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Can someone explain to me the appeal of F2P games?
WellzyC
Member UncommonPosts: 599
I don't understand the recent boom in popularity about the F2P model, Everyone's mom is talking about F2P. I ask, why?
Every F2P game I have played has been very under whelming.
- The graphics are "meh."
- The game play is always generic questing with the yellow Exclamation mark.
- Never more than 3-4 classes, usually genaric.
- Never anything new, always just recycled ideas done a billion times over.
- The combat and overall game feels like it was made in some ones garage.
Besides being a cheap @ss, what do people see in these games?
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
www.CeaselessGuild.com
Comments
People like free things no matter how bad they are,,,
Obviously they are free... that's about the only reason people play them. Yes, people do have that much free time to waste and they are that cheap.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do not play F2P games.
There are f2p gamse and there are "f2p" games.
At one time most f2p games fit your description. But now with several AAA games changing to f2p, it's not quite the same anymore.
And it's been shown, at least in the short term, that f2p games make a decent amount of money.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Entertainment is subjective.
I play a lot of F2P and find some fun and some not-that-fun.
SWTOR / LoL appeals to me.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I once heard it proclaimed..."If its free its for me and I'll take 3.".
I believe "You get what you pay for".
That is just me though.
First of all F2P means lowering the entry barrier. There are a lot of ppl never played a MMORPG before and are not used to pay a monthly sub.. for them it is a lot easier to pick up any F2P game.
The same is true for ppl not playing a lot, or never bought any computer game. For them it is easier to start playing with a F2P game, and they may get hooked.
About your complains. Look at games like Age of Conan or Star Wars the Old republic... they are both F2P now, to lowering the entry barrier. Are the graphics really just "meh"?
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
OP are you being purposefully obtuse? Many major games today are f2p, in fact more are ft2 then are not. AOC, Rift (soon), EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, AO, COH (before it closed), TERA, DDO, LOTRO, TOR, Vindictus, and so on. So will assume this thread is just typical bait. Out of all those games which I played/enjoyed, only one did I spend a penny in and that was COH and it was $4.
Now you could extend your argument to all MMO's be them free or not couldn't you? So my question would be why would I pay for a game, when I could get equal quality/enjoyment for free?
What do I see? I see a game I can try for free. If it's not very good, I merely uninstall, no dollars wasted.
Well for the U.S. I will blame it on failing education system. Most people can not understand that they spend way more money on F2P games then they will on Sub. based games.
It sounds like you're basing this entirely on F2P games from 5+ years ago. There are plenty of high quality F2P games now and many P2P titles are switching to F2P. You ask what people see in a game? The answer differs for every person and changes depending on the game. To accuse every F2P game of being low quality and every player cheap is just plain ignorant.
while a sub by itself is not a measure of the quality of a game. The willingness of players to pay a sub to play a game often is, you could even say that the less inclined a player is to spend money in a F2P game then the less attached they are to the game in question, which in a way is a sort of indication of the quality of the game itself.
You should qualify that by stating that SL was a flop as far a Pay to Play games go....
The quality of a game is not dependent on it's payment model. However, a game's payment model IS dependent on the quality of the game. A great game can charge a box price and monthly subscription. A game that isn't as good can only hope to make money off the F2P predatory business model.
What is hard to understand about trying out games for free? People have been doing that very thing for twenty years with free trials, shareware copies of games and more recently with betas and open betas. For that matter, how is F2P substantially different from free trials, or shareware versions of games?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Half of those things, if not more, people say about most sub games that come out too.
The main thing about F2P that attracts people, is the low bar of entry. It helps to keep the games populated and new blood cycling in.
In past p2p games, there is the initial wave of new players on a release, but then gradually people find that they dont feel the game is worth a sub, they quit, and thats one less person in the world. The world gradually empties, which leads more people to quit, creating a cascade effect. With a f2p model, the theory is, if someone enjoys the game, but not neccisarily enough to spend money on, they can play free, creating a more populated world for the paying players to enjoy, the free player is part of the content to keep the paying player in the game. At the same time, the free player will see some of the cool stuff the paying player has, providing a temptation to spend money. This is, of course the idealized vision.
I guess the main takeaway is the idea of keeping "potential" customers involved in your product, so you can tempt them to spend money.
Also with f2p games, in theory, since there is little, to no, bar of entry, people are a bit more forgiving (again in theory) than someone who has spent $50-$60 for a box and is expected to spend $15 a month.
you only get what you pay for. If you dont mind being secondrate citizen in agame.
All those games mentioned by Dgarbini you only get part of the game for free ; so they re not actually f2p games.
And yes I know you dont have to pay to play them but your in-game experience will be way better if you just sub (or buy things separately)
Most AAA mmos that have gone f2p were trash from the start. Have yet to be impressed by f2ps, some have interesting ideas and poor execution while others are bland carbon copies of something else. Granted that's an observation of the genre as a whole with a few outliers. At the same time some p2p would do better if they went f2p at this point, but that's mostly older mmos like daoc.
P2P doesn't guarantee quality by any means, but I will say that at least in p2p they're focusing on real content rather than spending a decent amount of effort trying to get you to pay for something.
This is all about mmos, f2p mobas are great.
-How many games have we bought the hype only to be disappointed and feeling mislead
-In case you haven't noticed many economies are in a shambles.Discretionary income is minimal for too many
-The pool of people who game has become much more experienced...and skeptical
-The ongoing parade of poor games confirms the instincts of the player pool.They aren't easily persuaded to pop down $59 and hope.
I don't have a clue. I haven't found not 1 F2P or B2P game that was worth playing past a few weeks. Like you said, same old generic, mediocre, questing games.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
It's safe to say that F2P Runescape has better questing mechanics than most AAA MMO, if presentation is a bit suck due to the medium(then again when you're competing with fetch 10 quests it's not very braggable).
Mabinogi had some pretty interesting takes on combat and skill based development even when it came to the US(it was out for half a decade before it came here).
League of Legends, has better PvP(or at least 'saner') PvPer when approached from a competitive angle when compared to nearly any MMO. EvE/Darkfall approaches PvPer from an economic angle so that comparison doesn't matter.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Video gaming is an extremely inexpensive hobby, so long as you already have the PC or console hardware. Even if you only get 20 hours of entertainment out of a $59 game, that's only $3 per hour. That's less expensive than most movies, going out for drinks, dinner, etc. If $59 were a major investment for me, I think I would consider taking advantage of government sponsored learning programs. These fill your free time, generally cost little to nothing and open doors to better paying jobs.
Edit: As for sub games, if you play only 5 hours per month (1.25 hours per week), you hit that same $3 per hour cost.
And exactly that is the misunderstanding for what F2P games are for.
If you play a game very regularly you should sub to this game. F2P is nothing else as a extended trial to get into the game, into the genre, into gaming in general.
But it comes also down to what kind of F2P game it is. In a game like Dota 2 (no sub available, no empowering items available, just tournament tickets and cosmetics) you may very well be a very active member and not spend a lot of money.. but for that kind of game it is the mass appeal, which brings in the money. (maybe just 1 out of 10 will ever invest anything, but if you have 15 millions of player instead of 1 million sold, it will be very well enough)
In F2P with additional Premium Membership(Subscription) it is meant to be a subscriber if you are really into this game, and the F2P part is just for casuals or to get into the game in the first place.
And some others it is meant to unlock content per microtransaction (so you have to actually buy something from the cash shop). All are very different, all have very different solutions to monetize. But all are called F2P.