Chillingo’s COO Ed Rumley feels that “complex” free to play games that offer a lot of content can be scary for several indie developers, since they find it intimidating that the devs are giving these huge games away for no price at all.
“There’s obviously a lot of games where you’re grinding away, or building up a city or whatever it is,” Rumley told VG247. “That’s a particular genre, and I think there’s a market for people who like those games, but there’s also a lot of people who still like pay-per-download games.
“From an indie developer’s perspective I think free-to-play games scares a lot of people because it’s a complex market, and I can imagine that developers put a lot of time and effort into their games, and that they’re very proud of their work, but it’s scary that they’re about to give this game away for free.”
He continued: “Then there’s our perspective which is, we’re very comfortable with the free market, and we now earn more from free games than paid, but paid is still an important market for us. The way we look at this – the bottom line – is that consumers are king, so for us the consumer comes first, and we will always try to make games with developers something that consumers are happy with.”
It does make sense that developers giving these huge games away for free would scare plenty of the indie devs, but it’s proved to be not much of an issue, since plenty of indie games have done well in the F2P market recently.