There has been a huge rise in the “free to play” type model in recent years, where games are offered for free, but supported by microtransactions.
They tend to range over a spectrum, from almost demo-like games where you are definitely expected to pay, and soon, if you want to keep playing (Everquest 2 falls within this, I think). And at the other end, microtransactions only provide you what you can get within the game anyway - I think Lord of the Rings Online works like this.
My question to you all is, what parts of free to play do you like, and what immediately turns you off? Some games offer unique advantages to those that pay - does that mean you don’t play it at all, or does it mean that you’re more likely to hand over some money to keep playing?
Do you try and play through the entire game for free, even if you enjoy it, or do you budget an amount you’re willing to spend?
It sounds a little like I’m a game dev doing market research, but I’m just interested in a discussion with gamers about this relatively new trend.
One thing I will say - often in these discussions the concept of “pay to win” crops up, and it seems to mean different things to different people. If you do use it, please explain what you’re using it to mean.
I hate it. Seriously turns me off. This practice is especially popular on iOS, where the early days of the AppStore weeded out pretty much anything over a dollar. Now 90% of games are free to play, but have some sort of premium currency that you don’t exactly need, but all the good stuff is only available with that currency or through tedious farming. Please offer me a game at an honest price and stop nickel-and-diming me at every stage of the gaming experience.
It’s an awful, awful movement that’s ruining gaming. Since the next gen of consoles is going to support it, it’s going to be even more pervasive.
I don’t understand the mentality. You can get thousands of games on PC for a few bucks each. How little do you value your own time that you’re willing to entertain yourself with a second rate product just so that you don’t have to spend 5 bucks?
F2P screws up incentives. Developers on a treadmill to develop the game in a way that gets them money - so you have some item that’s overpowered and flavor of the month and then once enough people have bought it that one is weakened in the name of balance and you can flock to the new overpowered item. This apparently wrecked what was an otherwise stellar example of the F2P genre, Tribes Ascend.
A lot of people I come across, for some reason, are very proud of not spending money on games. I mean people that spend 20+ hours a week gaming, just so very proud that they never support the people who created this thing they love so much. People will play the shittiest F2P games rather than pay a few bucks.
The only time F2P seems to work at all is if you’ve got a game that relies on having a certain player count to keep it interesting, and it’s dying. So dying MMOs would be a prime example - it actually enhances the experience of the paying players to have more players in their game world, so in a way you’d be doing those paying players a service by allowing some sort of limited F2P functionality that gets the game filled up with people.
And obviously I’m more lenient towards F2P games that make their money just through cosmetic and other non-gameplay-affecting sort of ways rather than ones who try to make you pay for things that affect your power relative to other players.
But I just don’t understand what the fuck the point is. Due to digital distribution, gaming is by far the cheapest it’s ever been, yet we’re flocking away from extremely low cost high quality products to free shitty products.
My only hope is that there was some sort of novelty in the first f2p games that made a billion cheap ass retards flock to them and as the market chases those people they get spread apart so much that none of them are really successful, the whole thing is called a failure, and we can get rid of that shit.
I can only discuss the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), since that’s what I know about.
LOTRO started as a subscription (and offered a lifetime deal - now withdrawn.)
It was moderately successful.
Then it offered ‘free to play’ (FTP) as well - and things took off.
There are now far more players (so lots more interaction) and LOTRO keep adding expansions (so they must be satisfied with their income.)
You can play the main storyline right through to the end as an FTP.
Subscribers get regular in-game money, various game benefits (such as extra storage, a couple of new character classes and use of the Auction House) and access to many side quests.
I personally started as FTP, decided I loved the game and turned into a subscriber (about $15 / month.)
I have recommended the game to many friends - some followed my route (FTP - subscribe), others just paid straightaway.
All of us are happy meeting subscribers and FTP alike.
There’s a good atmosphere within the game - if you ask for in-game advice, there’s a swift helpful response.
Quite a lot of them aren’t second rate products, of course. Team Fortress 2, LotRO, Tribes: Ascend, World of Tanks and League Of Legends are all examples of FTP games with microtransactions that have good production values.
You say, SenorBeef, that you’re more lenient towards games that purely provide cosmetic items. Would you play a FTP game if it was built on that basis? And would you give them any money?
On another point you made, the couple of people I know who play Tribes: Ascend don’t drop money on it, and are still playing it. I don’t think it’s been ruined by anything, for them at least.
TF2 and LOTRO aren’t good examples of the quality of F2P games, since they weren’t intended to be F2P. Games that start out as pay titles but become F2P at the end of their life cycle or because sales/subscriptions were disappointing have most of their development done on a normal game dev budget.
I do play a F2P game, Planetside 2. I don’t like that it’s F2P and I’d rather have it be subscription based. But it’s the only place to go for that sort of game, and it’s a really good game, so I play it despite it being F2P. It would certainly be better if the only pay items were cosmetic.
I play the hell out of League of Legends, and I think part of that is that their “F2P” model works. 10 different characters are free to play, rotating every week. You can unlock every character (permanently) simply by playing the game - every match you play gives you some points that you can redeem for the character of your choice. The only thing you HAVE to pay money for are (totally cosmetic) skins.
Contrast this with Marvel Heroes, which somewhat turned me off. Sure, you could theoretically unlock every character just by playing the game, but you only get one/two characters unlocked at the start, and you need to rely on Diablo-style drops to unlock other characters. Said drops are apparently incredibly rare, meaning you could complete the entire story multiple times without ever seeing a drop. That makes me not want to play the game - I don’t want to play through the entire game as Storm or Hawkeye to have a small chance at getting the character I want. Realistically, if you ever want to be Spider-Man or Wolverine, you gotta open your wallet.
These games need to be careful not to devolve into “pay to win”, though. I honestly dislike F2P games because they seem to steer games down paths that are un-fun. See how the real money auction house destroyed Diablo 3’s loot progression, or how every game now features “consumables” that you need to constantly pay for, or how you’re nickel and dimed for variety in your game, when in the past, the full game would be open to you as soon as you paid a fixed price.
In order to implement F2P well, your game needs to be grindy, needs to have un-fun downtime (that you can reduce by paying), needs to be unbalanced (unless you pay to be on equal footing with everyone else that pays)… just ugh.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop a developer from simply unlocking everything if you just paid $60, and left the nickel and diming for players that might not want everything, but something tells me that’s never going to happen. Not when some people might choose to pay in excess of $100 for all the variety in the game.
It’s a misnomer. Free to “start” playing, maybe. I don’t like what this model does to games, not one bit.
Whether we like it or not, it seems this payment model is here to stay especially for multiplayer games. I dislike some aspects of it, but I’ve been having too much fun in some freemium games to hate it unconditionally - Planetside 2 was good and I would’ve never tried it had it had a normal box + subscription model. Had a lot of fun in good old prematurely buried City of Heroes, some fun in the new NWN and been lately playing some digital collectible card games (or whatever they are called), mostly Kings and Legends.
Especially in them it is clear that if you pay big bucks, you would be able to crush any opposition in pvp matches. My measuring stick is the question “Am I having fun?”. If I am, I keep playing. If I’m not, I’m not going to pay to see if I might have fun with the VIP treatment. I tend to be rather mellow about these things though, not really caring if somebody stomps all over me with their real money decks.
It is an interesting subject all in all and I’m wondering what would be a good place to read more about it. I know that most of these games get a significant part of their profit from so-called “whales”, the big spenders. Given the crappy quality of some of the games I’ve tried I can’t help trying to imagine what goes through the minds of people spending hundreds of dollars on them.
I play one F2P game, World of Tanks. It’s by no means a “free shitty product”. I like it, and thank all the whales who spend large amounts of cash on stuff to pay the bills.
It follows Tabby Cat’s template pretty closely (very grindy but paying speeds it up immensely) but avoids the unbalanced pay-to-win* thing. The premium tanks that can only be bought with real money (technically you could win lots of gold in competition, through specials etc, but you’d have to be super-elite to be able to afford a Tier VIII premium) get a profit buff, but aren’t any better than fully upgraded regular tanks of the same tier.
*I define pay-to-win as a situation where an item conferring major game advantage is only available for real cash. If a free-player can access the same item through normal play then that isn’t pay-to-win, even though the free-player has to spend more in-game resources or time to get the item.
I suppose MTG was the original “Pay to Win” game. Seems like its doing well, but I think only because of the rule that you can only use “current gen” cards in standard tournaments (I might be wrong on this). It’s simply not the kind of game that I want to play.
Some people don’t mind pay to win, though, and I’ll never understand their way of thinking. I suppose it’s realism, in a way - in real life, sure you can “pay to win”. I play games because everything’s fair, and all that matters is how good you are at the game…
Usually because multiplayer games that you can “play solo” still have some sort of bleed over from what other people are doing. So even though you’re not directly competing with other players, what they do impacts you and reduces your fun.
All that said, I play LotRO and like it a lot. I could do without the F2P trappings, but if that’s what it takes to keep the game healthy, I can accept that.
F2P didn’t help TERA Online for me. The game is still boring even when it’s free.
I also dabble, very lightly, in Airmech, and honestly, I’m wondering how these guys are going to make any money with the model they are using. The game is entertaining enough, and it -looks- like it could potentially be “pay to win” except that the stuff you pay for doesn’t really seem appreciably better than the stuff you don’t, and with the exception of “ultimate items”, which are apparently disabled in competitive games anyway, pretty much everything you might want can be bought with the ingame “currency.” AND most of the starting units are good enough that I honestly don’t want to replace them with something else, so I find myself going “Well, I might like to have that heavy tank, but I can only take 8 units into battle, and I like all 8 of the units I’ve already got.”
Edit: On the other hand, most mobile F2P games are godawful money traps.
Or they bring their overpowered cash golems to my team and help us to win, increasing my fun. Unless that makes you sick with envy I guess. Even back in the day when there was no p2win and “e-bayers” who bought other people’s accounts were thought as the lowest of the low, there was always somebody better, somebody spending more time with the game or who was in a more elite guild. shrug
Or if, you know, you a challenge out of the game and not to be handheld through the dungeon/mission/blah, whatever. And yes, believe it or not, some people do still play games to be challenged.
Sure. And those people were either respected for their skill and dedication, or reviled for having gotten their on the shoulders of people who did all the actual work.
No one is going to respect you for blowing $200 on a game. Not even the developers.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Do you have an example?
For what it’s worth, my experiences are with Champions Online (which is perfectly playable solo up to high levels even with no one else around) and Dungeons & Dragons Online (which is playable solo up to a certain level, at which point I hit a brick wall and gave up) and various Facebook games (for which I don’t rely on friends to send me energy/coins/whatever).
Don’t recall where I got this factoid from, but supposedly many(most?) f2p games make most of their money from a few hardcore cash people who throw down thousands. The remainder of the players serve as a mob for the whales to look down on and feel superior to. Anyone have any idea if this has any truth to it?
As for me I am religiously opposed to F2P games and will absolutely not play them. If the developer is not done wanting my money after I buy his game it creates a perverse incentive for him not to deliver the best product he can and hold back the good stuff. I will not support that sort of thing.
Sure; At the simplest level, it’s an MMO where you can play solo, but still interact with other people via the auction house, or by them being in the area and doing stuff that you are trying to do. Having lots of people who, for example, buy powerful items on the game store means there will be a much reduced market for the items that you craft, or that rare drop you might have found. Why would they pay for your stuff if they’ve already bought a Sword of Awesome +7 from the real money store? Makes it hard if you wanted to invest your character heavily in crafting. Or on the flipside, it might make it hard for you to find good gear to -buy- because no one bothers to make any.
But really, the long and short of it is that if you’re playing a multiplayer game, even if you’re “playing solo”, odds are that what other people do in that game do still affect you on some level, even if it’s a ‘metagame’ level. And if you have a multiplayer game in which the actions of other players make zero difference, well, frankly, you could probably be having more fun in a real single player game unless you really enjoy those awesome MMO mechanics or something.
If I had a good group of friends to do stuff with, challenging content might be fun. But if my choices are bunch of idiot puggers who can’t do it and quit at the first sign of trouble or a bunch of idiot puggers with overpowered gear/cards/whatever that average out roughly at the same level of power as competent players, I’ll take the latter. YMMV.
Dunno sir; I’ve had some very good experiences doing stuff in LotRO (and, back in the day, in Everquest) with…random people I met in the game. I think pick up groups actually have a seriously bad name. Yes, everyone has had That Group that made them say “Screw this, I hate people” but my actual experience is that most pick up groups are not like that. People just get burned once and due to the way human memory works, figure it’s always like that.
I realize that I am a statistical outlier in all things, but that doesn’t make my experiences less valid.
