"When it's possible for children to spend huge amounts of money in game, you have to expect to be under scrutiny," said PapayaMobile's Chris Hanage at the F2P Summit in London's final panel.

"As an industry we have to accept it's very easy for people to run up huge bills, and as an industry we have to try and sort this ourselves."

Children and in-app purchases – and, indeed, their ability to purchase scores of them on their parents' credit cards – naturally dominated much of the talk following the Office of Fair Trading's announcement it is to investigate the issue.

Indeed, according to Hanage, free-to-play developers need to be wary of the way they're currently being portrayed in the mainstream media.

Press pressure

"I think there's a risk we underestimate how bad this all comes across," he added.

"Even the name free-to-play comes across badly – I've had friends who describe it as 'oh, it's one of those games where they trick you'. I think we have to be careful not to look disingenous, and there are politicians who will very happily ride the bandwagon.

"I haven't seen much positive press, or great headlines – you know, 'child gets great value from free to play game'," Hanage concluded.

Future Games of London's Ian Harper agreed, claiming much of the media coverage is based on the misunderstanding that free-to-play games are entirely free.

"The media perception of free-to-play is 'there are games that are free, but people are running up huge bills' and that's about as far as they go," he offered.

"It makes a good news story, but there is actually already regulation in place, so there's not actually much news there."

Indeed, on the threat of OFT action, Bossa Studios' Imre Jele noted that any new regulations in regards to apps aimed at children could see the UK set apart from the rest of the world.

"Any regulation is only going to be in the UK anyway, so we may end up in the situation where we just can't monetise as well in the UK compared to the rest of Europe," he added.

"Also, there's a danger of over-reaction, where say you can't sell a car for more than £5. We have to work with the government and so forth on all this."

The discovery debate

The other issue of the day was the increasing problems developers have with getting discovered – especially in the ever-crowded F2P market.

"What worries me a lot is discovery – that's just a sign of the maturity of the market," added Hanage.

"Discovery for new games and new studios is a nightmare. Will it get harder? It's hard now – it's already incredibly tough.

"From a geographical perspective, there are lots of countries still just opening up to free-to-play games. You're looking at potentially billions of new customers coming online, and that adds complexity to all the sorts of goods you can add and the way you sell them – I think we'll look back to what we're doing now as a bit naïve."

Micro movers

In Harper's view, however, there are still plenty of opportunities for devs to draw a profitable audience. You don't always have to aim big.

"One of the really beautiful things free-to-play allows you to do is to have a relatively small, nice market and not get killed for it," he said.
"Rage of Bahamut is regularly high up in the grossing charts, but try to find it in the download charts and often you can't. In order for people to be seen, people are going to have to more carefully pick their target market."

But perhaps its not just niche audiences that offer opportunities, but also niche forms of hardware, too.

"We're going to see whole new platforms appearing around free-to-play – microconsoles such as Ouya," offered PlayHaven's Ville Heijari.

"We don't know if it's going to work, but we're going to see whole new platforms evolving around free-to-play."

As well as evolving platforms, Heijari claimed he liked to see an end to free-to-play snobbery – an end to indie developers publicly disowning free-to-play.

"I would love to see the kind of game that rides on huge indie credibility, but actually stretched it out over free-to-play. I'd love to see these studios be creative with it."