From the Pi craze, a look back at free-to-play games and the magic of “nothing to lose”

Nowadays, everywhere I go, I see the phrase Free to Play

But at a certain stage, gamers wake up startled and realize they have lost a lot, sometimes more than the standard price of 60 USD (nearly 1.4 million VND) for an AAA game. By now, after more than ten years of existence, everyone must know the true face of F2P and really the “nothing to lose” is just a front.

F2P games have always been designed so that players are forced to deposit money and the more they are hooked, the more “hard” the deposit becomes. From small items less than 10,000 VND to a very valuable item up to 1,000,000 VND or 600,000 VND for 10 turns. The player, once bitter, is to empty the bag to “dry the blood” to get what he wants.

Want to be strong? First load

There’s plenty of room to hit and keep players motivated to top up. Racing for power is a common aspect of mining. Players will become weaker and out of breath if they do not recharge, the higher the level, the stronger the monster and have to spit something out to increase the character’s equipment. Most of the mobile role-playing games use this to stimulate players to take advantage of the arms race.

Gacha is a newly discovered mine of F2P. The game will be beautifully designed, with extremely flashy characters or a collaboration product with big brands. The goal is for players to spend money to collect as much as possible for their own “waifu” or “husbando” through the form of lootboxing. Legendary names can be mentioned such as Fate/Grand Order, Onmyouji, Honkai Impact 3 and the latest Genshin Impact.

Game Gacha always has extremely attractive characters

And there is an even smoother form of money mining that some mobile games do, which is running ads. Many entertaining casual games on platforms like Google Play or Apple Store provide players with a product that is both beautiful and quality for free. But you have to spend money to buy diamonds to cover in-game purchases or if you don’t have money you will watch an advertisement in exchange.

This method takes advantage of even the poorest gamers, by turning them into machines to plow advertising views and collect money for producers. Ad networks like Google Ads will cover the cost of gaming on behalf of players. Anyway, it has less impact on the player’s pocket than other ways.

Will Pi be a new F2P game?

Now we will predict in what ways Pi Network or the Pi digital currency that is becoming a trend today will profit from users! With a special perspective from gamers, and looking at Pi as a game we will see many interesting things.

Greetings when joining Pi Network

Start by convincing users to lose nothing, every day just open the phone to receive money that they accumulate automatically. You can associate it with hands-free F2P games (Idle Game), but of course the Pi won’t tempt you to top up like the traditional way. You will give the producer the same resources to make money but watch ads in exchange for diamonds.

The first is your demographic data, Facebook has taken a lot of work for you to declare your real name, country, phone number … and use it to increase the accuracy of your ads. To you it is “nothing to lose”, but that data warehouse is extremely expensive if owned in the number of hundreds of thousands to millions of people. The scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica has shown the value of such seemingly “nothing” information.

Users are required to declare their real name, Facebook and phone in order to withdraw Pi

Pi Network requires you to declare all of the above with a threat or it will be difficult or even impossible for you to withdraw your Pi number.

The second source of revenue is advertising, experts after reverse decoding Pi’s source code have said that there is code that runs ads. This shows that Pi is likely to promote the display of ads in the app and collect money, not only limited to simple ads when opening the app every day, but there may be many other ways to plow ads. You will lose nothing but provide 1 view for the ad and Pi will receive that money from the advertiser. Or they can go even further and pay Pi for the ads you click to view.

Of course you do not lose anything, just spend a little time making zombies see ads for others to profit.

The magic of billion-dollar ideas

The F2P game thought to have nothing to lose with revenue of billions of USD in 2020. In the ranking of the top 10 F2P games with the largest global revenue in 2020, King of Glory ranked first with 2.45 billion USD. You “have nothing to lose” but the game maker pocketed billions of dollars, have you ever wondered where that money comes from?

Top 10 F2P games with the highest revenue in 2020 (Source: Super Data)

This article is not to “expose” the Pi nor advise you to participate or not. Through this article, I just want to inform you about a magic in how game developers make money from gamers (and Pi). Sometimes you are cleverly persuaded by them to pay, sometimes you are used by them as an intermediary to “plow the view” of advertising and they still collect money, it only takes a few seconds to see a piece of advertising. fox. It can be seen as a win-win cooperation. It is truly a miracle.