To Free or not to Free

June 15, 2007 on 3:33 pm | In The Casual Games Business, The Casual Games Industry |

There seems to be an unending amount of comment about casual and online games and whether they should be free to play. On one side the users or the casual game player, who would like all of the games produced to be free and available for all and on the other, the businesses who try to make enough money so that they can flourish and develop more and more games.

So who is right? Well in my opinion everyone and no-one. I think for the industry to really grow there has to be a sensible mix of the free and pay-to-use casual game.

Casual games sites can not grow by surviving on advertising revenue alone. But these games sites need to offer content that is free to play. Even the biggest casual games portals offer free trials of their games for sale. After all it is sound business practise to encourage users to play the game before they part with their hard earned cash.

For new and innovative games to be created the developers need to know that there is the ability for them to earn a living from doing what they love.

We have experienced the backlash from users in the free vs pay debate. Our sequel to Swords and Sandals was offered free as a demo, but the full game was only available to paid subscribers or as a download. Yet we offer over 180 free games on our website of which about 50 of them we developed and built in-house. To call a business greedy and selfish for trying to earn a living is short sighted and ill-educated.

With the revenue generated from games sales companies are able to develop bigger and better games, employ more games developers and generally help the industry grow.

In my opinion, free content is great and it should be encouraged but to disparage those who are looking to provide more is just wrong.