The fair games make more money.

In 2006, a man in Hong Kong told Teut Weidemann to give his games away and sell what was inside. He flew home with the idea and was laughed out of the room. Something that only works in China. Today it is more than half the games industry.

Inside: how to wire an economy so players still have something to want in month twelve. Why a discount is the fastest way to destroy everything you sell. What loot boxes were for a century before the scandal. And five chapters on the dissection table — King, League of Legends, World of Tanks, and the disruptors rewriting the charts now — opened up with their real numbers and the question that matters most: not what they sell, but what they refuse to sell.

The finding underneath all of it is not a moral argument. It is a commercial one.

Anyone interested in free-to-play, honestly — but it is aimed mainly at two readers.

One thing was decided before a single page was written: this would not be a professional course. There are courses — and forty conference talks on YouTube, free, where most of this material was first tested against live audiences. This is deliberately a book. Built on stories and cases rather than checklists, and written so that anyone who finishes a chapter takes a real learning home, whether they run a studio or have never opened a game-design document in their life. The craft is all in here. It is just wearing better clothes than a syllabus.

How to read it. New to free-to-play: front to back — the book is built as an argument, each chapter standing on the ones before it. A veteran: jump straight to the chapter that matches your current problem. Every chapter is written to stand on its own feet.