Free to Play and the Tragedy of the Commons
Many new online multiplayer games are electing to use a free-to-play business model, where anyone can download and play the game for free. There are a variety of incentives for developers to do this; free games can more easily attract a larger user base (especially at launch) since there is low risk, they can be easily monetized with in-game markets or transactions in the future once players are hooked on the game, and, especially for smaller and hobbyist developers, they can market incomplete games (dubbed “early access” by Valve’s Steam platform) much more easily and with less backlash than if they had released an incomplete game that costed money.
However, the free to play model introduces the classic problem of the tragedy of the commons. Multiplayer games need players to be successful – if no one is playing them, then players will not be able to find a match to join. In this sense, we know the benefit of playing a free game a player receives is proportional to the number of players playing up until some tipping point. However, multiplayer games face many technical challenges – one of the most prominent being constant server maintenance. Players demand nearly 24/7 server up-time, and the more players that are online playing the game, the more the load on the server will be. With enough traffic, the server will under perform, resulting in a degraded playing experience for the players. Usually this is in the form of lag and server disconnects. Further, if traffic continues to increase, the server may crash completely, meaning no one is able to play the game, and the benefit again is zero for all players. Thus, the net benefit model described above follows very closely to the model of the commons – that is, the net benefit B = Nx (c – x). So, there is a maximum net benefit when x = c/2, and the net benefit again hits zero when x = c.
Often, we never observer this phenomenon, because larger game companies are often able to keep up with demand for their games. For example, Valve’s Team Fortress 2, one of the most popular free to play first person shooters for the PC rarely ever experiences downtime because Valve has the resources to keep up with the demand. However, smaller developers that meet unexpected success are often met with this situation. One example of this was with the game “Unturned” developed by a 16 year old named Nelson Sexton. The game mixes elements of two very popular PC games, Minecraft and DayZ. Sexton states he never expected more than a few hundred players when he made the game, but the game quickly became a success, reaching the top 10 list of Steam’s most popular games for a few weeks. This increase in demand beyond capacity caused the net benefit to drop, as servers struggled and went down. The traditional solutions to the tragedy of the commons is to either charge a fee or limit the number of players. Moving from a free to play model to a pay to play model is almost always hugely unpopular, so that is an undesirable option. Further, limiting the number of players would cause queue times to join a game to be very long with how popular the game was at the time, another thing that would turn games away from the experience. Luckily, it is much easier to obtain additional servers (at a cost) than it is to get a bigger pasture, so the actual solution is indeed a third solution to the tragedy of the commons. Sexton also added the feature allowing players to host their own servers, as well as sourcing server hosting to larger hosting companies. If we look back at net benefit, B = Nx (c – x), this effectively increases the quantity c, and since the net benefit is maximal at x = c/2, increasing c directly increases the number of players the game can handle while maintaining maximal benefit.
Sources:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/07/the-story-behind-unturned-one-of-steams-newest-top-games/
http://www.product-reviews.net/2014/07/15/unturned-servers-unresponsive-for-some/