Scrolls Will Not Be An Exact Free-To-Play Title
Mojang’s Markus “Notch” Persson spoke in an interview with Gamasutra, explaining that the developer’s next title Scrolls will not be free-to-play. According to Notch, “The idea is that you can play for free after the initial payment, which includes a lifetime subscription of new scrolls at regular intervals.” New scrolls can be earned by in-game activities such as tournament participation, and purchasing them online.
On Notch’s blog, he writes about how the whole free-to-play genre makes him feel:
It’s been tried in other genres in other markets with decent success. By “success”, I mean “it’s profitable”. The reason anyone switches to “free to play” is to make more money. You get your players hooked on your game, and then you try to monetize them. The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psyhological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than half-life 2.
So instead of calling it “free to play”, we should call it “as expensive as you want it to be” or something.
Scrolls will have “an initial cost that gets you started with the game. The game will be designed so you can in theory play the game with just this initial cost, but if you want to you can buy more scrolls to play with.” For this reason, Notch will not classify the game as free-to-play. It’s easy to see, however, that it does share some common elements with the free-to-play demographic. Either way, Scrolls will be a fun game that Mojang aims to get players to become awed all over again.
