Keeping zombie survival free to play

Free is a pricing model, not a promise

A free zombie game is almost never free of charge in the sense you mean when you search for it. It is free to install, and then it sells you the thing standing between you and the fun.

The genre has a favourite thing to sell, and it is ammunition. That is not a coincidence. Ammunition is consumed, it is consumed faster when you are losing, and running out is the exact moment a player is most willing to pay. It is the most profitable pressure point a shooter has.

Which is a problem, because scarcity is the mode

Deadwood Quarantine is built on ammunition being scarce. The armourer at the checkpoint hands out a ration, the ration is not generous, and every decision in the zone is downstream of how many rounds you have left. Do you push deeper for the higher tier of hazard pay, or do you turn around while you can still defend the walk back.

Put a buy button on that and the question stops existing. The tension in the mode is not the zombies, it is the arithmetic, and a wallet solves arithmetic instantly. You would not be removing a difficulty spike, you would be removing the game and leaving the zombies behind.

So the constraint runs the other way from how these decisions usually go. It is not that we are being generous by not selling ammunition. It is that the mode does not survive selling it.

The same logic eats most of the other things

Once you accept that, the list of things you cannot sell gets long quickly, because a life sim's rewards are all made of the same material.

Money

The city runs on earning it. Selling it directly is selling the outcome of every job, shift and run in the game.

Property

A flat is the reward for a lot of shifts. Sold for cash it stops meaning anything and the shifts stop mattering.

Weapons and ammunition

See above. The quarantine zone is a scarcity puzzle and a purchase is a cheat code for it.

Progress

Skipping the earn is skipping the game. There is nothing underneath it that is fun on its own.

So where does that leave the model

Honestly: with cosmetics and with the calendar, which is the narrow strip left once you refuse to sell power. Looks, and things that are only available for a while. Neither one changes what a player can do in the city, which is the line that matters.

We have written the longer version of this argument, and the shortlist of other games that hold the same line, in mobile games with no in-app purchases.

It is worth being precise about the tense here. Craze City has not launched. Nothing described above is a live storefront you can go and inspect, it is the rule the storefront is being built to, and the useful thing about publishing it is that it is now a rule you can hold us to.

What to check in any free zombie game

Three questions, and you can usually answer all of them before the tutorial ends.

Can you buy ammunition, health or anything else you consume. Can you buy your way past a wait. And is there a currency you can only get with money that also buys things the game hands out for playing. A yes to the third one is the strongest signal, because it means the two economies are joined and the free one is designed to feel slow.

The rest of Craze City is a city life sim about jobs, rent and buying a flat, and the zombie island is one district of it rather than a separate product. If you want to be told when it opens, the waitlist is here.