Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.
Hmmm, I'm not entirely sure, though I also don't like the model. I have fond memories of stuffing quarters into arcade games, a "pay to play" model that's even more direct in it's incremental revenue collection. Yet that payment model did not lead to bad gameplay, even though it did limit the types of games that were created at the time.
Possibly free-to-play is different, certainly it doesn't have the same requirement of keeping the gameplay fast-paced, so it's possible to make a boring one. But there are plenty of boring flat rate games as well. I wonder what people growing up on this game model will think about it?
I agree. While all of these pseudo-gambling games have been common place on PCs and the web for going on a decade (maybe more?), it's sad to see it start leaking into traditional game spaces as well.
iOS is basically brand new, so maybe it was inevitable for these types of games to take over. I'm interested to see what happens in the next console generation - it might be a sad state of affairs beyond big-budget AAA titles.
It's truly unfortunate. If the money is really in F2P (and I think it is), I would hate to see "core" developers like Epic/Valve/ID integrate those features into their games because it makes business sense.
Yes, TF2 is F2P, but I think they've done it in a fairly tasteful manner. The MvM stuff with tickets is skirting the edges a little bit, but time will tell how it all turns out.
I agree that it has the potential, but I think that this is unlikely. The approach to generating the incremental revenue can be done in at least two ways: claiming expected value and creating additional value. To use two free-to-play games as an example, consider League of Legends (LOL) and Dota 2. LOL requires one to use either purchased currency or earned currency to unlock characters. Dota 2 immediately makes all characters available to play. Therefore, a Dota 2 player would expect to have that value, yet it must be purchased through time or money in LOL. Both games, however, create value through the selling cosmetic enhancements to heroes.
If you think about it, the demo model seems like a special case of the free-to-play model: a small amount of content is free to play and the rest of the content can only be accessed through a purchase.
Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.