Game of Life: What if Game Designers ruled the world — #2 Pay2Win

This post is part of the book Game of Life — you can read the introduction and all other chapters here.

Problem 2: Pay2Win

In games you are typically matched against other players with similar ability/strengths to keep the matches interesting. Everybody knows this from playing soccer or other sports: the most exciting matches are against other people of equal strengths/skill. This approach is not only good for the player, it can also be very good for the gaming company running the game — especially for companies who offer free2play games. Free2play games are games which can be played for free but eventually cost money to save time or to become more powerful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play). The last part is important here: If you can spend money to become more powerful, you basically pay to win a match and this can bring in a lot of revenue for the gaming companies. However for obvious reasons some players especially in the western world consider this unfair and therefore strongly dislike this business model. They call this “pay2win”.
However there is a way to limit the negative and unfair effects of pay2win on the gaming experience while still being able to let players pay to become “better”. Let’s look again at a soccer example to understand this. You could allow your customers to buy better players for their team (e.g. Messi). But during the match the same rules apply for everybody and you do not allow to “buy” in-match advantages. If you then…