Late last month I visited Kraków in Poland to attend the latest Digital Dragons conference. Aside from taking far too many Instagrams (if you’ve not visited the city, it’s utterly beautiful, and like a pre-WWII time capsule), I also put together this piece on the evolution of free-to-play thinking for GamesIndustry.biz.

There’s an unwritten rule that, anyone talking about F2P at any event around the globe must spend at least the first 10 minutes of the presentation attempting to justify the monetisation model. Willingly or not, they’ll touch on the controversies, they’ll acknowledge the games that have given F2P a bad name and then, in whatever time they have left, they’ll actually talk about whatever the title of their talk originally suggested they would.

The often understandable resistance across the industry to embrace F2P and the opportunities it presents is something that has dogged the monetisation model during its relatively short existence, perhaps felt most notably at conferences where F2P proponents and doubters come together in one physical space to air their thoughts. Digital Dragons in the Polish city of Kraków, however, was having none of it. The fourth iteration of the games conference was embellished with a certain air of confidence when it came to F2P, with a selection of the talks on offer making no attempt to defend its current existence, but instead looking just where things may lead in the future.

You can read the article in full over on GamesIndustry.biz.