Richard Bartle, the creator of MUD, the world's first MMO, believes that free-to-play business model has a "half-life" that will eventually see it fall out of favour.
Speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton, Bartle acknowledged that free-to-play is a "great revenue model" right now; however he argued that its inherent basic characteristics would undermine its popularity sooner or later.
"It will start to tail off because the people who play the games will recognise when they're about to be nickled and dimed, and stop playing them," he explained. "It will tail off because there is a fixed amount of people willing to spend enormous amounts of money, and there's too much competition for those people."
"It will also tail off because the type of games people want to play will change. The more games you play the more sophisticated the content of the games you will want. And when you want a more sophisticated game, then the overlay of free-to-play will be more of a problem for you. You will get a more moral sense of fair play."
In response, game consultant and free-to-play advocate Nicholas Lovell put his faith in the creativity of the game industry, arguing that the industry's creative minds will surely find clever ways to address the problems put forth by Bartle.
"My sense is that the market will keep evolving," he argued. "Things that initially work against players will stop working; players will vote, with their attention and with their wallets, for games that treat them more respectfully."
"To my mind what free-to-play does is broaden the market by being free up front. It enables creators to keep creating. And I don't think that has a half-life because I think the games industry is endlessly innovative, and the reason why we're at the forefront of making money from digital content when every other medium is dying is because we love tech, we love change, and we love experimenting and tinkering. I'm incredibly positive."
Nonetheless, Bartle believes that game designers will eventually get fed up with the simplistic and limited gameplay mandated by free-to-play model.
"I think that new game designers will be less keen on free-to-play as a regular model because they've seen it's disadvantages," he pondered. "Most people working in the games industry are there because they like making games. They want you to play them because they're fun, not because they subject you to cheap psychological tricks. They want to say things through their games. They want to make money, of course, but money is a side issue."
