It seems to me like this was inevitable. But the question does come to mind, why do you care that a game is F2P and has a cash-shop?
You either spend $15 on a subscription, or you spend that money in the cash shop. Either way, you're spending money to play the game.
Because the quality and quantity of gameplay goes down in a F2P game.
Consider this: a game developer wants to add a nifty new sword to his game. In a P2P game, he has to consider how much of a challenge should it be to obtain the sword. Does it drop off a boss? Is it crafted? If it is crafted, what materials are required? Is it a quest reward? If it is a quest reward, what is the quest? What is the story behind the quest? Is it a group quest or solo?
In a F2P game, he just sticks it in the mall. Done.
The P2P model requires that there be gameplay content for the player to play through, which leads up to obtaining the reward, but in F2P you don't need any content at all. You skip the gameplay and let players just buy the reward. Petville is an extreme example of what happens with F2P -- there is hardly any gameplay at all. You just dress up your pet in different costumes that you buy on the mall, and that's basically the whole game. Imagine a fantasy MMO where there are no enemies to fight, no PvP, no raids, no crafting. Instead everyone just stands around in a town dressing up their avatar in different costumes bought on a mall, doing / emotes at each other and chatting about Chuck Norris all day. Sounds stupid, but that could be the future of MMOs.
I hear ya. But I don't think that's a bad thing.
I've said since I first started playing MMOs that raids are crap. PvP content is superficial at best in most MMOs. And I've always said that if there was some vendor that just sold the same gear as raids give, that nobody would raid.
What you just said goes along perfectly with that. If there was such a vendor, in the form of an item shop, then nobody would raid. Nobody would PvP. It would just be a dress-up game.
But that is because the item shops are now higlighting inherent flaws in MMOs. And that's a good thing. I think if anything, it'll push developers into coming up with better content.
Take crafting for example, it's something that fell by the way's side. But it now has the potential of becoming center-stage again. Likewise with PvP, I think it could be pushed much further. An item shop could serve to equalize the playing field, and that would mean that gear won't be a factor in PvP.
I don't know man, I'm seeing great potential here. I think people are doom and gloom about this because they're afraid of change.
I've said since I first started playing MMOs that raids are crap. PvP content is superficial at best in most MMOs. And I've always said that if there was some vendor that just sold the same gear as raids give, that nobody would raid.
What you just said goes along perfectly with that. If there was such a vendor, in the form of an item shop, then nobody would raid. Nobody would PvP. It would just be a dress-up game.
But that is because the item shops are now higlighting inherent flaws in MMOs. And that's a good thing. I think if anything, it'll push developers into coming up with better content.
Take crafting for example, it's something that fell by the way's side. But it now has the potential of becoming center-stage again. Likewise with PvP, I think it could be pushed much further. An item shop could serve to equalize the playing field, and that would mean that gear won't be a factor in PvP.
I don't know man, I'm seeing great potential here. I think people are doom and gloom about this because they're afraid of change.
Many of us are looking for change, probably a lot more than many. Thing is, this is a very bad change. The goal here is to squeeze the sponge and keep squeezing it until the majority start to say "hey wait a minute, I was cool with the unicorn and all, but this is too much".
They've started to milk us and for some reason lots of people seem to like it now and don't have the foresight to see what's coming. But it's coming.
Make no mistake though, everyone's teats are going to have a cracking point.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
I don't know man, I'm seeing great potential here. I think people are doom and gloom about this because they're afraid of change.
Bang on. Its just a transition period. I played on a free wow server before where there were teleporters for travel and tweaked xp where I was able to get lvl 80 in a week. The result? I played more. I pvp'd way more. I actually had more fun due to the elimination of time sinks and the time to actually do fun things yet leveling was paced enough that I got to see most of the world. Those were changes to the core game rules. That part is good. Charging cash for the elements that help to eliminate these time sinks is sometimes (depending on the goals in the game) a form of extortion like the double xp card for sale in Maplestory. If you consider leveling up a competition then the existence of that card is annoying. These problems become even more evident in a game with PVP due to the direct affect money has to balance. Game mechanics need to evolve along with the F2P model. For instance, maybe in a PVP game, if you can buy something I want to have a chance to take it away.
On the bright side, things will probably get better rather than getting worse.
Subscription based models survive by giving players things to do to keep them playing and thus subscribed longer.
Free to play (cash shop) model games survive by making gameplay lacking without cash shop support or by restricting players access to certain content without visiting the cash shop.
And yet they are mixed together all the time now. Pub/devs claim their 50 box drop and 15 a month isn't enough to pay for anything, nope, gotta have cash shops and micro-expansions to have any new content now. I understand cash shops in F2P, but this hybrid thing is a just a greed machine.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Originally posted by Cecropia: At some point in the last few years the cost of the average MMO sub should have gone up in my opinion. Problem is many of the big players would have had to agree to do this at the time because one company isn't going to risk it on their own.
They have a term for this. It's called Price Fixing. Try pitching Price Fixing to a game company's lawyer.
What will happen is publishers / developers will try new and different schemes. Some will stick ( players buy $25 mounts ) and some will not.
If players pay for virtual marketplaces that lack decent game play then those are the kinds of games we'll be stuck with. Shallow, expensive, virtual marketplaces.
You get what you pay for so don't pay for crap.
( We all have to suffer with Shrek the 4th and Transformers 3 because of others' poor choices. Don't add to it by renting these horrible movies. )
If these games turn to crap then look on the bright side, at least we'll all have plenty of time to catch up on our reading.
I don't know man, I'm seeing great potential here. I think people are doom and gloom about this because they're afraid of change.
Bang on. Its just a transition period. I played on a free wow server before where there were teleporters for travel and tweaked xp where I was able to get lvl 80 in a week. The result? I played more. I pvp'd way more. I actually had more fun due to the elimination of time sinks and the time to actually do fun things yet leveling was paced enough that I got to see most of the world. Those were changes to the core game rules. That part is good. Charging cash for the elements that help to eliminate these time sinks is sometimes (depending on the goals in the game) a form of extortion like the double xp card for sale in Maplestory. If you consider leveling up a competition then the existence of that card is annoying. These problems become even more evident in a game with PVP due to the direct affect money has to balance. Game mechanics need to evolve along with the F2P model. For instance, maybe in a PVP game, if you can buy something I want to have a chance to take it away.
On the bright side, things will probably get better rather than getting worse.
That's a good thing to point out, the transition period, and the elimination of timesinks. I think that's what causes a lot of the problem is the divide between the "hardcore" gamers and those who love gaming just a smuch, but actually live their live sin the real world, not just the virtual one.
For years, to "achieve" things in most MMOs, it required lots and lots of time, and a very good portion of that was nothing skilled or challenging, they were simply timesinks that somehow became interpreted as "achieving X in a timesink = skill" when really its just "achieving x in a timesink = nothing better/more fun to do (both in game and IRL)". For years, we had the elitists who felt that if you didnt spend the pointless hundreds of hours doing what they did and achieving the same "status" a sthem, you were just some unimportant noob who sucked at the game.
That was the era of the teens/adults with no lives outsidee of the game, living in moms basement. Now we enter a new era of gaming...
Now those no-lifers have met with opposition, those who have grown up and have more of a "real ife", and rather than having hundreds of hours on end to waste gaming, actually have decent jobs, and savings & checking accounts with some extra $ to spend. Because of this theres a major clash between the no lifers and real lifers, because all of a sudden spending your entire life ingame means little to nothing because the pointless timesinks can be replaced with a transaction that takes about 1 minute.
Now instead of "hey look at me and my uber sword that took me 4 months of grinding and raiding to get, cause im so awesome", its "yeah, look at you, you spent 4 months doing that, i spent the last 4 months buying a new house, new furniture, paid off my car loan, and am busy raising my 2 kids... and just started playing 2 weeks ago and am just as strong as you".
Problem is, the no-lifers are getting all up in arms crying "dont take my pointless achievments i got through wasting months and months in pointless timesinks" and insisting that any other method but theirs is wrong and evil, even when that other method is being used in a new game that they dont even (and probably never will) play. Meanwhile, the rest of us are more like "you play your way, ill play mine, who cares".
Its a clashing of 2 seperate ideas and lifestyles, and eventually either 1 will win out and the other will fade, or we will finally reach a balance through some other method that most can agree on (or at least accept), and all of thes ethreads will be long forgotten and most will say "What a bunch of idiots we were even arguing about that, we should have just made things this way from the start"
Same thing happened to Voyage Century Online, they are making the game harder to play without paying money. There are 7 treasure map leavels, and now lvl 3-7 you have to buy a item mall item to be able to use... Not to mention various other *subtle* game play changes
Ok I'll be bold and be the dissenting voice here. I think F2P with micro transactions will become more and more common, partially because of DDO's success story but mostly because it really benefits everyone if done right. It benefits the players because they have more freedom in spending as little (or in some cases as much) as they want, and it benefits the developer because ultimately, they get more money out of it as it opens up both ends of the spectrum (ie. those not willing to pay the minimum subscription fee, and those willing to spend over and above it).
The thing is, game companies DO NOT have to nickel and dime their players to get more money. All they have to do is give them options. Again I go back to DDO as a good example. In DDO, players who don't want to pay a subscription fee don't have to and they can definitely reach level cap without paying a single cent, although they will most probably have to repeat some quests (ie. grind) that way. They can also choose to buy just the adventure packs they want, or they can just opt for the monthly sub. The cash store sells convenience items which again, players don't HAVE to buy.
Since they went F2P, Turbine reports that their monthly revenue has increased by 5x (500%) and as a result, the game has been revived and they are now actively working on putting in more and more content. To me that's a win-win situation and you only have to talk to veteran DDO players to know that they are for the most part, happy with the way things are now.
Critics of F2P's nickel and diming are making exactly the same nickel and diming mistake in this thread. You only focus on how unfair an item-shop game can become, but have totally ignored the biggest segment of F2P population: those who play for free or spend only a little $$. These people make up the majority and can cast slow death to any F2P that gives too much advantage to its paying players, even when they don't contribute financially.
Most of F2P players who play games for free or for minimum expense are actually smarter than many here. If given a choice, they'd pick a decent game with smallest gap between paying and non-paying members. When free loaders leave and game becomes empty, paying players will leave as well. Unlike many mmo hardcores, free loaders in F2P's aren't that addicted and can quit this genre any time for some other forms of entertainment.
So next time, avoid the same pitfall of nickel and diming when you judge any F2P. Paying more attention to reaction of REAL players in F2P's: those who don't pay and those who only pay enough to get more than their money's worth. They are also weighing the balance between their advantage (play game for free) and disadvantage (being a bit inferior in game).
So if a F2P is doing well, even small unfairness in cash shop items can be tolerated by most of its players, then you have no case against it. I play many F2P's and I often can find a way to use in-game gold to trade for those cash shop items. So I don't see all cash-shop games as "unfair" as some of you see here.
At some point in the last few years the cost of the average MMO sub should have gone up in my opinion. Problem is many of the big players would have had to agree to do this at the time because one company isn't going to risk it on their own.
If they had found a way to work this out, or a studio had actually taken the chance and found success, maybe we could have avoided all of this cash shop crap encroaching on the P2P games that are now being tainted.
No one will jack their rates until Blizzard does it, and then they all will. If WoW wasn't in the picture, we'd probably have been paying $20 per month for a couple years already.
However, I don't buy that they NEED to raise their rates. You can play LotRO for $10 a month if you sign up for three months...not that much of a commitment. I wonder how much a month on average Turbine gets from the people playing the "free" version of DDO...
One of the most common defenses for the cash shops in subscription based games is that the companies need more money, because somehow the subscription doesn't cover everything. They also state that no one wants to raise subscription rates for fear of not being able to compete. What these people fail to factor in is games that offer lower subscription rates like LotRO frequently does, or the fact that MMOs in the past did raise their subscription rates when they needed to (despite what the competition was charging). If subscription fees for games with 50,000 or more players didn't actually cover the costs, then why haven't we seen item shops sooner?
There was an article on this website awhile back where the author quoted a contact in the industry as saying that only about 1/3 of the subscription fee was needed to pay for operating costs; that's salaries, continued develepment, maintenance and upgrading of equipment, and everything else. The other approximately 2/3 of that fee was profit. As she said in the article; if only one third of the subscription fee was actually needed, what does that make items in a cash shop?
"Oh my, how horrible, someone is criticizing a MMO. Oh yeah, that is what a forum is about, looking at both sides. You rather have to be critical of anything in this genre as of late because the track record of these major studios has just been appalling." -Ozmodan
This is why I like EVE online's system of paying...
You're paying a subscription each month to play the game. You can purchase PLEX for money, which you can either use to keep playing the game (in leiu of paying subscription) or you can sell it, in-game, for in-game money. Usually about 200-300 million ISK.
In this way, the game has gone pseudo Free-to-play, in that a player with enough free time/equipment/resources can just buy other people's bought-for-money-from-CCP PLEX with in-game money in order to continue playing the game.
Then everybody's happy, the person who doesn't want to spend money can just spend his time getting the in-game money to buy more game time, and the person who doesn't want to spend time can just spend his money getting the PLEX to sell for in-game money.
If we can support a few more indie MMO developers like CCP, perhaps we'll see a resistance to these shady shenanigans of the ol' nickel and dime disservice.
I am playing EVE and it's alright... level V skills are a bit much.
Originally posted by kaiser3282 That's a good thing to point out, the transition period, and the elimination of timesinks. I think that's what causes a lot of the problem is the divide between the "hardcore" gamers and those who love gaming just a smuch, but actually live their live sin the real world, not just the virtual one. For years, to "achieve" things in most MMOs, it required lots and lots of time, and a very good portion of that was nothing skilled or challenging, they were simply timesinks that somehow became interpreted as "achieving X in a timesink = skill" when really its just "achieving x in a timesink = nothing better/more fun to do (both in game and IRL)".
I agree that a lot of achievements in MMORPGs are just timesinks and do not take skill, and that is definitely something I'd love to see changed. I've played WoW for a long time as a priest, and in all that time I still feel that my best accomplishment in the game was obtaining the Benediction staff back in vanilla WoW. It was a challenging quest which involved taking part in a 40 man raid, then a small group of 4-5 people, and then finally a relatively difficult solo quest. It didn't necessarily take a long time (the 40-man raid progression took quite a while unless you joined a guild that was already farming it), but it did take skill and effort. Unfortunately, Blizzard has not put anything quite like the Benediction quest in the game ever since.
Now if you were suggesting that acquiring rewards in MMORPGs should take more skill and less timesink, I would entirely agree with you. But you're suggesting that the best replacement for the timesink is not better gameplay, but a real-life moneysink. That doesn't make any sense. A timesink may suck, but at least that is time spent playing the game and hopefully having a bit of fun while you do it, which is the whole point of buying a game in the first place. If you take away that gameplay and just replace it with money transactions, then there's no game anymore.
The question then is what do you actually do in the game after you've bought all of the rewards you want? Just stand around showing everyone the shiny armor you spent $50 on? The whole idea of an RPG is to play a character that you keep developing and improving through experience and achievements. If you can trick out your character by spending money, then there's no RPG anymore. You can no longer improve your character until they put something new up for sale. You can go out in the world in your fancy armor and kill things, but what's the point? What is your goal in a F2P game when there aren't any useful rewards for you to earn through gameplay?
Originally posted by Hellmarauder Critics of F2P's nickel and diming are making exactly the same nickel and diming mistake in this thread. You only focus on how unfair an item-shop game can become, but have totally ignored the biggest segment of F2P population: those who play for free or spend only a little $$. These people make up the majority and can cast slow death to any F2P that gives too much advantage to its paying players, even when they don't contribute financially. Most of F2P players who play games for free or for minimum expense are actually smarter than many here. If given a choice, they'd pick a decent game with smallest gap between paying and non-paying members. When free loaders leave and game becomes empty, paying players will leave as well. Unlike many mmo hardcores, free loaders in F2P's aren't that addicted and can quit this genre any time for some other forms of entertainment.
Two problems I have with freeloading in F2P games.
First, F2P isn't much fun if you're aren't willing to spend significantly. Inevitably the best gear, best dungeons, best classes, and so on are blocked unless you are willing to pay. Some gamers are OK with taking whatever scraps they can get, but I'm just not one of those people. If I get involved in an MMORPG, I want to enjoy it to its fullest.
Second, in a F2P there's no way to know for sure how large a gap there will be between paying and non-paying customers in the long run. It may be that today the gap is small and you can compete in PvP and complete most of the content and everything without spending much money, but at any time the developer can suddenly change the playing field by adding more powerful items in the shop. The more popular the game becomes, the higher they can raise the bar, and you may find that the gap between freeloaders and paying players has grown exponentially in a very short time. Granted you can just quit if that happens, but then you've wasted all the time you put into the game, and you have to leave any friends you've made in the game, and that plain sucks.
Originally posted by Getalife F2P has a stigma attached to it that if its F2P its going to suck in quality. if NCSOFT can do it with GW and upcoming GW2? why not the rest? also people need to stop crying CRYPTIC everytime since other companies does it. too. SOE, Blizzard..don't forget to mentiong these two.
This is the thinking we need.
It is not the concept that is bad, it is the implementation. Guild Wars has a great system. You can buy things that help, or things that add convenience. You can buy bank space, character slots, packs of the acquired abilities for use in PvP, and other things. You cannot buy uber equipment or special things that would make you stand out too much from the rest of the people in the game.
I greatly prefer the idea of frequent paid expansions (or in GW's case, stand-alone products), and fewer, or no, free content updates, if there is no subscription fee. Something similar to EQ, but without a sub fee in addition to all the expansions. I would buy extra stuff like character and bank slots in a game I enjoyed and spent time in, and would prefer that to a subscription, even if the total cost in the long run was no different.
I understand that MMOs require a lot of money and time and employees, but it does not feel like a service for which I am paying, even if it works that way, economically. and with my schedule, and generally flighty tastes in games, it would work better for me because I would have the freedom to bounce from game to game as my mood strikes me.
I am nervous about F2P, though, because of the games selling the uber equipment, exp boosts, other game-changing stuff that can really change the balance of power. I have no problem with games selling appearances or convenience things. It is no different than buying the Collector's Edition of a game and having a special pet or emote or costume or something. The people giving extra support to the game should be able to show off how much they like that game. It is not that different from buying apparel that is game-themed and showing people, while you wander around the real world, that you really like whatever game.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
To be honest, my great complaint with F2P is the constant desire by devs to charge way, way too much for items. There is no better example than That Retarded Horse costing 5 bucks short of an expansion pack. For a fricken horse. A reskin of another model added anyways with some alpha transparency, a couple visual effects, and the skeleton being shown with sparklies and stars.
Seriously.
That is my big complaint. Even DDO does this, with adventure packs lasting what can be considered at times 15 minutes to an hour at best for 7-15 dollars (don't know actual price range). Or other classes/races costing 10 bucks each. These barely constitute microtransactions, and just go to show how gullible and naive people can be at determining the value of the dollar.
This is only further hammered home when you realize copying any data implemented costs virtually nothing and can net massive turnaround profits, even from 1 dollar from a significant amount of content in terms of time spent in. This is the inexcusible part of F2P.
Ignore games being virtual malls. Ignore bad gameplay. Ignore everything else wrong with F2P, and my big complaint with F2P is that publishers or the dev companies charge way too much for games that should be by all rights a hell of a lot cheaper. Just compare any real 50 dollar game brimming with content, such as Mass Effect 1 or 2, DA:O, The Witcher, earlier FPS titles before they became trite. NWN1/2, Baldurs Gate. I'm mostly bringing up Bioware games (either directly or indirectly), but you get the idea. For 50 dollars, your money can go into 50 hours of gameplay.
Now look at DLC's for these games, otherwise known as microtransactions in the MMO scene (for all intents and purposes I believe this analogy to be mostly viable). Kasumi: Stolen Memories for ME2 was...I want to say 10 dollars, but let's go with 7-10 dollars. For what is essentially 1 hour of gameplay, if that.
You're now going from a 1:1 dollar->hour turnover rate, again, on content that has near absolutely zero shipping/production costs (the original game esp. if distributed digitally) to 7:1 or 10:1 dollars per hour. A net loss in content per cost ratio. This is the fundamental problem with F2P. People choose to remain ignorant about just how cheap it cost to produce these items in the grand scheme of things, versus how much they actually pay for a 5 cent (cheaper, really) copy of the same thing.
"Iron Realms Entertainment may have become the first to profit from the sale of virtual goods when it began auctioning items to players of its MUD, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, in 1998"
Whilst there is little data to support this, Iron Realms and specifically Matt Mihaly do claim to be the first to use micro transactions in online games, selling virtual items.
Just thought I'd offer that insight to you, as it is an American company and I think it is important for people to know that something so many Americans hate, is something created by Americans in the first place.
I agree . Free to Play does nt really accuratly describe most "free" games . However the do differ quite considerably as to content its possible to play for free and how competitivly priced the cash shops are . Micropayment does seam to be the way of the future even in subscription based games as both EQ2 and WoW have shown recently . Although at the moment its confined to mounts and pets . My personal view is that DDO offers proberbly the best payment model to date offering a lot of free content to a certain point then offerering mini expansions as pay to play as well as a cash shop while also offering the option of paying a monthly free . This hybrid model is the most attractive buisness model . The proof of which is now that DDO a once flagging game is now a success .
I'm currently playing DDO and subscribing. On balance I'm happy and having fun but I would much prefer to play a game that had no cash shop. You see, even with going the subscription route DDO constantly tries to get me to spend more money.
If I fail a dungeon, for example, they advertise the cash shop. Small amounts of Turbine coins come fairly quickly as you first play and these get you accustomed to using the cash shop and the process involved. This is of course, very deliberate and gets you in the shop. One also recognises all the time features of the gameplay that are affected by deliberate prompts to use the cash shop (the way normal hirelings work, for example, versus the ones you can purchase).
The manipulation is creepy and annoying.
So yes, I agree wholeheartedly with the article, and I worry for the future. If games like TOR end up going the DDO route and having a cash shop then yeah, I'll be thinking about giving up on MMOs too. Getting a group to play tabletop D&D is something I'm also thinking about.
Two problems I have with freeloading in F2P games.
First, F2P isn't much fun if you're aren't willing to spend significantly. Inevitably the best gear, best dungeons, best classes, and so on are blocked unless you are willing to pay. Some gamers are OK with taking whatever scraps they can get, but I'm just not one of those people. If I get involved in an MMORPG, I want to enjoy it to its fullest.
Second, in a F2P there's no way to know for sure how large a gap there will be between paying and non-paying customers in the long run. It may be that today the gap is small and you can compete in PvP and complete most of the content and everything without spending much money, but at any time the developer can suddenly change the playing field by adding more powerful items in the shop. The more popular the game becomes, the higher they can raise the bar, and you may find that the gap between freeloaders and paying players has grown exponentially in a very short time. Granted you can just quit if that happens, but then you've wasted all the time you put into the game, and you have to leave any friends you've made in the game, and that plain sucks.
First, not all games are gear based. Free loaders in F2P's know very well the distinction between achievement in virtual and real world. If they don't consider virtual world achievements worthy, they wouldn't spend a dime and that's why they play it for free in the first place.
Second, I have problems with your time investment point of view. All games are going to shut down sooner or later, so either way your time is going to be wasted. Getting most fun out of your playing time is the way to go, not investing time heavily just to hope some fun will come out of it. If you equate fun with achievement, you really should consider picking up a real life hobby than this time sinker.
F2P game design does have its core members in mind, most of which are non-paying or paying just a little. But I consistently see critics at this site or others ignore this, and exaggerate the item shop evil. What good is showing off your cash shop items if the core game isn't good enough to attract crowd? And if game is good and attracts people, what point is there to bash its cash shop?
Two problems I have with freeloading in F2P games. First, F2P isn't much fun if you're aren't willing to spend significantly. Inevitably the best gear, best dungeons, best classes, and so on are blocked unless you are willing to pay. Some gamers are OK with taking whatever scraps they can get, but I'm just not one of those people. If I get involved in an MMORPG, I want to enjoy it to its fullest. Second, in a F2P there's no way to know for sure how large a gap there will be between paying and non-paying customers in the long run. It may be that today the gap is small and you can compete in PvP and complete most of the content and everything without spending much money, but at any time the developer can suddenly change the playing field by adding more powerful items in the shop. The more popular the game becomes, the higher they can raise the bar, and you may find that the gap between freeloaders and paying players has grown exponentially in a very short time. Granted you can just quit if that happens, but then you've wasted all the time you put into the game, and you have to leave any friends you've made in the game, and that plain sucks.
First, not all games are gear based. Free loaders in F2P's know very well the distinction between achievement in virtual and real world. If they don't consider virtual world achievements worthy, they wouldn't spend a dime and that's why they play it for free in the first place.
I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of F2P games, but from what I have seen, all notable F2P games are at least partially gear based. If they weren't, they wouldn't have much to sell on the item shop. The few F2P games that I can think of that are not gear based are basically kiddy games like Petville or Farmville. Even Free Realms, a casual kid-friendly F2P MMO with a lot of non-combat stuff, still has gear to buy for combat and other aspects of the game.
Anyway it's irrelevant to me whether it's gear based or not or whether it has worthy virtual achievements or not. What matters is whether or not its fun without spending a lot of money. If you know of a F2P game that is truly enjoyable without spending anything, let me know. I'd like to try it. F2P developers wisely charge for the majority of the stuff in their game that is the most fun, so you're bound to miss out on the good stuff if you intend to freeload.
Second, I have problems with your time investment point of view. All games are going to shut down sooner or later, so either way your time is going to be wasted. Getting most fun out of your playing time is the way to go, not investing time heavily just to hope some fun will come out of it. If you equate fun with achievement, you really should consider picking up a real life hobby than this time sinker.
Well, the world would surely be a better place if we all exchanged our gaming hobby for something more constructive, but I don't want to. I DO equate fun with achievement in games, and I don't think that's wrong. I'm sure most people do. It's more fun to win Starcraft 2 matches than to lose them. If you play the latest Sam & Max episode, you strive to solve all of the puzzles and finish the story. In the Sims 3, you set your own goals such as becomming a rock star or raising six kids, and it's fun when you succeed at it. Those are all achievements, too, and the games are no good without them.
F2P game design does have its core members in mind, most of which are non-paying or paying just a little. But I consistently see critics at this site or others ignore this, and exaggerate the item shop evil. What good is showing off your cash shop items if the core game isn't good enough to attract crowd? And if game is good and attracts people, what point is there to bash its cash shop?
Developers only want to attract non-paying members in the hopes that they can lure them into becoming paying members. It's a business. If they really focussed on designing a game that was fun to play for free, they wouldn't make any money. They just want to lead you on long enough to convince you to get your credit card out.
Um.. why did this column disappear from the "Columnists" section on the home page that shows the most recent articles? I mean, there are May 21th and May 20th articles there, but not this May 24th article.
Cash Shop games (you really need to get out of saying "Free to Play". They're not by any stretch) do not "nickel and dime" players. They Jackson and Grant them.
The point of Cash Shop games is to get a few financially-reckless people to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the game, rather than rely on getting a large playerbase of $5-15 monthly subscribers.
Cash Shop games (you really need to get out of saying "Free to Play". They're not by any stretch) do not "nickel and dime" players. They Jackson and Grant them.
The point of Cash Shop games is to get a few financially-reckless people to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the game, rather than rely on getting a large playerbase of $5-15 monthly subscribers.
Lets start getting the terminology right.
This does seem to be true for many of the Pay to Win (my preferred term) games that I've tried.
I wouldn't mind playing games like this if 10-20 a month actually provided an enjoyable playing experience and didn't reward players who chose to spend high amounts of cash to gain an edge.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Cash Shop games (you really need to get out of saying "Free to Play". They're not by any stretch) do not "nickel and dime" players. They Jackson and Grant them.
The point of Cash Shop games is to get a few financially-reckless people to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the game, rather than rely on getting a large playerbase of $5-15 monthly subscribers.
Lets start getting the terminology right.
Yes lets get it right. Calling users who spend money in cash shops "financially reckless" is just plain wrong. These people pay for what they feel is value to them. If other users do not feel any value in what is offered they will not pay. There is no "reckless" involved. An example is gift giving Facebook apps. I would never pay to send a gift because I don't see the value although I have sent free ones. Others find paying for gifts to send worth the money and do so happily. Facebook makes 30 million a year on those gift giving apps because a portion of the users find it worth the money. If players deem goods for sale worth it, they will pay. End of story.
That's a good thing to point out, the transition period, and the elimination of timesinks. I think that's what causes a lot of the problem is the divide between the "hardcore" gamers and those who love gaming just a smuch, but actually live their live sin the real world, not just the virtual one.
For years, to "achieve" things in most MMOs, it required lots and lots of time, and a very good portion of that was nothing skilled or challenging, they were simply timesinks that somehow became interpreted as "achieving X in a timesink = skill" when really its just "achieving x in a timesink = nothing better/more fun to do (both in game and IRL)".
I agree that a lot of achievements in MMORPGs are just timesinks and do not take skill, and that is definitely something I'd love to see changed. I've played WoW for a long time as a priest, and in all that time I still feel that my best accomplishment in the game was obtaining the Benediction staff back in vanilla WoW. It was a challenging quest which involved taking part in a 40 man raid, then a small group of 4-5 people, and then finally a relatively difficult solo quest. It didn't necessarily take a long time (the 40-man raid progression took quite a while unless you joined a guild that was already farming it), but it did take skill and effort. Unfortunately, Blizzard has not put anything quite like the Benediction quest in the game ever since.
Now if you were suggesting that acquiring rewards in MMORPGs should take more skill and less timesink, I would entirely agree with you. But you're suggesting that the best replacement for the timesink is not better gameplay, but a real-life moneysink. That doesn't make any sense. A timesink may suck, but at least that is time spent playing the game and hopefully having a bit of fun while you do it, which is the whole point of buying a game in the first place. If you take away that gameplay and just replace it with money transactions, then there's no game anymore.
The question then is what do you actually do in the game after you've bought all of the rewards you want? Just stand around showing everyone the shiny armor you spent $50 on? The whole idea of an RPG is to play a character that you keep developing and improving through experience and achievements. If you can trick out your character by spending money, then there's no RPG anymore. You can no longer improve your character until they put something new up for sale. You can go out in the world in your fancy armor and kill things, but what's the point? What is your goal in a F2P game when there aren't any useful rewards for you to earn through gameplay?
No, you misunderstand, Im not saying paying for it is the best alternative, im simply pointing out that theres a big clash between the players stuck in the old way of completing timesinks = achievment/status/skill VS the newer method of screw the 200 hundred hours of grinding and timesinks, i have a life (job, family, etc), and time = money, so better to just spend a few measly hours pay than waste hundreds of hours in game. (personally, the newer/2nd method works better for me for most games)
I use both methods depending on the game. Some games i do find fun and worthwhile to play the content, others i might only play for 1 purpose such as to pvp at higher levels, so i find it pointless spending 100 hours grinding & timesinking my way up, so spending what for me is only an hour or 2 worth of pay instead so i can get to the pvp quicker is worth it. I also tend to be a toon whore and switch characters a lot / play lots of alts, so to me replaying the same (usually pretty lame) content 5 times does not = fun, and i dont need to relearn the game since ive already done everything, so its more convenient to me to just skip over a smuch of it as possible and get myself leveled & geared. Understandably, it's not the same for everyone though. Some people make less money and some make more, so that time vs money equation changes for them.
Either way, the 2 end results are usually the same. People whine and bitch about things being unfair, paying player shaving an edge, etc but a lot of those complaints are based on ignorance and the assumption that all cash shop / F2P games are the same. Many have tried a F2P 2-3 years ago, didn't like that system, and assume that every other F2P game out there works exactly the same as that 1 game, having no idea how little that gap between paying and nonpaying players is in many games.
Many F2P naysayers are also unaware of the fact that several F2P games out there offer alternatives to paying. 3 examples are DOO, RoM, and Rohan.
-DDO allows you to exchange Favor, earned in game, for cash shop points, allowing players to either take the quick & expensive route, or the cheap/free & slower paced route.
-With RoM, you're able to sell ingame items, including stacks of gold, in the AH for Diamonds (cash shop currency) as well as sell Diamonds for ingame Gold. This allows even the non-paying players to buy everything in cash shop by taking the stuf fthey earned ingame and selling it, making it no different than any P2P game where you take an item, sell it for gold, and turn around use that gold for betetr gear.
-Rohan has a somewhat similar, though different method as RoM. Rather than being through the ingame AH, they have an Exchange Marketplace on their website. Players in game can take an item from their inventory, set it to post to the exchange market, and then other players can buy it with cash shop credits and transfer it to their character ingame. They also have a Market for selling Characters. Just like with RoM, this allows everyone to be able to buy anything in the cash shop by simply getting valuable items in game, or spending the time to level up characters, and selling them on the Exchange Market. When i used to play, through a bit of smart craftng/upgrading I was able to take fairly easy to find items, make them much betetr, and turn around and sell them on the market for easily $20-$50 worth of cash shop credits apiece, allowing me to spend little to nothing out of my own pocket for cash shop items over several months of playing.
Those are just 3 alternatives to the stereotypical model people assume all F2Ps use, and im sure there are other games out there with good alternatives too. Plus, we will probably see other alternative spopup over the next couple years as the F2P market keeps growing.
As to your last paragraph. good questions, but i ask in return... what is there to do after you spend 2 years and hundreds of hours grinding out your levels and gear in other games? Same thing there is to do after i buy stuff from cash shop... whatever you/i want (pvp, crafting, roleplaying, helping others, etc). Just as i cant improve my character after i buy a certain amount, same goes for P2Ps. You reach a point where there is no more real advancement to make, youve got top level and the best possible gear, just like me, theres no difference really. And just like i cant go out and kill stuff in my "bought" **see note below*** equipment, you cant go out in the real world and do anything with your gear that you spent hundreds of hours getting. In the end, there really is no difference. Your stuff is just as useful/useless as mine, i simply achieved mine through different methods.
**Note** Bought equipment is also a very common misconception. The majority of F2Ps, especially those released in the past 1-2 years, do not offer any equipment (other than cosmetic/style stuff) for sale. You still need to get all your equipment ingame, just like everyone else. Usually it's the upgrading materials for equipment that are for sale, and they are just better (barely in many cases) than those found ingame. Ill use RF Online for this example. You buy boxes, which have a chance of giving various types of upgraders for different grades of equipment. The boxes are basically a gamble, theres a very high chance that the upgrader you get is pretty much worthless to the point where you cant even give it away for free, let alone actually use it for anything decent for yourself, and some of thos eupgraders even have a chance of failing and destroying the upgrader & equipment. Its very rare, after spending $10-20 for 1 box, to get anything useful out of it, and ive seen people go through literally dozens of boxes in a row and get nothing even remotely useful. Ingame, you can manually achieve the exact same upgrades as the cash shop, it just has a pretty low success rate, getting lower as the upgrades get higher. The upgrade process also uses jewels, which increase success rate (up to 4 types of jewel per upgrade) which can be found ingame through various methods, but there are also bette rjewels for sale in cash shop. However, those better jewels are barely useful. For the better upgrades, those bought jewels only take you from about a 10-20% chance of succes to about 15-25% VS the best ingame jewels.
Comments
I hear ya. But I don't think that's a bad thing.
I've said since I first started playing MMOs that raids are crap. PvP content is superficial at best in most MMOs. And I've always said that if there was some vendor that just sold the same gear as raids give, that nobody would raid.
What you just said goes along perfectly with that. If there was such a vendor, in the form of an item shop, then nobody would raid. Nobody would PvP. It would just be a dress-up game.
But that is because the item shops are now higlighting inherent flaws in MMOs. And that's a good thing. I think if anything, it'll push developers into coming up with better content.
Take crafting for example, it's something that fell by the way's side. But it now has the potential of becoming center-stage again. Likewise with PvP, I think it could be pushed much further. An item shop could serve to equalize the playing field, and that would mean that gear won't be a factor in PvP.
I don't know man, I'm seeing great potential here. I think people are doom and gloom about this because they're afraid of change.
Many of us are looking for change, probably a lot more than many. Thing is, this is a very bad change. The goal here is to squeeze the sponge and keep squeezing it until the majority start to say "hey wait a minute, I was cool with the unicorn and all, but this is too much".
They've started to milk us and for some reason lots of people seem to like it now and don't have the foresight to see what's coming. But it's coming.
Make no mistake though, everyone's teats are going to have a cracking point.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Bang on. Its just a transition period. I played on a free wow server before where there were teleporters for travel and tweaked xp where I was able to get lvl 80 in a week. The result? I played more. I pvp'd way more. I actually had more fun due to the elimination of time sinks and the time to actually do fun things yet leveling was paced enough that I got to see most of the world. Those were changes to the core game rules. That part is good. Charging cash for the elements that help to eliminate these time sinks is sometimes (depending on the goals in the game) a form of extortion like the double xp card for sale in Maplestory. If you consider leveling up a competition then the existence of that card is annoying. These problems become even more evident in a game with PVP due to the direct affect money has to balance. Game mechanics need to evolve along with the F2P model. For instance, maybe in a PVP game, if you can buy something I want to have a chance to take it away.
On the bright side, things will probably get better rather than getting worse.
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Subscription based models survive by giving players things to do to keep them playing and thus subscribed longer.
Free to play (cash shop) model games survive by making gameplay lacking without cash shop support or by restricting players access to certain content without visiting the cash shop.
The two just do not mix well together.
And yet they are mixed together all the time now. Pub/devs claim their 50 box drop and 15 a month isn't enough to pay for anything, nope, gotta have cash shops and micro-expansions to have any new content now. I understand cash shops in F2P, but this hybrid thing is a just a greed machine.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
They have a term for this. It's called Price Fixing. Try pitching Price Fixing to a game company's lawyer.
What will happen is publishers / developers will try new and different schemes. Some will stick ( players buy $25 mounts ) and some will not.
If players pay for virtual marketplaces that lack decent game play then those are the kinds of games we'll be stuck with. Shallow, expensive, virtual marketplaces.
You get what you pay for so don't pay for crap.
( We all have to suffer with Shrek the 4th and Transformers 3 because of others' poor choices. Don't add to it by renting these horrible movies. )
If these games turn to crap then look on the bright side, at least we'll all have plenty of time to catch up on our reading.
That's a good thing to point out, the transition period, and the elimination of timesinks. I think that's what causes a lot of the problem is the divide between the "hardcore" gamers and those who love gaming just a smuch, but actually live their live sin the real world, not just the virtual one.
For years, to "achieve" things in most MMOs, it required lots and lots of time, and a very good portion of that was nothing skilled or challenging, they were simply timesinks that somehow became interpreted as "achieving X in a timesink = skill" when really its just "achieving x in a timesink = nothing better/more fun to do (both in game and IRL)". For years, we had the elitists who felt that if you didnt spend the pointless hundreds of hours doing what they did and achieving the same "status" a sthem, you were just some unimportant noob who sucked at the game.
That was the era of the teens/adults with no lives outsidee of the game, living in moms basement. Now we enter a new era of gaming...
Now those no-lifers have met with opposition, those who have grown up and have more of a "real ife", and rather than having hundreds of hours on end to waste gaming, actually have decent jobs, and savings & checking accounts with some extra $ to spend. Because of this theres a major clash between the no lifers and real lifers, because all of a sudden spending your entire life ingame means little to nothing because the pointless timesinks can be replaced with a transaction that takes about 1 minute.
Now instead of "hey look at me and my uber sword that took me 4 months of grinding and raiding to get, cause im so awesome", its "yeah, look at you, you spent 4 months doing that, i spent the last 4 months buying a new house, new furniture, paid off my car loan, and am busy raising my 2 kids... and just started playing 2 weeks ago and am just as strong as you".
Problem is, the no-lifers are getting all up in arms crying "dont take my pointless achievments i got through wasting months and months in pointless timesinks" and insisting that any other method but theirs is wrong and evil, even when that other method is being used in a new game that they dont even (and probably never will) play. Meanwhile, the rest of us are more like "you play your way, ill play mine, who cares".
Its a clashing of 2 seperate ideas and lifestyles, and eventually either 1 will win out and the other will fade, or we will finally reach a balance through some other method that most can agree on (or at least accept), and all of thes ethreads will be long forgotten and most will say "What a bunch of idiots we were even arguing about that, we should have just made things this way from the start"
Same thing happened to Voyage Century Online, they are making the game harder to play without paying money. There are 7 treasure map leavels, and now lvl 3-7 you have to buy a item mall item to be able to use... Not to mention various other *subtle* game play changes
Ok I'll be bold and be the dissenting voice here. I think F2P with micro transactions will become more and more common, partially because of DDO's success story but mostly because it really benefits everyone if done right. It benefits the players because they have more freedom in spending as little (or in some cases as much) as they want, and it benefits the developer because ultimately, they get more money out of it as it opens up both ends of the spectrum (ie. those not willing to pay the minimum subscription fee, and those willing to spend over and above it).
The thing is, game companies DO NOT have to nickel and dime their players to get more money. All they have to do is give them options. Again I go back to DDO as a good example. In DDO, players who don't want to pay a subscription fee don't have to and they can definitely reach level cap without paying a single cent, although they will most probably have to repeat some quests (ie. grind) that way. They can also choose to buy just the adventure packs they want, or they can just opt for the monthly sub. The cash store sells convenience items which again, players don't HAVE to buy.
Since they went F2P, Turbine reports that their monthly revenue has increased by 5x (500%) and as a result, the game has been revived and they are now actively working on putting in more and more content. To me that's a win-win situation and you only have to talk to veteran DDO players to know that they are for the most part, happy with the way things are now.
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Critics of F2P's nickel and diming are making exactly the same nickel and diming mistake in this thread. You only focus on how unfair an item-shop game can become, but have totally ignored the biggest segment of F2P population: those who play for free or spend only a little $$. These people make up the majority and can cast slow death to any F2P that gives too much advantage to its paying players, even when they don't contribute financially.
Most of F2P players who play games for free or for minimum expense are actually smarter than many here. If given a choice, they'd pick a decent game with smallest gap between paying and non-paying members. When free loaders leave and game becomes empty, paying players will leave as well. Unlike many mmo hardcores, free loaders in F2P's aren't that addicted and can quit this genre any time for some other forms of entertainment.
So next time, avoid the same pitfall of nickel and diming when you judge any F2P. Paying more attention to reaction of REAL players in F2P's: those who don't pay and those who only pay enough to get more than their money's worth. They are also weighing the balance between their advantage (play game for free) and disadvantage (being a bit inferior in game).
So if a F2P is doing well, even small unfairness in cash shop items can be tolerated by most of its players, then you have no case against it. I play many F2P's and I often can find a way to use in-game gold to trade for those cash shop items. So I don't see all cash-shop games as "unfair" as some of you see here.
One of the most common defenses for the cash shops in subscription based games is that the companies need more money, because somehow the subscription doesn't cover everything. They also state that no one wants to raise subscription rates for fear of not being able to compete. What these people fail to factor in is games that offer lower subscription rates like LotRO frequently does, or the fact that MMOs in the past did raise their subscription rates when they needed to (despite what the competition was charging). If subscription fees for games with 50,000 or more players didn't actually cover the costs, then why haven't we seen item shops sooner?
There was an article on this website awhile back where the author quoted a contact in the industry as saying that only about 1/3 of the subscription fee was needed to pay for operating costs; that's salaries, continued develepment, maintenance and upgrading of equipment, and everything else. The other approximately 2/3 of that fee was profit. As she said in the article; if only one third of the subscription fee was actually needed, what does that make items in a cash shop?
"Oh my, how horrible, someone is criticizing a MMO. Oh yeah, that is what a forum is about, looking at both sides. You rather have to be critical of anything in this genre as of late because the track record of these major studios has just been appalling." -Ozmodan
This is why I like EVE online's system of paying...
You're paying a subscription each month to play the game. You can purchase PLEX for money, which you can either use to keep playing the game (in leiu of paying subscription) or you can sell it, in-game, for in-game money. Usually about 200-300 million ISK.
In this way, the game has gone pseudo Free-to-play, in that a player with enough free time/equipment/resources can just buy other people's bought-for-money-from-CCP PLEX with in-game money in order to continue playing the game.
Then everybody's happy, the person who doesn't want to spend money can just spend his time getting the in-game money to buy more game time, and the person who doesn't want to spend time can just spend his money getting the PLEX to sell for in-game money.
If we can support a few more indie MMO developers like CCP, perhaps we'll see a resistance to these shady shenanigans of the ol' nickel and dime disservice.
I am playing EVE and it's alright... level V skills are a bit much.
You all need to learn to spell.
I agree that a lot of achievements in MMORPGs are just timesinks and do not take skill, and that is definitely something I'd love to see changed. I've played WoW for a long time as a priest, and in all that time I still feel that my best accomplishment in the game was obtaining the Benediction staff back in vanilla WoW. It was a challenging quest which involved taking part in a 40 man raid, then a small group of 4-5 people, and then finally a relatively difficult solo quest. It didn't necessarily take a long time (the 40-man raid progression took quite a while unless you joined a guild that was already farming it), but it did take skill and effort. Unfortunately, Blizzard has not put anything quite like the Benediction quest in the game ever since.
Now if you were suggesting that acquiring rewards in MMORPGs should take more skill and less timesink, I would entirely agree with you. But you're suggesting that the best replacement for the timesink is not better gameplay, but a real-life moneysink. That doesn't make any sense. A timesink may suck, but at least that is time spent playing the game and hopefully having a bit of fun while you do it, which is the whole point of buying a game in the first place. If you take away that gameplay and just replace it with money transactions, then there's no game anymore.
The question then is what do you actually do in the game after you've bought all of the rewards you want? Just stand around showing everyone the shiny armor you spent $50 on? The whole idea of an RPG is to play a character that you keep developing and improving through experience and achievements. If you can trick out your character by spending money, then there's no RPG anymore. You can no longer improve your character until they put something new up for sale. You can go out in the world in your fancy armor and kill things, but what's the point? What is your goal in a F2P game when there aren't any useful rewards for you to earn through gameplay?
Two problems I have with freeloading in F2P games.
First, F2P isn't much fun if you're aren't willing to spend significantly. Inevitably the best gear, best dungeons, best classes, and so on are blocked unless you are willing to pay. Some gamers are OK with taking whatever scraps they can get, but I'm just not one of those people. If I get involved in an MMORPG, I want to enjoy it to its fullest.
Second, in a F2P there's no way to know for sure how large a gap there will be between paying and non-paying customers in the long run. It may be that today the gap is small and you can compete in PvP and complete most of the content and everything without spending much money, but at any time the developer can suddenly change the playing field by adding more powerful items in the shop. The more popular the game becomes, the higher they can raise the bar, and you may find that the gap between freeloaders and paying players has grown exponentially in a very short time. Granted you can just quit if that happens, but then you've wasted all the time you put into the game, and you have to leave any friends you've made in the game, and that plain sucks.
This is the thinking we need.
It is not the concept that is bad, it is the implementation. Guild Wars has a great system. You can buy things that help, or things that add convenience. You can buy bank space, character slots, packs of the acquired abilities for use in PvP, and other things. You cannot buy uber equipment or special things that would make you stand out too much from the rest of the people in the game.
I greatly prefer the idea of frequent paid expansions (or in GW's case, stand-alone products), and fewer, or no, free content updates, if there is no subscription fee. Something similar to EQ, but without a sub fee in addition to all the expansions. I would buy extra stuff like character and bank slots in a game I enjoyed and spent time in, and would prefer that to a subscription, even if the total cost in the long run was no different.
I understand that MMOs require a lot of money and time and employees, but it does not feel like a service for which I am paying, even if it works that way, economically. and with my schedule, and generally flighty tastes in games, it would work better for me because I would have the freedom to bounce from game to game as my mood strikes me.
I am nervous about F2P, though, because of the games selling the uber equipment, exp boosts, other game-changing stuff that can really change the balance of power. I have no problem with games selling appearances or convenience things. It is no different than buying the Collector's Edition of a game and having a special pet or emote or costume or something. The people giving extra support to the game should be able to show off how much they like that game. It is not that different from buying apparel that is game-themed and showing people, while you wander around the real world, that you really like whatever game.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
To be honest, my great complaint with F2P is the constant desire by devs to charge way, way too much for items. There is no better example than That Retarded Horse costing 5 bucks short of an expansion pack. For a fricken horse. A reskin of another model added anyways with some alpha transparency, a couple visual effects, and the skeleton being shown with sparklies and stars.
Seriously.
That is my big complaint. Even DDO does this, with adventure packs lasting what can be considered at times 15 minutes to an hour at best for 7-15 dollars (don't know actual price range). Or other classes/races costing 10 bucks each. These barely constitute microtransactions, and just go to show how gullible and naive people can be at determining the value of the dollar.
This is only further hammered home when you realize copying any data implemented costs virtually nothing and can net massive turnaround profits, even from 1 dollar from a significant amount of content in terms of time spent in. This is the inexcusible part of F2P.
Ignore games being virtual malls. Ignore bad gameplay. Ignore everything else wrong with F2P, and my big complaint with F2P is that publishers or the dev companies charge way too much for games that should be by all rights a hell of a lot cheaper. Just compare any real 50 dollar game brimming with content, such as Mass Effect 1 or 2, DA:O, The Witcher, earlier FPS titles before they became trite. NWN1/2, Baldurs Gate. I'm mostly bringing up Bioware games (either directly or indirectly), but you get the idea. For 50 dollars, your money can go into 50 hours of gameplay.
Now look at DLC's for these games, otherwise known as microtransactions in the MMO scene (for all intents and purposes I believe this analogy to be mostly viable). Kasumi: Stolen Memories for ME2 was...I want to say 10 dollars, but let's go with 7-10 dollars. For what is essentially 1 hour of gameplay, if that.
You're now going from a 1:1 dollar->hour turnover rate, again, on content that has near absolutely zero shipping/production costs (the original game esp. if distributed digitally) to 7:1 or 10:1 dollars per hour. A net loss in content per cost ratio. This is the fundamental problem with F2P. People choose to remain ignorant about just how cheap it cost to produce these items in the grand scheme of things, versus how much they actually pay for a 5 cent (cheaper, really) copy of the same thing.
Garret:
"Iron Realms Entertainment may have become the first to profit from the sale of virtual goods when it began auctioning items to players of its MUD, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, in 1998"
Whilst there is little data to support this, Iron Realms and specifically Matt Mihaly do claim to be the first to use micro transactions in online games, selling virtual items.
Just thought I'd offer that insight to you, as it is an American company and I think it is important for people to know that something so many Americans hate, is something created by Americans in the first place.
I agree . Free to Play does nt really accuratly describe most "free" games . However the do differ quite considerably as to content its possible to play for free and how competitivly priced the cash shops are . Micropayment does seam to be the way of the future even in subscription based games as both EQ2 and WoW have shown recently . Although at the moment its confined to mounts and pets . My personal view is that DDO offers proberbly the best payment model to date offering a lot of free content to a certain point then offerering mini expansions as pay to play as well as a cash shop while also offering the option of paying a monthly free . This hybrid model is the most attractive buisness model . The proof of which is now that DDO a once flagging game is now a success .
You can't argue with success .
I'm currently playing DDO and subscribing. On balance I'm happy and having fun but I would much prefer to play a game that had no cash shop. You see, even with going the subscription route DDO constantly tries to get me to spend more money.
If I fail a dungeon, for example, they advertise the cash shop. Small amounts of Turbine coins come fairly quickly as you first play and these get you accustomed to using the cash shop and the process involved. This is of course, very deliberate and gets you in the shop. One also recognises all the time features of the gameplay that are affected by deliberate prompts to use the cash shop (the way normal hirelings work, for example, versus the ones you can purchase).
The manipulation is creepy and annoying.
So yes, I agree wholeheartedly with the article, and I worry for the future. If games like TOR end up going the DDO route and having a cash shop then yeah, I'll be thinking about giving up on MMOs too. Getting a group to play tabletop D&D is something I'm also thinking about.
First, not all games are gear based. Free loaders in F2P's know very well the distinction between achievement in virtual and real world. If they don't consider virtual world achievements worthy, they wouldn't spend a dime and that's why they play it for free in the first place.
Second, I have problems with your time investment point of view. All games are going to shut down sooner or later, so either way your time is going to be wasted. Getting most fun out of your playing time is the way to go, not investing time heavily just to hope some fun will come out of it. If you equate fun with achievement, you really should consider picking up a real life hobby than this time sinker.
F2P game design does have its core members in mind, most of which are non-paying or paying just a little. But I consistently see critics at this site or others ignore this, and exaggerate the item shop evil. What good is showing off your cash shop items if the core game isn't good enough to attract crowd? And if game is good and attracts people, what point is there to bash its cash shop?
I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of F2P games, but from what I have seen, all notable F2P games are at least partially gear based. If they weren't, they wouldn't have much to sell on the item shop. The few F2P games that I can think of that are not gear based are basically kiddy games like Petville or Farmville. Even Free Realms, a casual kid-friendly F2P MMO with a lot of non-combat stuff, still has gear to buy for combat and other aspects of the game.
Anyway it's irrelevant to me whether it's gear based or not or whether it has worthy virtual achievements or not. What matters is whether or not its fun without spending a lot of money. If you know of a F2P game that is truly enjoyable without spending anything, let me know. I'd like to try it. F2P developers wisely charge for the majority of the stuff in their game that is the most fun, so you're bound to miss out on the good stuff if you intend to freeload.
Well, the world would surely be a better place if we all exchanged our gaming hobby for something more constructive, but I don't want to. I DO equate fun with achievement in games, and I don't think that's wrong. I'm sure most people do. It's more fun to win Starcraft 2 matches than to lose them. If you play the latest Sam & Max episode, you strive to solve all of the puzzles and finish the story. In the Sims 3, you set your own goals such as becomming a rock star or raising six kids, and it's fun when you succeed at it. Those are all achievements, too, and the games are no good without them.
Developers only want to attract non-paying members in the hopes that they can lure them into becoming paying members. It's a business. If they really focussed on designing a game that was fun to play for free, they wouldn't make any money. They just want to lead you on long enough to convince you to get your credit card out.
Um.. why did this column disappear from the "Columnists" section on the home page that shows the most recent articles? I mean, there are May 21th and May 20th articles there, but not this May 24th article.
Cash Shop games (you really need to get out of saying "Free to Play". They're not by any stretch) do not "nickel and dime" players. They Jackson and Grant them.
The point of Cash Shop games is to get a few financially-reckless people to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the game, rather than rely on getting a large playerbase of $5-15 monthly subscribers.
Lets start getting the terminology right.
This does seem to be true for many of the Pay to Win (my preferred term) games that I've tried.
I wouldn't mind playing games like this if 10-20 a month actually provided an enjoyable playing experience and didn't reward players who chose to spend high amounts of cash to gain an edge.
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Yes lets get it right. Calling users who spend money in cash shops "financially reckless" is just plain wrong. These people pay for what they feel is value to them. If other users do not feel any value in what is offered they will not pay. There is no "reckless" involved. An example is gift giving Facebook apps. I would never pay to send a gift because I don't see the value although I have sent free ones. Others find paying for gifts to send worth the money and do so happily. Facebook makes 30 million a year on those gift giving apps because a portion of the users find it worth the money. If players deem goods for sale worth it, they will pay. End of story.
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No, you misunderstand, Im not saying paying for it is the best alternative, im simply pointing out that theres a big clash between the players stuck in the old way of completing timesinks = achievment/status/skill VS the newer method of screw the 200 hundred hours of grinding and timesinks, i have a life (job, family, etc), and time = money, so better to just spend a few measly hours pay than waste hundreds of hours in game. (personally, the newer/2nd method works better for me for most games)
I use both methods depending on the game. Some games i do find fun and worthwhile to play the content, others i might only play for 1 purpose such as to pvp at higher levels, so i find it pointless spending 100 hours grinding & timesinking my way up, so spending what for me is only an hour or 2 worth of pay instead so i can get to the pvp quicker is worth it. I also tend to be a toon whore and switch characters a lot / play lots of alts, so to me replaying the same (usually pretty lame) content 5 times does not = fun, and i dont need to relearn the game since ive already done everything, so its more convenient to me to just skip over a smuch of it as possible and get myself leveled & geared. Understandably, it's not the same for everyone though. Some people make less money and some make more, so that time vs money equation changes for them.
Either way, the 2 end results are usually the same. People whine and bitch about things being unfair, paying player shaving an edge, etc but a lot of those complaints are based on ignorance and the assumption that all cash shop / F2P games are the same. Many have tried a F2P 2-3 years ago, didn't like that system, and assume that every other F2P game out there works exactly the same as that 1 game, having no idea how little that gap between paying and nonpaying players is in many games.
Many F2P naysayers are also unaware of the fact that several F2P games out there offer alternatives to paying. 3 examples are DOO, RoM, and Rohan.
-DDO allows you to exchange Favor, earned in game, for cash shop points, allowing players to either take the quick & expensive route, or the cheap/free & slower paced route.
-With RoM, you're able to sell ingame items, including stacks of gold, in the AH for Diamonds (cash shop currency) as well as sell Diamonds for ingame Gold. This allows even the non-paying players to buy everything in cash shop by taking the stuf fthey earned ingame and selling it, making it no different than any P2P game where you take an item, sell it for gold, and turn around use that gold for betetr gear.
-Rohan has a somewhat similar, though different method as RoM. Rather than being through the ingame AH, they have an Exchange Marketplace on their website. Players in game can take an item from their inventory, set it to post to the exchange market, and then other players can buy it with cash shop credits and transfer it to their character ingame. They also have a Market for selling Characters. Just like with RoM, this allows everyone to be able to buy anything in the cash shop by simply getting valuable items in game, or spending the time to level up characters, and selling them on the Exchange Market. When i used to play, through a bit of smart craftng/upgrading I was able to take fairly easy to find items, make them much betetr, and turn around and sell them on the market for easily $20-$50 worth of cash shop credits apiece, allowing me to spend little to nothing out of my own pocket for cash shop items over several months of playing.
Those are just 3 alternatives to the stereotypical model people assume all F2Ps use, and im sure there are other games out there with good alternatives too. Plus, we will probably see other alternative spopup over the next couple years as the F2P market keeps growing.
As to your last paragraph. good questions, but i ask in return... what is there to do after you spend 2 years and hundreds of hours grinding out your levels and gear in other games? Same thing there is to do after i buy stuff from cash shop... whatever you/i want (pvp, crafting, roleplaying, helping others, etc). Just as i cant improve my character after i buy a certain amount, same goes for P2Ps. You reach a point where there is no more real advancement to make, youve got top level and the best possible gear, just like me, theres no difference really. And just like i cant go out and kill stuff in my "bought" **see note below*** equipment, you cant go out in the real world and do anything with your gear that you spent hundreds of hours getting. In the end, there really is no difference. Your stuff is just as useful/useless as mine, i simply achieved mine through different methods.
**Note** Bought equipment is also a very common misconception. The majority of F2Ps, especially those released in the past 1-2 years, do not offer any equipment (other than cosmetic/style stuff) for sale. You still need to get all your equipment ingame, just like everyone else. Usually it's the upgrading materials for equipment that are for sale, and they are just better (barely in many cases) than those found ingame. Ill use RF Online for this example. You buy boxes, which have a chance of giving various types of upgraders for different grades of equipment. The boxes are basically a gamble, theres a very high chance that the upgrader you get is pretty much worthless to the point where you cant even give it away for free, let alone actually use it for anything decent for yourself, and some of thos eupgraders even have a chance of failing and destroying the upgrader & equipment. Its very rare, after spending $10-20 for 1 box, to get anything useful out of it, and ive seen people go through literally dozens of boxes in a row and get nothing even remotely useful. Ingame, you can manually achieve the exact same upgrades as the cash shop, it just has a pretty low success rate, getting lower as the upgrades get higher. The upgrade process also uses jewels, which increase success rate (up to 4 types of jewel per upgrade) which can be found ingame through various methods, but there are also bette rjewels for sale in cash shop. However, those better jewels are barely useful. For the better upgrades, those bought jewels only take you from about a 10-20% chance of succes to about 15-25% VS the best ingame jewels.