The Snowman and The Snowdog: Are caps on spending in F2P games the way forward?

In The Snowman and The Snowdog from Channel 4, the game's creator has introduced something we've never seen before, namely a cap on the amount anyone can spend on the game's IAP.

This endless-runner features a currency in the form of snowflakes. And if you feel like you need some more, you can buy them in bundles directly in the app.

But Channel 4 has deliberately set the game up so no one account holder can spend more than £20 on in-game money.

"Freemium is a fantastic business model for Channel 4 because it gives us both promotion for our brands and a return on investment," Colin Macdonald, Channel 4's game commissioner, said.

"In the case of The Snowman and The Snowdog, because it's more likely to be played by young children, we felt it appropriate to introduce the cap so that parents have confidence in the app."

"We always approach implementing any freemium responsibly taking various measures to ensure the model is well understood by users."

"We've found already that our freemium games have been received incredibly well by users with many commissioned games achieving ratings of 4.5 stars or higher."

It's an interesting move by the developer, with Channel 4 seemingly taking on board many of the recommendations made in the Office of Fair Trading's initial report into IAPs in games aimed at children.

And Channel 4 isn't the only one looking at restricting spending in its F2P games.

Tecmo Koei also intends to cap monthly spending for games within different age ranges.

So, kids under 15 won't be able to spend any more than $50 a month, and teenagers between 16 and 19 won't be able to spend more than $200.

Tecom Koei's goal here is to "offer services that minors can use without having to cause any worries".

For free-to-play games consultant and author of Free 2 Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away Will Luton, it's not a strategy that's likely to become viable in the wider F2P arena.

"The conventional wisdom is you want to avoid a low capped spend in F2P because the vast majority of your players (typically around 97 percent) will never spend a penny, and that is only balanced out by having your biggest fans spending well beyond the usual upfront price of a game.

"Your revenue comes from those few spending players in F2P, rather than all of the players in a paid game, so by capping the spend of the few, you vastly decrease the revenue potential of that game."

Standing on the other side of the free-to-play debate is CMA Megacorp, a developer that's not been shy about criticising this business model in the past.

At the F2P Summit in London earlier in the year, Andrew Lim from CMA compared free-to-play games to cheap supermarket chicken. He stated that "it's bad for the farmers, it damages the people who make it, and it damages the people who eat it."

And Chris Stevens, art director at CMA, is just as forceful in his rebuttal of the planned caps.

"It's like a pickpocket setting an upper limit for how much cash he will nab from your wallet. There's a twisted morality to it, but ultimately you still get exploited."

It seems, then, that developers on both sides of the F2P fence don't quite see the point of the caps, and it'll be interesting to see how the new Snowman game performs compared to Channel 4's other, un-capped games.

For some, though, it's a step in the right direction to ensuring that children aren't exploited by the free-to-play payment model. And while it might just be a salve for the moment, it's good to see developers taking some responsibility for their games.