Ethical Free-to-Play Game Design (And Why it Matters)

The vast majority of your users will be free. You can kinda monetize them with ads, but you are really only going to see a buck or two of revenue per month per user. The real money is found in the in-game digital purchases. These are the skins on Fortnite characters, an extra life in Candy crush, etc.

When an axis of competition is in a moral and regulatory gray area, the free market will reward those who exploit it to their advantage. Most everyone can agree that they would prefer to not be addicted to their technology, but that isn’t what wins market share.

But it feels strange that we basically settled with the paywall as the only viable business model for written content on the internet. A model that is at odds with how the web is structured and set up economically: