While reading Chris Anderson’s book “Free” I read about Brazil’s technobrega culture. In a society where creating a digital copy of a piece of music is essentially free, it doesn’t make sense for a band to make its money off of selling CDs. Rather, the CDs become a marketing device for the band and the money is made via selling tickets to live shows (as well as food, drink and merchandise at those shows). Prior to the show playing within a local community, the show organizers get the latest album music and cover art from the band for free and make lots of copies, effectively becoming a local low cost publishing operation. These are then distributed to local street vendors, again at no real cost to the street vendors, who then sell the latest music of the band at street vendor prices. All of this is completely legit – there is no record label whose copyright is being infringed. It’s just the band, the show organizers and the street vendors.
This is a model of the music industry that the world is moving towards. The difference is that in Brazil this is what the music industry is, while in the rest of the world, this model is still an experimental answer to the ‘problems’ of piracy. And it is a good idea, a good model of the future, and a way by which the customer and the creator can be happy. Giving away the abundant resource (recorded music in the form of digital information) and selling the scarce resource (live music) is just smart economics. But how can this same model transfer to other industries?
Chris Anderson praises games for being at the forefront of giving away content for free as a core business strategy. While large parts of the industry are still in the packaged goods business (including my employers) there are vast experiments taking place online where most or all of the play experience is free to the players. The book “Free” lists five of the most successful business models games use for giving away most of the game experience for free, but in almost all of them what is sold in the end is still a relatively abundant resource. While much of the digital game content is free, the costs are still associated with digital content that is scarce only because the creators artificially limit its distribution. Is there a business model within games that is parallel to the music model of giving the music away for free and selling the concerts? Can we find games where anything that can be easily copied is free and it is only direct connection to the creators that has a cost?
The closest model within games that I am aware of is the table top role playing game. Here there is both an abundant resource (the rules to the game) and a scarce resource (the time and skill of the game masters running the games). However, the business model is backwards; rule books are sold to hobbyist game masters (as well as books with additional tools to help run games) and these game masters in turn run games for their friends, usually for free. The best way for an excellent game master to make money in this model is for them to write their own game rules and sell them.
I am aware of several experiments of game masters selling their services, but I’m only aware of two methods by which this has worked. The first is when the game master sells their ability to run games not to the players directly, but to a context in which the game master is providing a service beyond that of running games. This can be selling their skills to an organization that then gives the sessions away for free (using the free sessions as a draw towards participation in the greater organization) or selling their game sessions to the parents of children who effectively just want a baby sitter, but would rather the child is doing something imaginative and social.
The second successful business model for selling game master skill that I am aware of is when the role playing game is not a sit down event but rather a live action game. In this model, a significant number of people (from 20 to several hundred) come together into a single location to physically act out their characters. The game masters act out the roles of supporting characters within the same environment, and when conflicts evolve between player characters and the world the game masters help facilitate the resolution system.
Because there are usually overhead costs associated with these events (renting a space for play and buying costumes and props for supporting characters) there is often a charge associated for players who come to play. In most cases, this barely covers costs, but I understand that in some instances the money made is enough for at least some of the game masters to survive long enough to plan the next event. This transformation of running a LARP into a career model seems to be especially true in Finland, where the LARP model has been combined with the model of selling the game to parents rather than directly to the participants, creating what is effectively a ‘fantasy summer camp’.
The question for me is whether we can use either of these models as a way to make money off of games online. Can we give away the game for free and charge people to play in moderated multiplayer games? I think the answer is basically yes; I would even suggest that there are already several experiments that have taken the first steps.
The most obvious parallel is the massively multiplayer online game. However, I’m not convinced that this is the same model, even in the case where some portion of the game is given away for free. The important distinguishing feature is that in a sit down RPG or a LARP, there is one or moderators who help the experience along, and whose skill and facility in doing so is at least part of what is being paid for. In the free to play MMO, the associated costs are generally unlocking additional content or tools, both of which are abundant resources that have only been made scarce by design (they are just data). What I am looking for is a case where the skills of a moderator are the resource that is being sold.
Skotos uses a model that is effectively like this. Most players pay to play in moderated worlds, while a few take on the roles of moderators or builders. However, the Skotos model is also not quite what I am suggesting here; there is no free game or tools that can be used or played with independent of the games that players pay Skotos to play in. Further, it is the technology that is being sold at the end of the day; builders and moderators still need to pay Skotos in order to use these tools.
So if no one has done this in full yet, what would the actual game look like? More importantly, why hasn’t anyone made the leap? What are the inherent problems with this model and what can be done to try to mitigate them? I will try to answer these questions in a future post.
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