Game Theory: When is it time to give a free game your money?

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.

One of the weird quirks of modern video game design is that you sometimes have a surprisingly large amount of control over how much you pay for your games. Not the big, massive-budget releases, of course—you’re not getting away with one of those puppies at launch for less than 70 bucks these days, and that’s if you don’t have a taste for deluxe packages—but for lots of games, the rise of free-to-play means you can get an enormous amount of well-made video game for $0. Which produces an odd question, one that exists somewhere at the intersection between pragmatism, ethics, economics, and sheer cussedness: When is the right time to shell out money for a “free” video game?

This is, essentially, a sequel question to our previous query about how much free-to-play games end up costing us in terms of the design decisions that flow down from that particular model. Which makes sense, because they’re both inspired by the same game: The First Descendant, Nexon’s compulsively playable attempt to rip off Destiny for the budget-minded gamer. Unlike the other game from that past column, Zenless Zone Zero—which absolutely drowns players in daily check-ins, luck-based character pulls, and endless interruptions to its basic gameplay loop—we’ve stuck with First Descendant for the last month or so because, turns out, shooting a bunch of nasty aliens and hitting them with elemental superpowers is a pretty fun way to kill a couple of hours before or after work. And, as our play count has risen, the occasional thought of “Hey, should I be giving these people some money?” has occasionally begun to crop up.

There are, when you boil it down, three major reasons to give a free-to-play video game your money. The first, of course, is to secure some kind of in-game advantage. This used to be really bad in this space, bordering on outright exploitive or scuzzy; one of the reasons free-to-play games have managed to eke out some modest respectability for themselves in recent years is that most designers in 2024 know they’ll get screamed at if they design their challenge curves to require spending in order for players to make progress. First Descendant slots nicely into this model: You can pay money for cosmetics—and it’s tempting, because some of these ladies desperately need a pair of sensible trousers—but you can also buy items that speed up leveling, or let you skip the (sometimes deliberately onerous) grinding required to unlock specific characters. It’s pay-to-get-stronger, yes, “pay-to-not-run-this-fucking-20-percent-drop-chance-for-the-19th-time,” but never feels like explicitly pay-to-win.

The second reason is a little more psychological, and embodied in modern gaming’s answer to the sunk cost fallacy: The Battle Pass. Pioneered by video game money extraction pioneers Valve with Dota 2, and massively expanded by Epic with Fortnite, battle passes are basically weaponized dopamine: An in-game reward structure that only operates in full if you pay some quantity of real-world money to opt in. Depending on the game, the steady drip of rewards and achievements conferring “points” that you just can’t use can get maddening; the rewards in a battle pass are rarely life-changing, but the fact is that gamers like rewards, and gating their ability to “earn” something through their play behind a cash wall is the kind of insidious genius that transforms an industry.

The final consideration for tossing cash at a free-to-play video game is also the most ideologically pure: Support. This is what’s pushing us closer and closer to giving ten or twenty bucks to First Descendant (although pragmatism means we’ll be holding out on actually shelling out until its first season officially launches next week; none amongst us are pure). We like what Nexon has done here, at least enough to want them to keep making it, and so it feels right to use our wallets to lodge a small vote of confidence. We’d never go so far as to suggest this aspect is some kind of moral imperative, or even a moral good—the economics of video game development are wild, varied, and seem designed to keep any huge benefits away from the people who actually make the games we love—but there’s a philosophical heft to the idea of spending our entertainment and arts budget directly on those games that are currently bringing us joy. We’re at something like 40 hours with First Descendant, and a lot of them have been pretty fun; value is an incredibly weird and tricky concept in gaming, but $10 for those good times feels like a steal.