Dr. Richard A. Bartle showed in 1996 that players in the same persistent virtual online world / game can have very different motivations for playing. The concept was later much simplified as the 4 "Bartle types": Achiever, Killer, Socializer, and Explorer. During this week's discussion on Free2Play I stumbled upon some comments where people considered Free2Play as being rather harmless, as they couldn't see how somebody would spend too much money on them. Other people thought that it was perfectly possible to ruin yourself financially with such a game. And I began to wonder whether this difference in opinion could be explained with the Bartle types.

The games where we have evidence that some people actually spent thousands of dollars in a short time on are all PvP games, like Clash of Clans or Game of War. It appears obvious to me that these people are of the Killer Bartle type. And I can understand that somebody who has strong tendencies towards that Bartle type can consider Free2Play games as dangerous: If you can buy power with money, and use that power to win over another player, that easily can lead to a spiral in which your opponent then spends more money to strike back, forcing you to spend even more money, and so on, until somebody gives up or is broke. Games where you can buy power only at lower levels, but not infinitely to beat high-level human opponents are considered by Killers to be much less dangerous.

For an Achiever buying power to win is also attractive. But as the challenges the computer opponents pose are fixed, there is more likely to be an upper limit of how much money you can spend. Even if raid epics were for sale, one set of the highest level epics would obviously suffice for an Achiever. The main concern that Achievers have with Free2Play games is that they consider the epic gear to be not just the necessary equipment, but also as the reward for their previous achievements, a trophy showing their achievement to the world. If somebody else can buy that, it cheapens their achievements.

Socializers are a lot less interested in buying power, and are more likely to buy cosmetic items and fluff. It isn't impossible to overspend on that, especially since some cosmetic items are rather expensive (WoW sparkly pony $25, EVE Online monocle $70). But there is not so much pressure on a Socializer to spend money, as even for him the items remain more in the nice to have category than in the must have category.

In a way the Explorers are the luckiest of the Bartle types with regards to Free2Play. Sometimes companies just plain forget to try to monetize them. I don't know if it is still the case, but I was struck at the time how Explorers got the best deal out of the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Free2Play: Everything an explorer wanted, like the full story content, was for free. What you can sell to an Explorer is mostly more content, like DLCs or expansions. Again those don't come cheap, but as it takes the developers quite a lot of time to produce more content, Explorers don't have to pull out their wallet all that often. Explorers are most likely to be annoyed by day 0 DLCs and similar moves. But as long as they buy really new content, they usually feel they get a fair deal. Offering fresh content is also the least specific possibility, as all the other Bartle types will probably want the new content too, for different reasons.

Ultimately much of the conflict about Free2Play models is often about the fact that everybody would prefer somebody else to pay. When you hear somebody demanding that games should only sell cosmetic stuff, that person sure isn't a Socializer. If the item shop contains nothing that you actually want or feel you need, you can actually play for free. But I think that for fairness it would be best if Free2Play games sold many different items, appealing to all different Bartle types, so that the cost of running the game is spread around fairly.