GameHorizon 2011: Zynga's Louis Castle on why games want to be free and why your audience is your distribution network

Having recently left the triple-A boxed product world for the world of digital distribution, Louis Castle, VP of Studios, Zynga, kicked off the Game Horizon conference in Gateshead, UK, with all the enthusiasm of a new believer.

"I used to say you can't give games away, but I'm a convert. You have to," he said in his keynote entitled The future of digital entertainment and distribution.

"You will see games like Gears of War given away for free in the future."

Rise of free

Castle pointed to several key reasons why he thought the freemium model would eventually dominate.

"Games want to be free," Castle said, pointing to social networks and sharing as the key distribution method of the future.

"What is going to make your audience find what game you're building?" he asked. "It's not going to be the app store. People discover games by sharing, not browsing, not through portals. You don't stumble upon things via browsers.

"People want immediate access to a sufficient amount of a game to see if they like it, and tell their friends about it."

Be more friendly

Yet, Castle was also keen to look to the future, saying the current range of social games weren't using sharing to its full potential.

"As an industry, we haven't figured out to turn on all the social hooks yet. We're in our infancy in terms of understanding how to get consumers to share content and add value to that relationship."

Another area mentioned was the general criticism of social games as abusing their audience by forcing them to spend money.

"People do not pay to be abused," he argued.

"You have to give them access and reasons to spend money with you. Of course, there has to be a reason to pay. You need to have gated access or a pinch point, but it should be a good thing."