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Time for F2P?

Written by Mike Holmes on the 25th of July 2013 at 13:41

More and more often developers and publishers are giving us stuff for free. Im not complaining too loudly, we all love free stuff, I'm no different in that respect. The only problem is that these games are often far from free, and the price of admission is usually your most valuable commodity; your time.

We're baited through the door with the promise of free content, free action, free adventures. But often sticking around and getting to the good stuff eludes us, because the investment in time is too large, it takes us too long to get there. The grind brought about by free-to-play MMOs, which are increasingly adopting the model as a way to draw in new players, often requires huge investments of time and energy. It's difficult to call out publishers when they're offering free content, even if the path to the good stuff is a convoluted one.

If you're one of those players who'll happily grind their way through to the completion of a game without paying a penny, you're deemed an acceptable loss. Sure the publisher would prefer to get paid, but often they're happy that there's another player on their servers. They're all looking to achieve a critical mass of users, where a larger community attracts larger numbers of players.

There are other ways that the model is implemented. I recently downloaded Sonic Dash to my iPad. It's now free, presumably after selling an underwhelming amount of copies through the App Store, but the way it's been presented is a little overwhelming. Adverts pop up, and bought credits can be used to cheat death. Of course, if you're thick skinned you can play through the distractions, but for many it'll be a frustrating barrier to entry. I include myself in that bracket. I have too many good games to play to spend time dismissing adverts and closing down superfluous menus. You might think you're getting stuff for free, but when there's adverts involved, there's something else going on.

The old saying - if you're not paying, you're not the customer - springs to mind.

MMO shooters have a different way of operating within the free-to-play arena, and it's just as absurd. In Ghost Recon Online you have to pay for grenades, for example. Dust 514 asks you to regularly top up your kit with exotic weapons and vehicles.

One of my personal favourites is the model implemented by games like Marvel Heroes and League of Legends (both, incidentally, inspired and influenced by old Blizzard games), whereby players pay for the character they like, and then play through the content, occasionally earning enough in-game credit to supplement their purchase. That said, games like Planetside 2 do it best, where the base game is free, but buffs and new equipment can be purchased at will. If you spend enough time in a game like that, sooner or later you're going to want to try some new equipment, and you're hardly going to begrudge paying for it because of the unintrusive way the free-to-play's been implemented (at the end of the day though, even here levelling up is still a bit of a grind).

I'm glad it's flourishing as a payment method. The only thing i'd like to see more of is packages where you can spend what you would on a normal game, and get something that's more complete and less grindy. I'd have no problem paying £40 for a complete version of Planetside 2, or maybe even Dust 514. That the latter offers packages of a value that is twice that number, that still don't feel like the finished product is for me a problem. From time to time it still feels like the payment model can punish players too much for playing for free, and take too much money from those who are prepared to put their hand in their pocket. At the end of the day even free players are investing something, something far more valuable than money, and until some studios recognise that symbiotic relationship more acutely, we're still going to run into the occasional daft implementation of a free-to-play financial model.

HQ