Game Theory: How much do "free" games end up costing us?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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“Value” is a tricky prospect when you’re talking about video games—even moreso than the term’s already nebulous applications to art in general. If you buy a book, you’re at least guaranteed to get one “book”’s worth of something out of it; you don’t have to wait for more book to get patched in or fixed six months down the line, or weather offers to have the final few chapters sold to you as part of a “season pass” bundle. The whole prospect of gaming value gets even weirder when you factor in the massive market of “free to play” games that dominate the space these days, where you’re not trading money for your fun, but time, a willingness to exist in proximity to advertising, and a general sense of inconvenient cruddiness.

The topic’s been on our minds this week because we’ve been dipping our toes into two different new examples of the FTP model this week, both of which throw a lot of money, and even some genuine technical skill, at the screen in an effort to over-awe potential non-customers: Nexion’s The First Descendant, and miHoYo’s Zenless Zone Zero, which are not just fierce competitors in the “Names that don’t mean a goddamn thing” stakes, but also in the fight for our time over the last week and change.

The First Descendant is, as you’ll note about 20 seconds after installing it, Destiny with the serial numbers filed off. (And not even that well filed off, according to certain reports.) Running on the Unreal 5 engine, and stuffed with so many capital letter proper nouns that you’ll lose your mind trying to parse out all the “Prime Hands,” “Guides,” “Ironhearts,” “Dimensional Walls,” “Arches,” and more, it offers a very basic satisfaction—shooting dudes with guns whose numbers frequently go up, multiplayer, the allure of unlocking new characters with different powersets—in exchange for what can quickly feel like an enormous amount of grind. (In fact, it occurs to us, as we write this, that the game has never actually gotten around to asking us for money in the 20 or so hours we’ve spent with it; it just wants us to trot through the same damn missions over and over again in order to get one piece of a thing that can be combined with three other things that can then have several hours of “research” dumped into them to get a new character to play with.) It has a ton of polish, the ability to get very quickly tossed into multiplayer missions with other players is smooth as hell, and the basic shooting works really well. Sure, it’s boring, because the whole Destiny model runs on a certain level of boredom—interspersed with occasional bouts of outright cruelty— but it’s a competent flavor of boredom.

Zenless Zone Zero, meanwhile, goes much harder, in directions both gross and glorious. Coming from the same team behind gacha game hits like Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact, it carries all the signifiers of that particular model: Luck-based character unlocks that can be easily goosed with infusions of cash; art that runs strongly to the Teen-Level Anime Horny School Of Character Design; a million little systems like daily check-ins, timed energy meters, and other mechanisms to keep players safely ensconced with their heads jammed straight in the Skinner box. It’s also gorgeous, surprisingly funny, and fun as hell to play, offering up an extremely quick-moving version of Bayonetta-style character action that’s all about dodging enemy attacks, launching counter-attacks, and scoring big, satisfying hits. The basic gameplay can get a little repetitive over a long enough timespan, but the feeling of hitting the Counter button at just the right time to launch a new character in for a flurry of combo hits is incredibly satisfying, and elemental afflictions and stagger bars add a mild layer of strategy to the whole thing. It’s a genuinely great video game.

This is what brings these two games—ostensibly connected only by their release dates and general money-making strategies—into fascinating conversation with each other. It boils down to something like this: We’re playing The First Descendant because it’s free, but we’re playing Zenless Zone Zero despite it being gratis for the download. Which is to say that, if you stripped out all of the free-to-play garbage from Descendant, you’d be left with a somewhat more boring version of Destiny. (Which already had one of those, that also managed to be genuinely fascinatingly odd, in Warframe.) It’s fine, because it’s free, but it’s not something you’d pay money for because, well, Destiny 2 exists. Whereas if you pulled out all the crap from ZZZ, you’d be left with a great game that we’d enjoy playing a whole hell of a lot more than the one we’re currently throwing our nights at. It feels weird to damn a game by saying it’s too good for its own model, but there you go: Zenless Zone Zero falls into that strange niche of free-to-play game where we’d love to pay $40 once, instead of constantly being goaded into spending $5 at a time.

Of course, that’s never going to happen, because it turns out you can make a whole hell of a lot more money with those little $5 pokes than you can by taking people’s tickets at the door. To that end, we’ll note that ZZZ isn’t nearly as predatory as some of the games we’ve seen in this space; say what you like about their character designs—and it’s not like First Descendant isn’t also egregiously T&A heavy, by the by—but miHoYo got really big by realizing that you had to give people a big portion of a genuinely great game to really get the cash flowing. We’ll keep playing it, riding the highs, and trying to ignore the prompts to spend $4 to get 10 more “pulls” or whatever from the machine. But we can still dream of a world where you buy a great game a single time, instead of paying for it a sawbuck and an hour at a time.