Turbine just announced another round of layoffs. I don't think LOTRO can be used in an argument against this article. The way I see it, if LOTRO flopped completely, those devs would have been out of a job a long time ago and would already be working on another project (most likely not F2P).
All free to play games do is allow you set your own monthly budget. I know it's easier for a lot of people to say, just bill me the $15 a month so I don't have to think about it, but with cash shops in P2P games now, what's the difference?
The bottom line for me is a great game is a great game, P2P or F2P doesn't really matter as long as I enjoy it.
I'm sorry, but your not allowed to be this sensible on these forums. You need to immediately get on one side or the other and start making idiotic assumptions and broad, sweeping claims about an entire subset of gamers. Refusal to do so almost certainly goes against MMORPG.com's Rules of Conduct, and as such I'll be forced to report you.
:-D
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
See my response above this post. Your missing the bigger picture that the article paints. It's not just about you searching for some small bit of fun in the 1000's of F2P games that are spreading like a cancer, its about what its doing to the developers (you know the creatives) that have to work in this industry. Its pretty obvious to me what has happened to the game play and design model since F2P took off. Some of us though are oblivious to it.
Here's the deal. Conditions suck for everyone holding non managerial positions within the industry. All of the big publishers treat their employees like crap, and yes. I am very, very well aware of that. That is part of the reason I don't buy from EA, since they have been one of the worst offenders. So stop playing holier-than-thou.
If you need counterpoints to the idea that it is f2p that is ruining the market, as opposed to suits looking for a better bottom line anywhere they can, just look at CoD, or BF, or the WoW clones. F2p does not stifle creativity. The pursuit of wealth does. And that happens in every genre, every payment model, every industry in the world. This article, and everyone who espouses its viewpoint, are confusing correlation and causation. Bad games are one the rise because of corporate greed. Corporate greed is not on the rise because of f2p. F2p, a perfectly legitimate and functional payment model, is being heavily abused by people out for a quick buck, but then again so are plenty of other things in our industry.
All that this article says to me is that f2p is the new WoW: it's cool and hip to complain about it, and pretend that it's the source of all the industry's woes. "Radio will kill concerts!" "Tape recordings will kill the music industry!" "WoW will kill the games industry!" "F2p will kill the games industry!" So I'm sorry if I don't seem interested in joining in for a little narrow viewed fear mongering and front porch grumbling. If people want to buy into this latest doom and gloom craze, go for it. It's a free country. But try and remember how f2p was going to kill the industry when you're ranting about how WoW2/kitten based transactions/The Man is going to kill the industry in five years.
Oh and pro-tip: greed isn't going anywhere. So you can either complain about it on an internet forum, or try and root it out of your own life and be part of the solution. Your choice, but I get the impression most people on here will go for the easier path and keep whinging.
you are awarre that for the level of schooling or experence needed to make AAA games, develpoers dont get paid nearly as much as other proffesions that require less.
in fact most develpoers dont even get paid well at all and have a very bad job security.
I am a developer myself, I think I am aware of things like that .
then i missunderstood something in your post i had thought you where imply that devs get paid large amounts of money.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
All free to play games do is allow you set your own monthly budget. I know it's easier for a lot of people to say, just bill me the $15 a month so I don't have to think about it, but with cash shops in P2P games now, what's the difference?
The bottom line for me is a great game is a great game, P2P or F2P doesn't really matter as long as I enjoy it.
I'm sorry, but your not allowed to be this sensible on these forums. You need to immediately get on one side or the other and start making idiotic assumptions and broad, sweeping claims about an entire subset of gamers. Refusal to do so almost certainly goes against MMORPG.com's Rules of Conduct, and as such I'll be forced to report you.
:-D
that point of view is pefectly valid and one that most eople who enjoy F2P have,
for me though i will happily support any game i think is good and i enoy, no matter what type of payment module it is, but i prefer P2P simply because i prefer all of my money to go towards improveing the game instead of a good amount going toward what i see as new ways to et me to pay more money to the cash shop.
it is a diffrent point of view but i do not beleve it is any less sensable. but we all have our on point of view.
P.S> i swore off getting into these P2P VS F2P disscusions several months back, why didnt i stick to it
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
>cater to a gaming public whose sense of entitlement is out of control
Wise publishers, gouge the cash before they (the gamers) figure it out.
hahaha, political talking points in gaming.
There have been far more subscription based cash grabs than F2P, perhaps one day you will figure that out. But I doubt it.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Even games with sub options to limit restrictions, often (almost always) leave the subber in a worse place than they would have been if the entire game was subscription based. Why?
1. Because a large number of people will be paying -more- than the sub in order to acquire extra gear/whatever from the cash shop (and generally even in games with sub -options- there are still further tiers for increased bag space/character slots/whatever that you can unlock with cash.) This means the player is not on a level playing field with all other players, as they would be in a proper sub game.
2. No one benefits in a game with a cash shop, since everyone is on different levels of spending. Those who spend more (in every game really, even the games with good models,) always have an advantage, all else equal, over those who spend less. No skill or effort involved, just real life bank account. Take League of Legends, for instance. It has one of the best free to play models, but if I start the game now and drop a thousand dollars into it, I can unlock 20 rune pages (which gives me a serious advantage as I can customize my rune setups for any lane match ups,) a bunch of boosts to quickly acquire runes, and every character in the game. If League were a sub game, this would all come with a 15$ a month sub (but instead you have to pay 1k to get it all, and that's not counting skins--though in a sub game those would probably be earned.) If someone wanted to earn 9 of every rune/3 of every quintessence, and all the champions, it would be years before they earned enough IP to buy it all. I mean, maybe if they were playing 12 hours a day they could catch up, but even when I was playing the better part of each day (with a 70% win rate), I could barely save up enough to get each champ as they released.
3. As noted by others, developers are forced to develop shop-only content or other content with restrictions in order for the game to actually make money. Again I'll use LoL as an example (since it's model is considered one of the best.) League does a fair job at implementing changes/new content, but let's be honest -- the time it takes to add the content they add is very, very small compared to a proper MMO actually adding new zones/skills/whatever. Now imagine how much more League could introduce content-wise, if they weren't so focused on creating vanity shit? I mean, for a comparison, we can look at DotA 2, and how they were adding something like two champions a week for a while. It's just unacceptable that a game making as much money as League doesn't have more regular balance updates/teams working on each of its modes (rather than completely neglecting everything but 5v5.) The only reasoning I can think of, is that most of their team is locked up working on vanity crap (skins being the most regularly introduced content in the game--and seeing as legendary skins would take the same amount of work as introducing a new character.... (due to particle revamps/voice recordings/animation changes,) it just shows how much COULD be in the game but isn't thanks to the F2P model.
I enjoyed both parts of this. Forgive me if this is just my browser or some setting I have but if it's not my fault, please never ever ever ever ever put blue text on a gray background like you did in the Final Fantasy bit again, ever.
No offense but if some fool and his money parts from him easy then this person is a real idiot in the first place for not doing his research and having the patience to wait a few months after release. look at the Pre-Order fanatics who wipe their arse with money each time a shiny Turd is shoved out the door with a fancy trailer attached to it. you can't blame the game company's for not taking advantage of them.
They jump and buy anything based on a name or well know IP before they even have a chance to play it. They believe in games like they're some sort of digital messiah and they're an apostle on a crusade.
It's sad but as long as gamers like that throw money at obvious cash grabs and fund and support all the shoddy underhanded business models like F2P and cash shops , it will be here to stay.
"By all means, reach for the stars but you need to build the spaceship first"
I couldn't even finish reading this article because I didn't have a barf bag near me. How could you have gotten everything about free to play incorrect?
1.) Developers don't work for free on F2P games. Free to play games make MORE money, not less money, MORE money then P2P games. This has been proven many times.
2.) WoW is on the uptick? Is this a joke? WoW has lost what? 4 million+ subscribers and maybe some are coming back and now P2P is suddenly saved? FFXIV is successful, but it's definitely not bigger than any of the other popular F2P MMOs Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, etc.
3.) As far as I can recall, Zynga doesn't make MMOs, and LoL is not an MMO either. So why are you comparing free to play games that are not MMOs to MMO subscription games? Did you waste everybody's time comparing Apples, to Orangutans?
As a person that enjoys both P2P games, and F2P. I honestly do feel this is a topic worth discussing however, this article isn't worth the font it was typed on. #StrawmanArgument.
There's plenty of blame to go around for crappy F2P games (not all of them are). Devs, publishers, and gamers share in creating the morass that's affecting multiple genres. Let's not pretend it was entitled gamers who initially demanded that subscription games go F2P or that publishers in the West weren't carefully watching how games in the East were able to rake in the cash with P2W cash shops, lootboxes, and paywalls long before they made the swap.
In many ways the F2P phenomenon is masking the real issue that games are facing today-- the glut of poorly designed, unpolished, often prohibitively-expensive-to-make games that are being unleashed regularly. Their "freeness" gives them traction they wouldn't otherwise have but not even F2P can save poor quality indefinitely. Instead of seeing this for what it is, a transitory phase where publishers and consumers try to figure out a sustainable, reasonable model for F2P gaming in the future (a la the aforementioned League of Legends), people are acting as if this is the endgame.
If there's really so much discontent with this model across the board then the sway of capitalism should steer things back into more reasonable territory.
Originally posted by mohit9206 I admit i love free2play.I avoid or quickly uninstall the bad ones but invest lots of time in good ones that i enjoy.I have never spent anything in a f2p and probably never will,i just want to get the maximum amount of enjoyment for the least amount of money i don't care about the developers or publishers there are enough whales out there to fund them.All you need to do is avoid bad f2p games and keep playing the good ones so that soon enough the industry will realize that fair implementation of f2p is vital to retaining playerbase.
There are good f2p games out there? Could have fooled me.
Personally, I don't know any game that is listed as f2p that is truely free. Everyone I have tried always offers limited gameplay for those that don't want to spend money. Now of course there are some people out there with no life and can invest tremendous amounts of play into a game and that does not generally apply to them.
the irony of F2P and i know some people wont take the time to wrap there brains around this , but a model like Wows is the best F2P model out there.. you pay a monthly fee and the entire game is free..
Originally posted by mohit9206 I admit i love free2play.I avoid or quickly uninstall the bad ones but invest lots of time in good ones that i enjoy.I have never spent anything in a f2p and probably never will,i just want to get the maximum amount of enjoyment for the least amount of money i don't care about the developers or publishers there are enough whales out there to fund them.All you need to do is avoid bad f2p games and keep playing the good ones so that soon enough the industry will realize that fair implementation of f2p is vital to retaining playerbase.
This is the main reason why i do not like F2P games why should me spending money allow others to play for free?
What I find humorous is that all the attributes that the author is associating with F2P... is exactly the reason why people dont like P2P. I am perfectly happy with P2P and/or F2P... but have gotten burned by P2P so many times, for so many years, that I moved to F2P...
The reality is that none of these payment models are particularly bad. It is just how they are abused by some, that turns people off. At this time, I prefer F2P, as it is much more customer friendly.
F2P is just fall out from failed WoW clones. You make David that looks like Goliath but is worst in every way. Fails to meet expectations. Goes F2P to be funded by epeen spenders who spend more per person then Subs. Now you have a generation of MMORPG players who don't want to pay for the box/subs anything, mixed in with a few who pay more then normal and hate it ,and those big spenders who like to prance their rainbow unicorns around.
Due to the epeen guys we have a genre of stagnation that doesn't adjust due to failure because most games can be bailed out by whales. The question really comes into play what happens if F2P model falls face down even when those epeen guys get themepark fatigue. SOE seems like one of the few in the genre who kind of get it that you can do themepark crap layered onto sandbox games that give players unlimited content on top of your content. But its still SOE and kind of scary which exploitive means they plan to try with sandbox.
All free to play games do is allow you set your own monthly budget. I know it's easier for a lot of people to say, just bill me the $15 a month so I don't have to think about it, but with cash shops in P2P games now, what's the difference?
The bottom line for me is a great game is a great game, P2P or F2P doesn't really matter as long as I enjoy it.
I'm sorry, but your not allowed to be this sensible on these forums. You need to immediately get on one side or the other and start making idiotic assumptions and broad, sweeping claims about an entire subset of gamers. Refusal to do so almost certainly goes against MMORPG.com's Rules of Conduct, and as such I'll be forced to report you.
:-D
that point of view is pefectly valid and one that most eople who enjoy F2P have,
for me though i will happily support any game i think is good and i enoy, no matter what type of payment module it is, but i prefer P2P simply because i prefer all of my money to go towards improveing the game instead of a good amount going toward what i see as new ways to et me to pay more money to the cash shop.
it is a diffrent point of view but i do not beleve it is any less sensable. but we all have our on point of view.
P.S> i swore off getting into these P2P VS F2P disscusions several months back, why didnt i stick to it
When we pay a subscription we don't really know if the money is going to game improvement or a corporate bonus program.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
All free to play games do is allow you set your own monthly budget. I know it's easier for a lot of people to say, just bill me the $15 a month so I don't have to think about it, but with cash shops in P2P games now, what's the difference?
The bottom line for me is a great game is a great game, P2P or F2P doesn't really matter as long as I enjoy it.
I'm sorry, but your not allowed to be this sensible on these forums. You need to immediately get on one side or the other and start making idiotic assumptions and broad, sweeping claims about an entire subset of gamers. Refusal to do so almost certainly goes against MMORPG.com's Rules of Conduct, and as such I'll be forced to report you.
:-D
that point of view is pefectly valid and one that most eople who enjoy F2P have,
for me though i will happily support any game i think is good and i enoy, no matter what type of payment module it is, but i prefer P2P simply because i prefer all of my money to go towards improveing the game instead of a good amount going toward what i see as new ways to et me to pay more money to the cash shop.
it is a diffrent point of view but i do not beleve it is any less sensable. but we all have our on point of view.
P.S> i swore off getting into these P2P VS F2P disscusions several months back, why didnt i stick to it
When we pay a subscription we don't really know if the money is going to game improvement or a corporate bonus program.
same cna be said for F2P but at least i know it not going to makeing sparkly ponies that i have to pay 5 more bucks for
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
Very one sided and only representative of a portion of game designers.
I am a software developer of some 20 years. I came from the web side into a social gaming startup that grew and did very well. I worked with a lot of people who came from the AAA studios. Most of the people I worked with had spent years working on everything from shooters to mmo's.
The guys I worked with loved what they did. Social games were like the wild west for us. It was new and different. One thing I learned is that game design is game design whether it's an mmo, shooter, or casual game. It's about creating experiences that people enjoy.
Monetization has always been analytics driven. You are confusing that with the revenue model. Casual games don't lend themselves to subscriptions, they needed another revenue model.
As for game developers being taken advantage of, you know nothing about software development. Good developers can get a job anywhere and get paid very well.. I loved working on games, but not so much because it was a game, but because there were really hard, interesting problems to solve. There are other industries also that have interesting problems to solve.
Software development is an art that can be enjoyed and applied to things other then games. Good developers with years of experience make over 6 figures. This is not a group that people need to feel sorry for. If they worked somewhere they hated, they should have quit. It's one of the few industries where you had options even when most of the country was having it pretty hard.
Overall, social/casual games have opened up a whole new world for game developers. It's created a ton of opportunity. It's fairly common knowledge among game designers in the industry that social games are evolving. It brought in a lot of people who don't play games in a hardcore way, and gradually those people are migrating to more complex games. There are hundreds of social game companies now, and many many games that are nothing like the farmville genre of years back.
The studio I was at created an award winning game that was a fairly complex RPG. We even made a sandbox game at one point ( it failed, but we made it). There is a lot of that going on now.
Anyways, that's another opinion from someone who was actually there, not just looking on from the sidelines.
Comments
I am probably older then both of you and I have seen them all p2p, b2p, f2p ... everything, and I am still on the side of b2p/f2p. Cheers.
:-D
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Here's the deal. Conditions suck for everyone holding non managerial positions within the industry. All of the big publishers treat their employees like crap, and yes. I am very, very well aware of that. That is part of the reason I don't buy from EA, since they have been one of the worst offenders. So stop playing holier-than-thou.
If you need counterpoints to the idea that it is f2p that is ruining the market, as opposed to suits looking for a better bottom line anywhere they can, just look at CoD, or BF, or the WoW clones. F2p does not stifle creativity. The pursuit of wealth does. And that happens in every genre, every payment model, every industry in the world. This article, and everyone who espouses its viewpoint, are confusing correlation and causation. Bad games are one the rise because of corporate greed. Corporate greed is not on the rise because of f2p. F2p, a perfectly legitimate and functional payment model, is being heavily abused by people out for a quick buck, but then again so are plenty of other things in our industry.
All that this article says to me is that f2p is the new WoW: it's cool and hip to complain about it, and pretend that it's the source of all the industry's woes. "Radio will kill concerts!" "Tape recordings will kill the music industry!" "WoW will kill the games industry!" "F2p will kill the games industry!" So I'm sorry if I don't seem interested in joining in for a little narrow viewed fear mongering and front porch grumbling. If people want to buy into this latest doom and gloom craze, go for it. It's a free country. But try and remember how f2p was going to kill the industry when you're ranting about how WoW2/kitten based transactions/The Man is going to kill the industry in five years.
Oh and pro-tip: greed isn't going anywhere. So you can either complain about it on an internet forum, or try and root it out of your own life and be part of the solution. Your choice, but I get the impression most people on here will go for the easier path and keep whinging.
then i missunderstood something in your post i had thought you where imply that devs get paid large amounts of money.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
that point of view is pefectly valid and one that most eople who enjoy F2P have,
for me though i will happily support any game i think is good and i enoy, no matter what type of payment module it is, but i prefer P2P simply because i prefer all of my money to go towards improveing the game instead of a good amount going toward what i see as new ways to et me to pay more money to the cash shop.
it is a diffrent point of view but i do not beleve it is any less sensable. but we all have our on point of view.
P.S> i swore off getting into these P2P VS F2P disscusions several months back, why didnt i stick to it
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
>cater to a gaming public whose sense of entitlement is out of control
Wise publishers, gouge the cash before they (the gamers) figure it out.
hahaha, political talking points in gaming.
There have been far more subscription based cash grabs than F2P, perhaps one day you will figure that out. But I doubt it.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Even games with sub options to limit restrictions, often (almost always) leave the subber in a worse place than they would have been if the entire game was subscription based. Why?
1. Because a large number of people will be paying -more- than the sub in order to acquire extra gear/whatever from the cash shop (and generally even in games with sub -options- there are still further tiers for increased bag space/character slots/whatever that you can unlock with cash.) This means the player is not on a level playing field with all other players, as they would be in a proper sub game.
2. No one benefits in a game with a cash shop, since everyone is on different levels of spending. Those who spend more (in every game really, even the games with good models,) always have an advantage, all else equal, over those who spend less. No skill or effort involved, just real life bank account. Take League of Legends, for instance. It has one of the best free to play models, but if I start the game now and drop a thousand dollars into it, I can unlock 20 rune pages (which gives me a serious advantage as I can customize my rune setups for any lane match ups,) a bunch of boosts to quickly acquire runes, and every character in the game. If League were a sub game, this would all come with a 15$ a month sub (but instead you have to pay 1k to get it all, and that's not counting skins--though in a sub game those would probably be earned.) If someone wanted to earn 9 of every rune/3 of every quintessence, and all the champions, it would be years before they earned enough IP to buy it all. I mean, maybe if they were playing 12 hours a day they could catch up, but even when I was playing the better part of each day (with a 70% win rate), I could barely save up enough to get each champ as they released.
3. As noted by others, developers are forced to develop shop-only content or other content with restrictions in order for the game to actually make money. Again I'll use LoL as an example (since it's model is considered one of the best.) League does a fair job at implementing changes/new content, but let's be honest -- the time it takes to add the content they add is very, very small compared to a proper MMO actually adding new zones/skills/whatever. Now imagine how much more League could introduce content-wise, if they weren't so focused on creating vanity shit? I mean, for a comparison, we can look at DotA 2, and how they were adding something like two champions a week for a while. It's just unacceptable that a game making as much money as League doesn't have more regular balance updates/teams working on each of its modes (rather than completely neglecting everything but 5v5.) The only reasoning I can think of, is that most of their team is locked up working on vanity crap (skins being the most regularly introduced content in the game--and seeing as legendary skins would take the same amount of work as introducing a new character.... (due to particle revamps/voice recordings/animation changes,) it just shows how much COULD be in the game but isn't thanks to the F2P model.
No offense but if some fool and his money parts from him easy then this person is a real idiot in the first place for not doing his research and having the patience to wait a few months after release. look at the Pre-Order fanatics who wipe their arse with money each time a shiny Turd is shoved out the door with a fancy trailer attached to it. you can't blame the game company's for not taking advantage of them.
They jump and buy anything based on a name or well know IP before they even have a chance to play it. They believe in games like they're some sort of digital messiah and they're an apostle on a crusade.
It's sad but as long as gamers like that throw money at obvious cash grabs and fund and support all the shoddy underhanded business models like F2P and cash shops , it will be here to stay.
"By all means, reach for the stars but you need to build the spaceship first"
I couldn't even finish reading this article because I didn't have a barf bag near me. How could you have gotten everything about free to play incorrect?
1.) Developers don't work for free on F2P games. Free to play games make MORE money, not less money, MORE money then P2P games. This has been proven many times.
2.) WoW is on the uptick? Is this a joke? WoW has lost what? 4 million+ subscribers and maybe some are coming back and now P2P is suddenly saved? FFXIV is successful, but it's definitely not bigger than any of the other popular F2P MMOs Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, etc.
3.) As far as I can recall, Zynga doesn't make MMOs, and LoL is not an MMO either. So why are you comparing free to play games that are not MMOs to MMO subscription games? Did you waste everybody's time comparing Apples, to Orangutans?
As a person that enjoys both P2P games, and F2P. I honestly do feel this is a topic worth discussing however, this article isn't worth the font it was typed on. #StrawmanArgument.
There's plenty of blame to go around for crappy F2P games (not all of them are). Devs, publishers, and gamers share in creating the morass that's affecting multiple genres. Let's not pretend it was entitled gamers who initially demanded that subscription games go F2P or that publishers in the West weren't carefully watching how games in the East were able to rake in the cash with P2W cash shops, lootboxes, and paywalls long before they made the swap.
In many ways the F2P phenomenon is masking the real issue that games are facing today-- the glut of poorly designed, unpolished, often prohibitively-expensive-to-make games that are being unleashed regularly. Their "freeness" gives them traction they wouldn't otherwise have but not even F2P can save poor quality indefinitely. Instead of seeing this for what it is, a transitory phase where publishers and consumers try to figure out a sustainable, reasonable model for F2P gaming in the future (a la the aforementioned League of Legends), people are acting as if this is the endgame.
If there's really so much discontent with this model across the board then the sway of capitalism should steer things back into more reasonable territory.
There are good f2p games out there? Could have fooled me.
Personally, I don't know any game that is listed as f2p that is truely free. Everyone I have tried always offers limited gameplay for those that don't want to spend money. Now of course there are some people out there with no life and can invest tremendous amounts of play into a game and that does not generally apply to them.
I was confused about that as well. They did a free weekend once, but you sure can't call it F2P based on that.
What do you mean by truly free? Like MS Solitaire?
This is the main reason why i do not like F2P games why should me spending money allow others to play for free?
What I find humorous is that all the attributes that the author is associating with F2P... is exactly the reason why people dont like P2P. I am perfectly happy with P2P and/or F2P... but have gotten burned by P2P so many times, for so many years, that I moved to F2P...
The reality is that none of these payment models are particularly bad. It is just how they are abused by some, that turns people off. At this time, I prefer F2P, as it is much more customer friendly.
F2P is just fall out from failed WoW clones. You make David that looks like Goliath but is worst in every way. Fails to meet expectations. Goes F2P to be funded by epeen spenders who spend more per person then Subs. Now you have a generation of MMORPG players who don't want to pay for the box/subs anything, mixed in with a few who pay more then normal and hate it ,and those big spenders who like to prance their rainbow unicorns around.
Due to the epeen guys we have a genre of stagnation that doesn't adjust due to failure because most games can be bailed out by whales. The question really comes into play what happens if F2P model falls face down even when those epeen guys get themepark fatigue. SOE seems like one of the few in the genre who kind of get it that you can do themepark crap layered onto sandbox games that give players unlimited content on top of your content. But its still SOE and kind of scary which exploitive means they plan to try with sandbox.
When we pay a subscription we don't really know if the money is going to game improvement or a corporate bonus program.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
same cna be said for F2P but at least i know it not going to makeing sparkly ponies that i have to pay 5 more bucks for
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
Very one sided and only representative of a portion of game designers.
I am a software developer of some 20 years. I came from the web side into a social gaming startup that grew and did very well. I worked with a lot of people who came from the AAA studios. Most of the people I worked with had spent years working on everything from shooters to mmo's.
The guys I worked with loved what they did. Social games were like the wild west for us. It was new and different. One thing I learned is that game design is game design whether it's an mmo, shooter, or casual game. It's about creating experiences that people enjoy.
Monetization has always been analytics driven. You are confusing that with the revenue model. Casual games don't lend themselves to subscriptions, they needed another revenue model.
As for game developers being taken advantage of, you know nothing about software development. Good developers can get a job anywhere and get paid very well.. I loved working on games, but not so much because it was a game, but because there were really hard, interesting problems to solve. There are other industries also that have interesting problems to solve.
Software development is an art that can be enjoyed and applied to things other then games. Good developers with years of experience make over 6 figures. This is not a group that people need to feel sorry for. If they worked somewhere they hated, they should have quit. It's one of the few industries where you had options even when most of the country was having it pretty hard.
Overall, social/casual games have opened up a whole new world for game developers. It's created a ton of opportunity. It's fairly common knowledge among game designers in the industry that social games are evolving. It brought in a lot of people who don't play games in a hardcore way, and gradually those people are migrating to more complex games. There are hundreds of social game companies now, and many many games that are nothing like the farmville genre of years back.
The studio I was at created an award winning game that was a fairly complex RPG. We even made a sandbox game at one point ( it failed, but we made it). There is a lot of that going on now.
Anyways, that's another opinion from someone who was actually there, not just looking on from the sidelines.