Fortnite popularized the concept of a battle pass or season pass in the ecosystem of the live game. Because of this, every single game has adopted this business model. However, from a player’s perspective, it can be difficult to understand why this is happening.
Hopefully, this article will be a good summary of why a studio might want to elect to open up a season pass for players to buy.
Video Games are expensive
Video game studios are a business, and all businesses have costs that are associated with running them. Studios need to pay for licenses to software like Unity or Maya to make the game, or even software like Slack or Gmail to communicate with each other.
Beyond software, you also need to pay for everyone who takes part in the game. Programmers, 3D artists, sound designers, producers, and game designers are all people and need to be paid to live in the world. While a video game can be a labor of love, love doesn’t pay for bread.
If a studio has an office you need to pay rent and the costs to keep the office up and running. Also, you need to hire roles like marketing, finance, accounting, and HR to handle the operations of the company.
All of this requires studios to try to find ways to make money, and a season pass is a great way to do that.
Different kinds of revenue
Revenue is the money received from the selling of goods or services. Video games can generate revenue in a lot of ways. The most typical way is to the revenue generated from the purchase of the game. If you purchase a game for 60 dollars then the company received 60 dollars are revenue from you.
However, online games are expected to add content over the years in a way to keep the game fresh and supports the community. That 60 dollars of revenue does not go far, and this is a problem that companies have with supporting games years down the road. Updating a game requires people to do work, and if it isn’t generating revenue to pay for salaries or other expenses it is hard to justify.
This is where season passes come in. Season passes are recurring revenue that a company can receive on a quarterly basis. If your game can have 4 seasons a year then you can have the player support the game at 4 different times.
Recurring revenue is more valuable than revenue not is non-recurring. It is hard to budget off of, and forecasting becomes a make or breaks when it comes to the future of the business.
Can increase of Key Metrics
Key metrics are a way to determine the success and health of a product. An online game might care about their DAU or Daily Active User. This is defined differently from game to game. Fortnite might classify a daily active user as someone who plays one round a day. However, a game like Rocket Bot Royale might quantify an active user as someone who plays an hour a day.
If players are working towards their season pass then it may increase your DAUs. This might convert them to other revenue sources such as cosmetics.
Give and Take Relationship
The season pass is a way for the player to encourage the development of new content. The player in return will typically get some kind of perks. However, the studio needs to make the season pass desirable. Despite this, the season pass encourages the studio to listen to the players.
Fortnite’s battle pass took off because of the great perks. John Wick was a max-level reward for an early-season battle pass. Now, this is a symbol of a great OG player.
In Conclusion
This is far from an extensive explanation of why a company might want to have a season pass for their game. This is aimed at people who are not from a business background. However, this is should be a good jumping-off point.
Business decisions are not always made out of greed, but as a means to continue to make games.