How Free-to-Play Games Trap Players by Design

Time, money, and the sunk cost fallacy

Just recently, I wrote a piece on free to play and mobile design, with specific reference to gacha and lootbox mechanics. In the same piece, I mentioned the game Arknights and how it was still in its honeymoon period. Well, that period is over and it didn’t end well. In this piece, I’m going to hone in specifically on the free to play — especially its more pernicious aspects.

Snaring a whale

As everyone knows, the lack of up front payment to get into a free-to-play game is a major attraction for people to give them a try. There are other ways that free-to-play games generate revenue (such as ads), but these methods are fundamentally different from both gacha and lootbox design in large part because the latter are designed to keep players invested in playing.

The most addictive games fully understand that if you want to keep someone playing (and turn them into a whale — a person who spends a large amount of money on a mobile game), you need to get them invested. One way to think about player investment is to consider time and money. This topic was discussed by Valve at a GDC talk some time ago in the context of Team Fortress 2. Valve were telling the story about the game’s move to a free-to-play model, where revenue…