Games subscription opportunities and challenges after "people have been trained to play for free"

• Simonetta Lulli discussed the need for games studios to change their mindset when it comes to subscriptions.
• She suggested attempting what works for free-to-play is the wrong approach.

"Subscriptions are mainstream now. Right now, it is the way people monetise. So why isn’t gaming getting into subscriptions more?" asked GameHouse CEO Simonetta Lulli during her recent talk at Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona.

"People have been trained to play for free."

During the session, Lulli discussed subscription models and designs that stick, suggesting there is much games teams can learn from other industries like television and fitness.

In particular, she noted experiences that evoke an emotional response are important, and argued games subscriptions often fail to do this.

"There is no emotional look into gaming subscriptions right now. You get a catalogue of games, but you don’t really get any link with what you’re consuming," she said.

"There’s too much content and there’s little reason to return."

Lulli called this "content overload", where subscriptions put all types of games out in front of users without focusing on value. She used Netflix Games as an example of this, with subscribers expected to pay in exchange for "a lot of unknown content".

A non-gaming mindset

With approximately 20 years in the games industry across Spin Master, Woozworld, Sulake and GameHouse, Lulli has been involved in various stages of mobile game lifecycles, from development to launch to global marketing.

GameHouse, meanwhile, has been focusing on games subscriptions since 2000, predating the likes of Apple Arcade or Netflix. The company makes casual games with a 97% female audience.

"Currently we have 80 games on mobile subscription and more than 3,000 games on PC," Lulli noted.

She suggested that the free-to-play model has damaged subscriptions in the games industry, and that paying for a "better" experience is a hard sell as a result. But Lulli compared this position to Netflix’s rise as a streaming service - offering high-quality shows as a paid alternative to free TV channels.

"Coming with a gaming mindset into subscriptions, we say we’re going to do what works in free-to-play. It does not work," she warned.

Lulli highlighted fitness apps as a standout example in the subscriptions space, with daily rewards, progress tracking and personalised segmentation all comparable to games. But she argued that focusing on these elements and aiming to learn from them alone is "wrong".

"What we should be learning about is about the personal growth, about the consistency and milestones," she said.

"You need to connect emotionally. It’s all about identity, not only game mechanics. That’s a fundamental thing."

Pocket Gamer Connects will return to Helsinki, Finland on October 7th to 8th.