Opinion on "free"-to-play games? and example

For me, almost all of the pay-to-play games out there seem like they would be so much more appealing if there was a way to just pay a one-time sum and get all the content at once. Having to pay for content $5 or $10 at a time is annoying to me if it is something I like. Yes you can still get all the content, sure, and even though I have never done it, it seems like doing so would cost 10 times more than just paying the standard $60.

To give an example: Marvel: Avengers Alliance. Great Facebook game, pretty much the only one I ever got into. However, I lost interest in it because for every little step along the way you could either queue up actions and wait for 10 hours or something or pay real money to speed up the process. I guess it might have made Playdom a lot of money, but for someone like me, I would have been far more interested if I could have just focused on playing the game instead of constantly hitting gameplay tolls. I'm aware that this is better for some people, but it seems to me that it would be more financially successful if more of these free-to-play games started giving you the option just to go ahead and unlock everything (at a reasonable price, not $250 or something...)

"Free to play" should be free to play. No in-game purchases whatsoever. Just my opinion of course.

The only good system would be a purely cosmetic one, but that would never happen because people want to pay their way to the top.

There are the F2P games where you can get everything if you spend hundreds of hours playing. I'm not really a fan of games that constantly expand with purchasable content so you can never catch up. I understand why they do it, to dangle the carrot a little further for the 5% that spend a fortune, but it really bugs me.

I think many F2P games don't really last all that long either, and all the time or money invested is for naught. There are some exceptions, but in general I am avoiding F2P from now on.

dota 2 is a good free to play game and the only paid items are cosmetic.

Path of Exile is a wonderful free to play game.

Age of Empires online has got me pretty burnt on free to play games and just shows everything wrong with them. Just let me explain: the premise of a free to play game is that it is free to play (duh) but the prices in some of these games are absurd.

Like the Orcs must Die games cost 15 dollars. Yet in the new free to play OMD game, you can spend upwards of 150 dollars. And this isn't the only game that does that. In some Free to play games there is so much you can buy, you can end up spending more than on 3 full priced games !!!

And the thing is, I'll be able to play the old OMD and Age of Empires games long after their release. Yet, if the servers of a free to play game shut down (because of popularity or because there is a new version) you lose all the money spent in that game, no matter how much or how little.

So I'll be wary whenever I play another F2P game, and I'll be wary to spend money too. No, just give me a full price up front, I'd rather pay that and not be troubled with microtransactions.

So in short: the old model >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> free to play model.

PlanetSide 2 is a fantastic free-to-play. There are in game purchases but they are only used for additional gear and the like, but those can easily be bought with in-game earnings. Those purchases help a little but are unnecessary for the core experience.

Path of Exile should be the gold standard for FTP. It has so much content and is so well polished I felt guilty paying nothing for it, and the buyable items are mostly cosmetic.

So you'd rather a game reliant on advertising? Because other than straight up free games, you'll likely get games with advertising to compensate. I honestly think freeloaders within free to play games are as bad as a game that adopts pay to win practices.

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Cosmetic and Personalization are the ideal ways to monetize. Followed by convenience then content gating (pay as you go), side grades and the obvious buying power being at the bottom of the barrel. Either way, I think the main driving factor for Free to Play games is to focus on improving the good will of the service, which unfortunately, very few Free to play games do. This is done by both providing a good game and a fair experience to players in terms of its business model. Personally, I treat free to play games like any service in the real world, I treat free to play games in the same way as I would tip a good waiter, bartender or a taxi driver that truly deserves their effort. Rude people wont get much of my money.

As for Path of Exile, I would have like a little more in the cash shop. Last time I played it, there wasnt anything I wanted to buy to support the game. I would have really liked some little extra inventory space.