When I speak of desire versus friction, I’m talking about a player’s desire to play versus the friction that keeps them from playing.  Desire is driven by a number of factors:

• production values — not just audiovisual assets, but quality of gameplay
• perceived investment — how much time has the player spent already, how much stuff do they have or progress have they made
• game playing community — both the range and variety of people, plus the personal relationships within the game
• content interest — is it a compelling subject or type of play to this particular consumer

Friction can be external or internal to the product, such as:

• having to pay to continue playing, or having to pay too much or by a means unavailable to the consumer
• having to play too long in a given session, or being not very interruptible
• not having the platform to play the game
• not knowing the language
• steep learning curve, or difficult to understand
• it’s too hard, or inability to make progress/succeed
• takes too long to start playing
• have to remember too much from session to session

I’m sure there are plenty of other examples.  The point I want to make is that total desire needs to exceed total friction for the player to keep playing.

That’s all well and good, and rather obvious.  To take it one step further:  a game must introduce friction at some point  – for play or economic reasons — at which point you risk raising total friction above total desire.

The key is to widen the gap between total desire and total friction to the point where it’s safe to introduce more friction.  That’s particularly important if you’ve made it difficult or unappealing to continue play without coughing up some dough.

One final thought:  total friction and total desire are unique for every individual.  You can manage them to the best case scenario for your entire audience, but that’s no better than setting a fixed price for your downloadable game and being happy with your 1% conversion.