=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3069/longpaper05
|storemode=property
|title=Attitudes Towards Free-to-Play Revenue Models Among Finnish Gamers
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3069/FP_05.pdf
|volume=Vol-3069
|authors=Erno Vanhala,Sami Hyrynsalmi,Jussi Kasurinen
}}
==Attitudes Towards Free-to-Play Revenue Models Among Finnish Gamers==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3069/FP_05.pdf
Proceedings of the Conference on Technology Ethics 2021 - Tethics 2021
Attitudes Towards Free-to-Play Revenue Models
Among Finnish Gamers
Long paper
Erno Vanhala1[0000-0001-9039-7731] , Sami Hyrynsalmi1[0000-0002-5073-3750] and Jussi
Kasurinen1[0000-0001-9454-8664]
1
LUT University, Lahti, Finland
erno.vanhala@lut.fi
sami.hyrynsalmi@lut.fi
jussi.kasurinen@lut.fi
Abstract. Free-to-play games are dominating the gaming environment on
mobile phones. They are free to download and fast to get known and can hook
gamers for a long period of time. Yet game companies are generating revenue
with in-game payments. Research has shown that a small percentage of gamers
actually use money in free-to-play games. This survey study is based on
answers of 215 Finnish free-to-play gamers and sheds light on what free-to-play
gamers think of the concept; how much they play, how much they spend money
and what their attitudes are towards free-to-play revenue model. One of the
main findings in this study is that the majority of the respondents had spent
money on free-to-play games, yet they still dislike the basic free-to-play
revenue model features, such as unbalance of paying and non-paying gamers. It
seems that the free-to-play revenue model is still in the maturing phase and
gamers are accepting paying with real money more and more. We recommend
replication of this study around the world.
Keywords: business model, revenue model, free-to-play, survey, computer
game, mobile game
1 Introduction
"I play this game every day. It has daily rewards." – 6-year-old nephew of the first
author.
This real-life quote illustrates the pervasiveness of digital games in our society.
Not only has digital gaming become a more mainstream hobby in the last 30 years, it
has also probably become one of the most common hobbies worldwide. In fact, in the
United States alone, there are over 210 million people, basically two thirds of the
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entire nation, who consider video games as their hobby (Entertainment Software
Association, 2020). Globally, an estimate of 2.69 billion people have played at least
one game in 2020, with the yearly numbers constantly rising (Statista, 2021).
Digital games are a quick and easy form of entertainment; they have relatively low
entry costs, the selection catering to different interests is varied, and due to
advantages in the mobile devices, they are no longer strongly tied to being at a
specific location with an access to the hardware to play the games with. However,
there are also concerns. For example, the time spent with video games is away from
doing something else, and obviously games, including free-to-play games, are not
actually free, since otherwise there would be no market for them. The objective of
finding out the positive and negative sides of the video games from this viewpoint
lead us to consider whether free-to-play games are improving our society or is the
downside deeper than has been previously thought (Zagal et al., 2013). To gather
observations from as heterogeneous population as possible, we decided to focus on
mobile free-to-play games, since the entry costs are very low; any modern mobile
smartphone will do, and almost all categories and genres of games industry are also
represented in the mobile games ecosystems. Specifically, to get to know how free-to-
play is considered among mobile gamers, we decided to create a survey to collect data
and observations on the topic and distribute it to the online communities.
Digital gaming differs from non-entertaining software engineering in the sense
where non-entertaining software tries to minimize the time spent with the software,
the game tries to keep the player within the game as much as possible (Vanhala and
Kasurinen, 2014): its function is to entertain the gamer (Zagal et al., 2013). It is
crucial for game business models to keep gamers coming back to the game again and
again, this is called retention rate and game business model designers intend to get
high retention rates. Not all revenue models require high retention rates. Still,
especially with free-to-play models the revenue is generated when the player is
playing and exposed to either advertisements or microtransactions, not beforehand
like it was with the traditional software business model where the customer bought
the piece of software – such as a game – from a store to be able to access the software
itself. This also leads to ethical issues when business developers try to squeeze the last
pieces of money out of frustrated gamers.
In this study three research questions are set:
1) Who plays free-to-play games?
2) How do gamers like to spend money and time on free-to-play games? and
3) What attitudes do gamers have towards the free-to-play revenue model?
In the essence we are aiming to understand how the free-to-play revenue model is
seen within the gaming community and what is actually the free-to-play community
consisting of.
2 Background
The emergence of the modern generation smart phones and their respective
application stores has drastically changed the revenue models of the gaming industry
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(Smed and Hakonen, 2017). In our use, the “revenue model” tells how a company is
compensated from products or services it offers (Popp and Meyer, 2011). A revenue
model consists of one or more revenue streams (e.g., ads, in-application payments).
Usually, the compensation is money, but it does not need to be. Prior to the launch of
Apple’s App Store for devices with iOS operating system in 2008, the industry
standard for games was upfront paid one-time license fee. That is, a customer bought
the right to use the game application before being able to use it.
With the emergence of the new application stores with their platforms and
ecosystems (such as Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play and Valve’s Steam), new
kinds of revenue models emerged (cf. Hyrynsalmi (2014), Hyrynsalmi et al. (2012)).
For example, the in-application payments, where a customer can buy more content –
such as new levels, better resources, or improvements in the game either with a direct
cost (euros or dollars) or with indirect currencies such as virtual diamonds or gold
coins – were not widely used before the iPhone era’s application stores. These
changes brought free-to-play (F2P) games into the mainstream in the industry. In
these kinds of games, a user can start playing the game without any monetary
transactions. In theory, games can be played endlessly without paying anything for
the game (thus, the name “free-to-play”), yet by buying more content or
improvements, the gamer can either gain advantage over non-paying peer (e.g. faster
building time in certain games), acquire some graphical gadgets or cosmetic items
(e.g., new hats or other funny clothes), or for example speed-up the game by reducing
the waiting times.
The emergence of the new kinds of revenue streams and models have not gone
without collateral damages. For example, there have been frequent reports on appstore
bills up to thousands or tens of thousands of euros when an underaged user has been
buying more content into the game without fully understanding her actions 1. In
addition, some free-to-play games have been referred to as “pay-to-win” by the critics
and scholars if a user is able to buy an advantage in the game over non-paying peers
(Howard, 2019; Zendle et al., 2020). Therefore, not surprisingly, more academic
attention has been put into considering also ethical consequences of new monetization
approaches used especially in mobile games (Hyrynsalmi et al., 2020). This study
contributes to this emerging literature by reporting results how the users are
perceiving the new revenue models in games.
Zagal et al., (2013) list three types of dark patterns utilized in game design:
temporal, monetary and social capital-based dark patterns. The definition for such a
pattern is an intentionally designed feature to cause negative experience to gamers.
These are strongly related to the free-to-play revenue models and features like pay-to-
skip (e.g. no need to wait for finishing the harvest if real money is used), pay-to-win
(with real money one can get better weapons) and grinding (do the same tasks over
and over again) are examples of dark patterns to harm players’ game experience to
encourage them to use real money.
There are dozens of different revenue models available when developing a new
game. The simplest question is whether a gamer is paying before playing, while
1 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-28-parents-refused-refund-by-apple-
after-son-spends-1700-on-free-ipad-game
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playing, both or not paying. Some options are oxymorons, such as freeware game,
which would require money, and some options are non-relevant, for example if game
is open source there is no money involved inside the game and if one is buying the
game, it is not successful to still provide ads or pay-to-win options. In this study we
are focusing on games that are free-to-play in the sense that 1) they are gratis to install
and 2) provide an option to use real money in the game. Table 1 illustrates the options
mentioned here.
Table 1. The revenue models – and example games – of modern digital games loosely based on
(Kimppa et al., 2016; Zagal et al., 2013). Black options are not used, and dark gray ones are
hardly successful ones. This study focuses on the light orange part. DLC = downloadable
content, F2P = free-to-play, P2P = pay-to-play, S2P = Subscribe-to-play.
How to pay before playing
No paying Paying
Open source Freeware F2P P2P S2P
How to None Gnu Chess MoleZ Quake, World Of
pay Original WarCraft
while Angry Birds
playing Donation 0 A.D. Angels That
Kill - The
Final Cut
Ads Angry Birds
DLC Kingdom StarCraft
Rush
Pay-to-win Dungeon
Keeper
(2014)
Diamonds Forge Of Kingdom
Empires, Rush
AngryBirds 2 Vengeance
3 Research process
The principles of the survey method in general are defined for example by (Fink,
2013). The objective for a survey in general is to collect quantitative information
regarding the feelings, considerations, beliefs, and ideas from the target audience,
with a certain acceptable level of reliability. Following a classification scheme by
(Kitchenham et al., 2002) we conducted an exploratory and observational study on the
behavior and beliefs the users have on the free-to-play mobile games.
The online survey was anonymous, with a control question to ensure that the
participants paid attention to the survey. It was also localized to Finnish language, to
ensure that the target audiences on the selected venues understood the questions and
were able to express themselves clearly on the open items. The applied data collection
platform was Google Forms, with the target platforms for data collection being
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several Internet sites including two university intranets in Finland. The survey was
also advertised via social media platforms such as Twitter. The participation in the
survey was absolutely voluntary, and no identifier data besides some basic
categorization data, such as age and gender, was collected. Partial works, and the ones
which failed the control question were also discarded from the final dataset.
Overall, out of the potential target audience of more than thirty thousand
individuals – for example, the survey advertisement was viewed by 2,774 users in
Twitter – 215 valid responses were collected. According to Fink a response rate of
around five percent is typical for an Internet survey, so we consider the survey data
collection rate sufficient and the number of responses enough to warrant an analysis
step. Since this was an explorative survey, our objective was to establish trends, and
compare our results against the related works and earlier, similar studies on the topic.
In this work, we focus on the analysis of the results as a population, with some cross-
sectional comparisons presented if deemed meaningful deviation from the general
trends. Finally, the survey instrument was developed by three persons, the authors of
this article, and an English version of the data collection instrument is available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uolu93gsxdfdqgu/f2p-survey.pdf
4 Results
As already mentioned, a survey was created, and it was open from 2021-04-07 to
2021-04-30. The survey was written in Finnish as we had no guarantee that all the
respondents could understand English well enough. Thus, we focused only on Finnish
gamers. Although digital gaming is a global arena, there are still games that are more
popular and successful in some countries and not in others. The aim is to replicate the
study in global environment, but the start is carried out within Finnish audience.
In total, 227 responses were gained and 215 were accepted. In the data validation,
12 answers were removed as they did not answer the control question correctly. The
survey focused on three different topics: monetary issues, such as how much and how
often gamers use real money; time, as in how much gamers spend time with free-to-
play games; and opinions on the free-to-play gaming. Additionally general questions,
such as age and gender, were also asked.
The average age of respondent was 31 years (median 28, minimum 18, maximum
57) and standard deviation being 9.6. Respectively the age when respondents started
playing digital games was 9 (median 8, minimum 1 and maximum 35; the reported
minimum age of 1 sounds more like a typo) and standard deviation being 6.3. 61.4%
of the respondents identified themselves as man, 35.3% as woman, 2.8% as other and
0.5% did not wish to give this information (See Fig. 1 for more information). 79.1%
of the respondents report having been playing free-to-play games for more than 5
years, the rest various degrees of less than 5 years.
Respondents were asked to name free-to-play games that they have been playing.
215 individual games were mentioned. 78 games got more than one mention and 12
games got ten or more mentions. They are listed in Fig. 2. Pokémon Go was the most
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Fig. 1. The age distribution of respondents based on gender.
mentioned game, and it has been a highly successful game over the globe 2 Finland
being no exception. We could identify only three mentions of games with Finnish
only language.
In the beginning of the survey, we defined free-to-play games as follows: The aim
of this survey is to examine gamers’ attitude towards so-called free-to-play games.
These games can be played without direct payment to game developers, but games
can have options to buy additional goods. These goods can give benefits over other
gamers or add cosmetic features to a game. Examples of free-to-play games are, for
example, Fortnite, Forge of Empire, Clash of Clans, Heroes of the Storm, Hill Climb
Racing and Pokémon Go. Yet there were still mentions of games that clearly do not
fit the definition of free-to-play (such as Nethack). 93% of the gamers could
recommend the game(s) they were playing and 7% could not.
Fig. 2. List of games that got ten or more mentions.
4.1 Time
The amount of time spent with games varied from less than daily to several hours per
day. 2.8% of gamers had stopped playing free-to-play games and 17.2% did not play
every day. Those who played daily were playing a considerable amount of time as
only 3.3% (out of the 215 responses) mentioned less than 15 minutes of playtime per
day. 22.3% were playing 16 minutes to 1 hour, 29.8% playing 1 to 2 hours per day
and 24.7% were spending more than 2 hours daily playing games.
2 https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2016/8/pokemon-go-catches-five-
world-records-439327
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Gender had no big effect on how much time is spent with free-to-play games,
although it seems that men played more long durations per day, but they were also in
a bigger percentage with the group of non-daily gamers. This is illustrated in Figure 3.
Fig. 3. The amount of time spent with free-to-play games between different genders. Only men
and women present statistically meaningful data.
Gamers also play other games than just free-to-play ones. 25.6% reported to spend
less than 25% of their playing time on free-to-play games 25.1% spent 25%-50%,
19.5% spent 51%-75% and the biggest group of 29.8% spent more than 75% of their
playing time on free-to-play games. As this survey was targeted to free-to-play
gamers it is no surprise how much free-to-play games are played, but it is noteworthy
that gamers do play other games too.
When asked whether the time spent with free-to-play games has changed during
the last year or two 31.6% reported no change, 17.2% moderate decrease and 25.1%
moderate increase. The biggest difference was with the significant parts: 7.9%
reported significant increase, but 15.3% reported significant decrease in their
playtime. 2.8% had stopped playing free-to-play games. It seems that the COVID-19
has not have a significant effect on free-to-play gaming.
Gamers were reasonably satisfied with the amount of time they spend with free-to-
play games (75.8%). 7% would like to play more, 16.3% would like to reduce the
time and 0.9% would like to stop playing free-to-play-games.
4.2 Money
Previous research has identified key features of the free-to-play revenue model
(Davidovici-Nora, 2014; Fields, 2014). One of these has been the concept of “whale”
meaning that only a very small fraction of gamers spend thousands of euros in the
game and the significant majority does not spend real money at all. Findings in this
study challenge this concept.
When asked how much money gamers estimate to have spent in free-to-play games
in total only 23.7% answered “none”. 18.1% estimated to have spent more than 300
euros in free-to-play games. Figure 4 illustrates this finding. More than three quarters
have spent money on free-to-play games, which is not in line with the previous
studies on the topic.
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Fig. 4. Answer distribution on the question “Estimate how much you have spent money in free-
to-play games in total”.
When checking whether gender has any effect on the amount of money spent, it
was found that those who identify themselves as men spend significantly more money
than those who identify as woman (Chi-squared test: Χ2=24.88, df=5, p=0.00015).
The median spending is less than 10 euros with women and 11 – 100 euros with men.
Other genders were so rare, they did not give any statistically meaningful results. The
differences between genders are illustrated in Figure 5.
Fig. 5. The differences in spending between genders. Only men and women can be measured
statistically.
All age groups (–20, 21–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–) had pretty similar spendings, and
11-100 euros was the median group in all age groups except the 51– group that had
the median value of less than 10 euros.
When cross tabulating whether the time spent with games has an effect on how
much money is spent, we found out the group that plays more than 2 hours per day
has a median of 101 – 200 euros money spent. All the other groups had a median of
11 – 100 euros of spent money.
When inquiring about the amount of money spent monthly on free-to-play games
69.8% answered none. This is more in line with the previous research and illustrates
the issue that gamers do not spend money that often on free-to-play games. Yet,
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almost one third spend money monthly (13.5% less than 5 euros, 8.8% 5 – 10 euros,
4.2% 11 – 20 euros, 0.9% 21 – 30 euros and 2.8% more than 30 euros per month),
which is more than has been previously reported (e.g. Davidovici-Nora, 2014).
As the free-to-play revenue model does not explicitly describe how the revenue is
generated it was asked where gamers spent money. Four options were given, and the
respondent could choose multiple of those. 26.1% had not spent any money. More
than half of the respondents had spent money on features that advance them in the
game. This indicates that these features bought with real money are not in a minor use
at all, but the core part of how free-to-play games are played. Also, more than a third
answered that they had bought cosmetic features with real money. Only 8.8% had
used money to get rid of ads. It seems that the buyable features could be the most
beneficial way to monetize free-to-play games. Figure 6 illustrates this.
Fig. 6. Answer distribution on the question “To what you spent money in a free-to-play
game?”. Respondents could select multiple choices.
There seems to be a reason for the fact that only 8.8% of the respondents had used
money to get rid of ads. It was asked how much time the respondent spends watching
ads in one game session. 67.4% of respondents report that there are no ads in the
games they play. 15.8% spend less than a minute, 14.4% spend 1-5 minutes and only
2.3% spend more than 5 minutes per gaming session. Although the first free-to-play
games were topped with heavy advertising, it seems that the number of ads have
decreased within the most popular games.
It was asked what the respondents think of special offers – such as Valentine's Day
or X-mas sales when some goods are sold with “discount” – that are common in free-
to-play games. 11.6% considered them cheering up, 50.2% considered them ok and
15.3% considered them merely a way to scam gamers. 22.8 had no opinion as they do
not spend money at all. Although these special offers can be scams and dark patterns
of trying to get gamers to invest more money into the game, the respondents' attitudes
are considered neutral towards them.
Now there have been three distinct questions that have had an option to answer that
the respondent does not spend any money on free-to-play games. In Figure 4 the
number was 23.7%, in Figure 6 26.1% and now 22.8%. There seems to be some
misunderstanding as these numbers should have been the same, but we are unable to
tell the reason for this. The questions have been put differently, which might change
the respondents’ mindset. We still consider all the accepted answers valid human
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created as the game names had been written correctly instead of random spam. The
numbers from 22.8% to 26.1% are considered trustworthy in this context.
Next it was inquired whether free-to-play games are considered free or not as no
money would be required in the beginning. 19.5% responded that they have not used
any money, thus the games are free for them. 9.8% said that they watch ads and hope
that will help game developers. 48.4% answered that they have used money, but they
could have played the game without any payment, thus games can be considered as
gratis. 4.2% said that it is wise to put money into games, thus they do not consider
games gratis. 18.1% responded that developing games requires money and one should
put money in them, thus gratis is an illusion.
As some gamers spend money into the game and some do not, it creates an
unbalanced arrangement between gamers. Some might spend ten hours per day for
weeks, others gain the same level by paying 50 euros. It was asked how respondents
see this. 29.3% did not see any issues in this arrangement and considered it “totally
ok”. 23.7% selected the option “Everyone can use money, if one wants. I do not use
it.” 2.3% thought that they could compensate for their skills (or lack of them) with
money. 0.5% (one respondent) would have wanted to use money but could not.
Biggest group (44.2%) of the respondents thought there is an issue in this unbalance
between gamers and that the more you pay the better you manage is wrong.
We also asked whether the covid-19 has increased how much money is put into
free-to-play games. 90.2% did not see any increase, 2.8% could not tell and 7.0% had
increased their monetary spendings in free-to-play games.
4.3 Thoughts on free-to-play
Time and money are important concepts when discussing free-to-play games, but
there are also other – softer – parts in game studies. We also included several in our
survey. First, we asked why one plays free-to-play games. The highest ranked reasons
were joy that games bring and to kill some time. Also, other gamers in the game are
considered a good reason to play. Games also often offer new content and tasks daily
that are considered reasons to play. 5.6% answered that they are addicted a lot to the
game, but overall, that was not considered as the reason to play the game. Similarly,
although a gamer has put money into the game, it was not the reason to play – yet
6.5% said it was an important reason to play. The Figure 7 illustrates the responses
further.
Fig. 7. Reasons to play the free-to-play games the respondents play.
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As the statement “Games bring joy to my life” was met with a positive attitude, it
was further cross tabulated whether the amount of money spent would have an effect
on the view. This is illustrated in Figure 8. It seems that the more money you put into
free-to-play games, the more enjoyable they are – or vice versa, the more you enjoy
the game the more you put money in. We are not arguing that money would bring one
happiness, but at least it removes the free-to-play game obstacles of enjoyment.
Fig. 8. Cross tabulated joy and the amount of money that is being spent in the free-to-play
games. Correlation exists (r = 0.95; n = 215; p = 0.000).
When inquired what respondents think of some features of free-to-play games,
none of them were considered good. Respondents did not like the unbalance when
some advanced faster by using real money, nor did they like bypassing boring or too
difficult parts with real money. Respondents did not like ads in free-to-play games
and also grinding did not get positive feedback although it was the least disliked
feature. This is in line with the arguments of (Zagal et al., 2013). Figure 9 illustrates
this in full.
Fig. 9. Gamers’ attitudes towards various concepts available in free-to-play games.
The overall thoughts on free-to-play games were positive. 20.5% liked them as
they did not require money and 63.7% considered them pleasant entertainment. 14.4%
would prefer pay-to-play games and 1.4% hated free-to-play games.
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We also asked if gamers would stop playing free-to-play games – or had already
done so – what would be the reason. The most voted option was the lack of fun.
Another option gaining votes from more than 50% of the respondents was that there is
no new content to play. This is a logical time to stop playing. With free-to-play games
there is often an option to accomplish some daily tasks and 41.9% of respondents
would be worried that playing takes too much time. In addition to lack of content
there is also a possibility to have too much content and 23.3% reported that there is
too much new content coming in. 11.2% had got a comment from a close one that she
is playing too much, 10.2% considered some games oppressing and 7.9% thought
some games take too much money. This is visualized in Figure 10.
Fig. 10. Reasons to quit playing free-to-play games.
5 Discussion
In the beginning we set three research questions: 1) Who plays free-to-play games?,
2) How do gamers like to spend money and time on free-to-play games? and 3) What
attitudes do gamers have towards the free-to-play revenue model? Based on this
survey we can argue that Finns play free-to-play games in almost all age groups and
all genders although almost two thirds of the respondents identified as man.
The most surprising finding was how a large percentage of respondents spend
money on free-to-play games. In this study only around 25% (based on the question it
varied from 22.8% to 26.1%) of respondents did not spend money. This means that a
significant majority of gamers do spend money on free-to-play games, and this is
contrary to previous findings by for example Davidovici-Nora (2014). Although 75%
of the respondents had spent money on free-to-play games, 69.8% did not do this on a
monthly basis. A longitudinal study on how gamers spent money would shed more
light on the topic.
In this study ads did not play a significant role as money was mostly spent on
getting features that helped the gamer to advance in the game. Also, cosmetic things
(e.g. new clothing for a game character) were bought with real money. In the light of
this study, it seems that gamers are ready to use real money on features that help them
in a game, but also acquire features that do not directly help them to advance in the
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game. In a sense this is a move from just playing a game to identity building inside a
game (Lehtonen and Harviainen, 2016; Vanhala and Kasurinen, 2016) and most
successful games today have strong communities and options to build identity. Maybe
mobile gaming (both gamers and developers) is ready to move from monetizing
gaming features to monetizing identity building features?
Free-to-play games have features where one can use real money to do things such
as advance faster, bypass too hard parts and skip grinding. Besides these ads are often
shown inside games. Previous discussions have found some of these kinds of revenue
models ethically or legally questionable. Nevertheless, this study underlines the issue
that all of these features are unwanted, but gamers merely tolerate these features as
they are still playing free-to-play games. Do we still need these ethically questionable
features, or could the industry move to more ethically sustainable business? As
suggested in the previous paragraph there is at least a change.
One last core finding of this study are the reasons to quit playing a specific free-to-
play game. The most common reason was that a game would not be fun anymore.
This underlines the value proposition of a computer game: it needs to be entertaining.
Second reason to quit is the lack of new content – but also the overwhelming amount
of new content. Clearly the content is important as there is nothing to entertain from if
the content is already played through. But as free-to-play games are also played
casually, the gamers can exhaust themselves from too many tasks popping up. This
leads us to the third reason to quit: a game takes too much time. With daily tasks
giving daily rewards, gamers cannot take a day off and play for example only on
Saturdays. This can be frustrating and closed ones can get irritated or the game can
start to feel oppressing.
This study reflects only the Finnish audience. We did not ask the income level of
the respondents, so we are unable to calculate correlations between income and
money spending levels. Only one respondent reported that she would have wanted to
spend more money than she could. We cannot estimate how much these findings can
be generalized to lower income countries. Our findings require more research and
verification with a larger number of respondents from various countries.
As for threats of validity, to maintain the validity of this study against the common
threats (for example (Robson, 2011)) the questionnaire was developed following
guidelines set by (Fink, 2013), the questionnaire and the collected data was discussed
with peers to avoid personal bias, and overall, the data collection phase implemented
techniques such as control question, to ensure that the answers were submitted by real
people, even though anonymously. Obviously, because of the nature of the data
collection, it is impossible to assess if the data population favors some identifiable
group such as degree of education or level of income, but at least the group of people
who answered represents all genders, age groups, “hardcore” fans and casual players.
Overall, the metrics presented in this paper are accumulation data from the survey, so
the researcher bias, or statistical inaccuracy on the results should be minimal and not a
meaningful issue. It is also noteworthy that although framing effect was tried to
minimize in the survey design, there is still a risk that it was not achieved with every
question.
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Proceedings of the Conference on Technology Ethics 2021 - Tethics 2021
14
6 Conclusion
In this paper we observe and discuss the free-to-play business model and mobile
games in general from the viewpoint of motivation and considerations towards them
as a hobby. Since video games, mobile platforms included, are one of the most
common hobbies around the world, the different business implications and ethical
aspects related to marketing and customer participation are important. At the general
level, the different models and techniques for monetizing games are well-known, and
unlike traditional game products with purchase costs allowing access, the free-to-play
games live from the visibility to their target audiences, and customer retention.
For this study, we conducted a survey (N=215) among the Finnish free-to-play
gamers. The more common results provided some talking points; the game industry is
global, as globally trending games are also the ones, which are popular among the
Finnish gamers. Similarly, the study confirmed that there are both women and men
who play games, in all age groups and might spend even several hours per day
playing games. However, the survey results indicate that the prior stereotypical
money spending models of the gamers might not be completely accurate: It was found
out how approximately three quarters of respondents spend money on free-to-play
games, almost one third monthly. This finding is not in line with the current reports as
they have been suggesting a fraction of paying gamers instead of the majority of what
our survey presents. Similarly, the gamers who spend some money are not buying
something small just to ease the game or make the experience smoother; cosmetic
items and quicker access to the game content made up over 50% of purchases,
whereas pragmatic purchases like getting rid of advertisements were less than 10
percent. In fact, designing the game so that the gamer could all but guarantee success
by spending money was seen as a design flaw.
In any case, our observations warrant for a need to do additional studies on the real
costs of free-to-play games, and test if we could replicate these observations in a
larger, multinational context. It would be interesting to conduct this study in other
countries or in a global environment to see whether this level of money spending is a
fortifying phenomenon or is it a feature of higher income countries. Additionally, if
these observations turn out to be more universal and persistent, a discussion on the
ethics of digital game marketing and the concept of “free games” should be discussed
in more detail, especially considering that most of these game products attract very
wide audiences from the different social and age groups.
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