Recently, the senior VP for NAMCO Bandai Europe, Olivier Comte, said that free-to-play games are hurting the game industry as a whole by giving the gaming public unrealistic pricing expectations. "Free-to-play games can't be high quality," Comte said at Cloud Gaming Europe this year."We need to put certain value on certain work. When you're a big company, you can't take risks too quickly, you can't make a change just because there's a fashion for a couple of years; you want to be there in 20 or 30 years."

But Comte isn't the first person in the games industry to have these sentiments. He is essentially echoing what Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said about a year ago at GDC. Iwata believed that the entire mobile game market is devaluing games as a whole. He said that the public perception of the value of game software is slowly dropping. It would be incredibly hard for the gaming industry to recover should we, as a gaming community, reduce that value to nothing.

Is this true? Are free-to-play games actually harming the gaming industry, or are freemium titles simply a new way of doing business that the gaming industry will have to adapt to? Let's analyze the pros and cons of the traditional and free-to-play development models to find out.

Risk

Comte said it best himself: "When you're a big company, you can't take risks too quickly." Taking a risk on a new idea could cost a triple-A developer a lot of money. Unfortunately, our best game ideas come from taking risks. No one ever knows if gamers will like a new game idea until it's been made, but if a failure might cost a triple-A developer loads of money, they'll probably opt for something safer like another FPS. But even Call of Duty was once the new and innovative idea that someone had to take a chance on. It's easy to see that a string of "safe bets" will eventually cause gaming to stagnate. Stagnation reduces public interest in gaming, and reduced interest leads to reduced sales. And no one wants that.

Free-to-play games truly have the advantage here. Not every free-to-play game attempts to be creative, but the ones that do often become huge hits. Look at Cave Story or Minecraft. Both of these games have massive followings and both were originally free-to-play (in some form, at least). I don't think anyone would argue that these games are "good," but are they "good for gaming?"

Free-to-play games generally have less money behind them, and, as a result, cause their developers to lose less money if they fail. Some free-to-play games even have no budget at all. A failure of one of these games would financially affect no one. Because of this reduced risk, some freemium developers look at their games as art pieces rather than products, and that's how we get the Cave Stories and Minecrafts of the gaming world. The success of these products leads to other indie projects with small financial backings. This brings us games like Limbo, Braid, and Super Meat Boy (the last of which, by the way, started as a free flash game.) Eventually these indie developers build up a reputation and gain the backing of triple-A publishers like NAMCO Bandai or Nintendo, and, before you know it, they are making games for the mainstream audience. The cycle then repeats itself, allowing new ideas and new developers to work their way up to the mainstream from humble free-to-play beginnings.

Sustainability

Comte and Iwata touched on a very important point: It is impossible for AAA developers to compete with the cost of freemium games, and this will never change. Lots of hard work goes into game development. Coders, artists, sound technicians, voice actors, system designers, and more are working around the clock to finish even the smallest of development projects. These people need to get paid. For that to happen, their employers need money, which comes from game purchases.

The traditional gaming market is far more stable than the freemium indie market. The money from your last blockbuster comes in to fund your next in a cycle that forever repeats itself and hopefully keeps many people employed for a long time in the process. Freemium games, however, have to look to alternative revenue sources. They have to hope that their fan base buys additional content like hats or weapons. They may have to rely on funding from ads, which can reduce the overall quality of the gameplay experience. They might even make no money at all. If that's the case, the development team probably won't be jumping at the chance to give their time to another project.

This is what Comte and Iwata are afraid of. If the public becomes more enamored with free-to-play games, full-priced games will sell less. If-full priced games sell less, development studios get less money. This causes lost jobs, which in turn reduces the size of the team of the next project. If this reduces the quality of the project, then next game sells even worse and the studio makes even less money. This repeats itself until the studio goes out of business.

And that's just what gaming is: a business. If game designers don't get paid, then there will be a whole lot less game designers in the world. After all, would you do your job if you weren't paid for it?