While attending Arizona State University I was admitted into the Barrett’s Honors College, which as an undergrad, requires one to write a thesis. So for my thesis, after asking those in the gaming industry and doing my own research decided on the topic of monetiztion in Free-to-Play games, the thesis being titled: An Exploration of Monetization in Free-to-Play Games.
My goal for this thesis has always been to try an provide ideas and help form some sort of foundation for Free-to-Play/serviced-based games in general (even if my thesis provides a wrong direction in thinking to know what not to do), especially since these models are fairly new. Below is the abstract of the thesis:
Free-to-Play (F2P) Games are an explosive sector of the already growing games industry. The emergence and success seen with this model has spurred much debate on game design, ethics, and the inner workings of the F2P model. In this thesis I explore the F2P model from the bottom up, with a focus on monetization. To conduct this analysis, I first look at concepts that are related to the F2P model (e.g., agile methodologies and digital business models) and the F2P model itself.
The primary goal of this thesis is to explore how consumers feel towards monetization in F2P games and help provide foundational concepts/principles for F2P games. Due to the F2P model still being young, I started my primary research by interviewing professionals in the industry that are in the F2P sector. These interviews gave me insights to the F2P model and how to approach monetization in general. These interviews also led to developing a framework called the games as a service triangle, which looks to show the importance of the relationship between the game design, monetization design, and marketing of a F2P game. With the insights gained in these interviews I then moved on to conduct a survey to explore how consumers feel about F2P games (respondents were primarily casual gamers). Results were mixed with respondents having both positive and negative feelings towards F2P games.
Download here: An Exploration of Monetization in Free-to-Play Games – Alex Konda
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Hope you enjoy!