The cost of Freemium

The purpose of any business, whether it be behind video games, education, or both, is to make money. Neural Energy Games is no different, and once these games come out, we will be looking for ways to generate profit. There are many ways to sell video games these days, but the one that is beginning to gain a lot of traction is the "Freemium" model. When I say freemium, I mean that the majority of the game will be playable for free, but portions of premium content will be accessible with money.

The decision to go with the freemium business model came after a lot of careful consideration, since there are many ways where it could go wrong. One ill effect from the free-to-play model comes from how it effects the way kids view hard work and value. Consider a game where your character needs to become level 10 to compete against the next opponent. The player could spend hours training his character until it becomes level 10, or he could pay 5 dollars to have the character automatically leveled to 10 in a matter of seconds. Broken down to its basic level, this is basically telling kids that hard work is valuable, but not as valuable as cold, hard, cash. Even though, in a cynical view of the real world, this is basically how it works, it's probably not the greatest thing to feed into our students' heads that money is the solution to hard work.

I want to say that Neural Energy Games has a strong opinion on how free-to-play games should be structured in that game altering items will be kept at a minimum. We will strive to move away from the types of games which makes it basically impossible to compete with others or advance in the game without paying, and instead move towards models made popular by Valve, which is based heavily on virtual vanity items that are completely optional. Since we want the games we make to be education in nature, we want to make sure everything is as accessible to every student as possible.