruptions mentioned previously, and in general sacrificing the game quality over maximizing revenue. Aggressive monetization was considered as a negative feature of free-to- play games by interviewees in both Articles I and V, although were not seen as a part of all of the games and was sometimes seen as a sign of a shady company. Aggressive monetization was also identified as a problem when evaluating social network games in Article II.

While generally against aggressive monetization, one interviewee in Article I noted that aggressiveness seemed to be working at the time of the interviews, so it might be ill-advised to reject it completely. That said, the worst time for aggressive monetization seems to have already passed, and according to the game professionals featured in Article I, free-to-play games had already taken a less aggressive direction. This change was further visible in Article V, where several respondents mentioned past experiences with aggressive games, while currently played games felt much better in this regard.

Toxicity and cheating

Free-to-play games have a strong social design, yet it can also lead to typical problems in the model. In Article V, toxic behavior in the communication channels, ranting, hacking, use of bots, or just unequal skill levels were all mentioned as causing negative moments that stood out from the game experiences. The community could be so toxic that it could be a reason to quit the game. It was also pointed out that as free games, they attract a different kind of audience and commitment from the said audience than games that have a purchase price or a monthly fee, and this could make the games more toxic. Some of the games in Article III tried to avoid the toxicity by restricting the ways players could communicate with each other.

The inequality between paying and non-paying players divided players into groups and created tension between them. This in turn sometimes erupted into aggression. In Article V, players described how paying players could act as being better and mocked others after winning, while non-paying players called out players using money and treated them with disrespect.