A New Breed of Video Games

While video games have long been popular, a new trend in the video game market is the idea of making the game free. While this seems like it might not be the best tactic to gain revenue for video game companies, it has proven to be highly successful and has left the consumer satisfied. In recent years, the idea of making the consumer pay for a certain ability in a video game to give them an advantage has become unpopular among consumers. It is entirely possible for free games like Fortnite to surpass paid games like Call of Duty, which have not hit their stride in recent years. As the idea of free games has become more popular, more companies are exploring the possibility of making their game free.

Paying to win games is frowned on by the public. The consumer is not content with how they sometimes have to pay ten or twenty dollars extra just to compete with other players who spent the extra ten to twenty dollars. “Morally, it is rather questionable to require players to pay for the game, and then require them to pay additional fees in order to keep up with others,” said Henry Nichols, a senior at SSFS. He does say however that, “if you don’t want to pay, you don’t have to in order to play the game.”

Recently, the company, EA, came under fire when they introduced Battlefront 2 in stores. Buyers found that most of the stuff they thought they were going to get was not actually in the game unless they paid for it. This led to loyal supporters of the game protesting and boycotting the game, leading to a less predicted value in revenue. If video game companies do decide to make certain aspects of their game pay-to-win in the future, they should be more careful in how they execute it to prevent another situations like the one from EA.

Fans have become intrigued by the growing selection of video games, like Fortnite, Dota 2, Smite, and more. These games have attracted a large amount of people and brought high revenue to video game companies. Since the games are free, the consumer does not need to question whether it is worth their money and time to play this game. If they do not like the game, they can simply uninstall it. When asked about why some free games can gain more revenue than paid for games, Daniel Hooks, a senior at SSFS, stated, “because they often offer more in return for the money and get the player more easily into the game as they will try it because it’s free and then pay money.”

Once players download a free the game they can use small amounts of money being to get more clothing options or other exterior features. These are called microtransactions. Fortnite has heavily relied on these to earn revenue. Fortnite is also popular on ESports and the company gets a portion of the earnings from every event. When asked about whether free games will be more popular in the future, Daniel replied, “Free games might become more popular, but recently free games have had more in game transactions so it has the same effect as free games but sold at full price. Free games will definitely become more frequent, but for it to be successful like Fortnite they need to have a style of play that is relatively new and doesn’t seem to copy another game. Fortnite did copy other games but they did it in a style that is different.”