This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In my last post I wrote that without pay-to-win and pay-to-progress, free-to-play doesn’t hold up. Today I’m setting myself a design exercise instead: how would I monetise an F2P game for a PEGI 12 audience in 2028, with the new Digital Fairness Act in force?
Rules of the exercise
- PEGI 12 audience, so predominantly minors
- no paid loot boxes
- no pay-to-win and no pay-to-progress
- in-game currencies off by default, only switched on with parental consent
- prices shown in euros
The starting point
I’m taking a genre I know well: a casual mobile game with social features, along the lines of Monopoly GO!. Initial team of 8–15 people, with ambitions to grow to over 400.
Monopoly GO! makes most of its money from two things. Dice — the energy you buy to roll more and move faster around the board: textbook pay-to-progress. And sticker packs with random contents, which are effectively loot boxes. For a PEGI 12 audience, under the draft rules, both of those go out the window.
That leaves the question everything else hinges on: should sessions be capped or not? I think yes. Without a cap the game loses its rhythm — but I can no longer sell the cap itself.
Playing and progressing, kept separate
I’d try to separate playing from progressing. Each day there’s a progress cap, the same for everyone and free. You play your rounds, advance around the board, collect your rewards. Once you hit the cap you can keep playing, but from that point the base game gives you nothing more.
After the cap, the daily endgames open up: paid modes with different boards, different rules, special events. One rule applies throughout:
You pay to get in; once you’re in, everyone’s on equal footing.
Whatever you earn in a premium mode stays in the premium modes and never feeds back into the base game. Inside, there’s nothing you can buy to go faster — otherwise I’d have just moved the pay-to-progress problem sideways. It’s the same principle as an expansion pack: you buy access to new content, and once you’re in, you compete on the same terms as everyone else.
Explorers and Achievers
In the endgames I’d include achievements: badges, titles, profile frames. They exist purely to be shown off and have no effect on gameplay whatsoever. The Achiever buys the chance to earn them — like paying an entry fee for a race, knowing you still have to win the medal yourself.
For Explorers, who in classic F2P I never monetised well, I’d put in secrets: rare combinations, board areas that almost nobody has ever reached, hidden rules you only discover by playing. This is an audience I used to leave on the table, and here they become actual customers.
The monetisation for Killers I’d leave entirely to parents — and only to parents — in case they want to join their kids in an alternative version of the game, rated PEGI 18.
The customer is the parent
With currencies off by default, whoever pays is always the parent. The kid has the desire, the parent has the card and has to give consent. So I need to persuade two people with very different motivations: the child wants what their friends already have, the parent wants to know exactly how much they’ll spend and whether their child is playing too much.
No dark patterns in communications or pop-ups — by 2028 that’ll be the law, so it barely counts as a virtue. To genuinely reassure parents you need something proactive, and I’d treat it as a product feature:
- a monthly spending cap set by the parent
- a summary of what their child has bought and how long they’ve played
- a fixed-price subscription, approved once, instead of a stream of individual microtransactions to approve one by one
Then there’s an idea I’ve already hinted at. Monopoly was born as a family board game — parents and kids around the same table. So the parent can enter the game as a player: family sessions, gifts, a family subscription with multiple profiles. A parent who plays alongside their child knows what they’re buying, and is much more likely to say yes.
One condition: it’s the child who invites them.
At 12–14, very few kids want a parent watching while they play with their friends. If the involvement were imposed, I’d be taking away the very thing I’m trying to monetise cleanly — the child’s autonomy. And on top of that, the game would instantly become “the one where your parents are”, which for a twelve-year-old is basically a death sentence.
The model in brief
Free: the base game, with a daily progress cap.
Paid: access to the daily endgames, with achievements to show off and secrets to uncover. Once inside, everyone plays on equal terms.
Running across both: cosmetics, a subscription (including a family tier), gifts between friends and between parent and child. No randomness: you always know exactly what you’re buying.
The verdict
According to self-determination theory, we play to satisfy three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Classic F2P sells all three. In this exercise I’m selling autonomy — through cosmetics and mode access — competence remains tied to the premium modes (though I can’t sell victory), and relatedness through gifts and family play.
I don’t know how much a game like this could make — let’s say one tenth. One tenth is enough for a fifteen-person team to get by on, and get by well. A team of four hundred or more, as is the case with Monopoly GO!, is a different story entirely.
Without pay-to-win, free-to-play shrinks.
To the small European studio I was advising two days ago to make a different type of game entirely, today I’d say something more precise. F2P is still doable, as long as you design it to stay small from day one — with an audience, a catalogue, and a team built for that scale. The ambition of becoming the next Monopoly GO!, under this legislation, in Europe, targeting kids? I’d let that one go.
How would you monetise it? Any angles I’ve missed? Feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn.