Firewalk Studios has gone on record to defend the monetization for their upcoming hero shooter, Concord.
As reported by Eurogamer, Firewalk director of IP Kim Kreines talked about Concord‘s $ 35 retail price:
“When you buy the game, you get… the 16 characters, 12 maps, six modes. Every season, all that seasonal content, that’s all free.
There’s additional cosmetic-only customisation options where you can further personalise your characters’ looks – this isn’t gameplay, this is only cosmetic – that you can purchase, and that will come out seasonally as well.”
As the first game under Sony’s initiative for first party live service games, the company has to navigate several conventions to figure out their place in the market.
So let’s make some comparisons. Fortnite is available on nearly every platform, is free to play, but has a season pass and DLC monetization model that’s been designed to make paying for content desirable.
The late Satoru Iwata’s assertion that free to play games should be called free to start is no longer applicable here – instead, there’s an informal hierarchy between players who play at a high level and pay a lot to get everything, high level players who invest a lot of time to get everything free, whales who pay to compensate for not being that skilled, and players who don’t win a lot and don’t get the best items, but show up for the community they are part of in the game.
We brought up Iwata because one of the last franchises he had a hand in making, Splatoon, presents an alternative monetization platform, based on completely different convictions on how games should work than what Epic Games believes in. The first Splatoon was $ 60, but nearly all the content available in the game was on disc, and was merely rolled out in a schedule. There are Splatoon amiibo, that had exclusive content on it, but even if you bought all this content, it would not amount to as much as what Fortnite players spend every day.
Since then, of course, both Epic and Nintendo have changed things up on the game design and monetization for both Fortnite and Splatoon. Fortnite is now treated as a platform, and designed to entice more casual players in the community over high level players. Splatoon 2 and 3, on the other hand, have seen the addition of DLC on top of the amiibo. Once again, Nintendo has a certain premium for their games and content, but they still don’t make as much as what Epic does on Fortnite.
Sony’s strategy seems to lean more towards Epic’s than Nintendo’s, but clearly, they still want to keep the perception of Concord being a premium game. For now, Firewalk will have to prove that Concord really is a game worth playing, combating the negative reception of its reveal. Whether it succeeds to do that or not will then decide if people will consider if its monetization is acceptable or not.
