Bigpoint on Free2Play: "Monetise Everything"

Chief games officer at Bigpoint, one of the world’s largest online gaming portals, Philip Reisberge had some strong words for EA, Valve, and Ubisoft who have begun to enter into the free-to-play and microtransactions market. In an interview with Next-Gen.biz, Reisberge basically said that publishers should “monetise everything” in there free2play games.

If you have a sophisticated approach to free-to-play games, in the end you can monetise everything.

In a nutshell, EA doesn’t understand it…It wouldn’t ruin the game. If selling an advantage ruins the game, you haven’t done the balancing right…EA and Ubisoft, for example, they’re both trying, but they’re not really there yet.

In the above quote Reisberge is referring to the fact that EA’s Battlefield 3 pre-order bonus gives players a special weapon, but it doesn’t give any competitive advantage.

To suggest that pay-to-win is the superior business model for all free-to-play games is ridiculous. While Bigpoint is successful with it, one needs to realize they’re really not even in the same market as EA, Valve and Ubisoft. Bigpoint develops and publishes browser MMO games where a new one is churned out ever few months, while EA spends tens of millions of dollars developing their titles over the course of years to create AAA titles.

Just look at Biopoint’s website, they have about 63 games listed but I’ve only heard of a dozen of them, maybe. It doesn’t matter if a game fails because it only took a few months to make it.  Could you imagine if EA came out and said Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be pay-to-win? There goes 80 million in development costs and 5 years of their time. Publishers like EA can’t afford to take that chance.

Only a few months ago Eve Online had a massive backlash from their player base due to the fact they thought CCP was going to introduce game effecting items to the new Eve Online item store.

Games likes LoTRO, DDO, League of Legends and Global Agenda to name a few have all proven that you can run a free-to-play game with an item store that doesn’t contain any game effecting items and still generate impressive earnings. Perhaps Bigpoint should take a page out of their playbook and get rid of their pay-to-win business model.