7 ms·

As a (non game) developer, I can say, thay free to play is instantly dead on arrival for me. The moment something is known to become or becomes free to play is

As a (non game) developer, I can say, thay free to play is instantly dead on arrival for me. The moment something is known to become or becomes free to play is the moment I lose all interest. The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me. Developers need to eat, Managers need to eat, Marketeers need to eat... And sometimes psychologists doing evil mindtricks and supporting gambling addictions need to eat too... Or buy a lambo, or two. I don't care whether it's only cosmetic or not, I have and will never support that business model

chrismcb 5y ago
I don't follow. Tapped out is free to play, and for years was one of the top money earners. I'm pretty sure the developers were eating quite well. If someone releases their game for free, it is their prerogative. Either they want to give it away for free, it they've figured out another way to monetize it.
Kiro 5y ago
Good thing they have whales like me who will spend 100x of what you would have paid. They don't need you when they can milk me.
- soultrees 5y ago
  Genuine question out of curiosity - what do you get out spending that much on a game? I’ve heard some whales spending 10-20k a week and that’s probably not even the highest. Do you get genuine enjoyment out of it or do you ever feel fleeced at all?
  - Kiro 5y ago
    It depends on what kind of loot box. For cosmetics it's pretty random. When the game itself feels stale I want a new outfit to make it feel fresh. For P2W it's a treat after I've been grinding freemium for a while. It's like opening a beer on Friday after work. I don't spend 10-20k a week but I do occasionally spend that amount on one game during its whole lifetime. However, that also means I've gotten thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it. But yes, while I'm only a 1000x (1000x compared to someone who just pays $20 upfront) there are certainly people who are 1000000x and much bigger whales than me. I can't speak for them.
    - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
      The beer on Friday metaphor resonates with me (even though I don’t drink beer), that’s how I perceive buying in game items. Out of curiosity which game(s) did you spend 10-20k on?
    - dvlsg 5y ago
      I think that's part of the problem. Because skipping the grind by paying money is seen as a treat, game companies now have the incentive to turn their games into a chore on purpose to convince people to treat themselves.
  - yomly 5y ago
    I think those numbers are all relative? If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays? Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix? Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla. We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Just to follow up on what you said, one of the things I've learned after a couple of years in online retail is that a huge proportion of people genuinely enjoy spending money. They don't consider the opportunity cost or feel the pain of lost potential, but get a rush of "feeling rich" whenever they spend $50 on a T-shirt they'll wear once. It's cross-cultural, natural psychology, and I doubt it'll go anywhere.
      - Beltalowda 5y ago
        A lot of people have this; I certainly do: when I buy something new it feels good, for a short time. I actually live a fairly frugal life, and I think acknowledging this is important: "do I really want or need this or am I just making myself feel better for a few hours?"
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Some people have enough money that they don't care about the money. But other people become addicted and end up spending money they don't have. Just like some people dropping 100k in Vegas in a weekend are paying for the experience and VIP treatment and others just need one more bet to replenish Johnnys college fund.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I don't spend near as much as GP but I found that I am OK spending a comparable number (or a little more) to a classic boxed game such as a console title, so around $50-$100, if I enjoy the game enough. Two examples: Roblox and Genshin Impact. Me and the kid got into Roblox entirely for free. Beyond all the games she enjoys even without any paid features, we got a dead-simple game creation platform with world-class MMO built in. I thought that was nice enough to warrant buying a few gift cards for her and the peers. We got into GI for free as well. I was apprehensive at first because I heard from friends that GI is an evil gacha game preying on addict personalities. But once we started it we enjoyed the artwork and the game so much through the hours of main quest lines and beautiful content that I thought it was as good or better than Zelda BOTW so why not kick back at least the BOTW purchase price?
- legalcorrection 5y ago
  This is like bragging about being in the demographic that keeps celebrity gossip tabloids afloat. Do you also lose a lot of money on MLM schemes? Are Vegas casinos comping week-long stays for you?
  - Kiro 5y ago
    I'm not into MLM schemes (or gambling) but I do love celebrity gossip. Since apparently you get to decide what interests are cool or not, I would love to hear what kind of amazing things you are into!
    - legalcorrection 5y ago
      Mostly telling people on the internet that they are wrong.
      - Handytinge 5y ago
        This is the funniest thing I've seen on HN!
      - Loughla 5y ago
        This is either the most amazingly self-aware joke I've seen, or a completely tone-deaf unbelievably cynical response. I can't tell.
        legalcorrection 5y ago
        :)
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    You are implying that F2P is unethical. What Kiro is saying, I believe, is that the person they responded to had an invalid point. Someone was suggesting that F2P is inherently dishonest because "developers need to eat" and clearly there are unethical moneymaking behaviors happening. Kiro is saying "No, it isn't inherently unethical, and there are people like me willing to spend the money on cosmetics and lootboxes to cover the development of the game". You are making the same logical fallacy (or simple opinion) that "There is no way for F2P is ethical".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sofixa 5y ago
I disagree. There are ways to do it in which it's obvious where the business model is, and it isn't too forceful or gambling. The World of Tanks/Battleships/Warplanes series, are free to play, with progression through experience ( you unlock higher level machines based on xp points you accumulate through playing and success at it), or through paying to go up the ladder faster or unlock special machines. You can play the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Isn’t WoT the game where you can pay to get slightly better bullets? Even if that’s just a small bonus, that makes it P2W instantly.
  - automatic6131 5y ago
    Yes, and they used to be premium, real money shells only. But years ago they made them simply purchaseable with ingame money. But to have any of that spare, you need to play with "premium" time (which is fairly easy to get for free) or be really good at the game.
    - Semaphor 5y ago
      Ah, I guess that makes it a more complex thing to argue about. I only played it many years ago for a short time and remembered the golden bullets that were real money only.
- dkersten 5y ago
  The problem I have with these games is they are almost universally tuned to make them very time consuming and grindy if you don't pay. That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay. Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.
freedom2099 5y ago
I hear you! Same goes for me… if a game is free to play for me it’s a NO GO!
duckmysick 5y ago
I've been wondering why we have such different reactions to free to play games and free software. I know gaming has different value proposition, but free software and services share a lot of similarities. It's not just feeding the creators. There are tricks and "addictions" too. Do you like the free version but want to scale up, remove that restrictive license, or unlock new features? No problem, just pay up a bit. It's no big deal; look at our landing page where you can see other players - I'm sorry, other businesses - who happily have done that. Some even do cosmetics too (we'll show your logo and remove ours in the UI facing your customers). Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I think the issue is that it doesn't do what it says on the box, or if it does, there are disclaimers in super-tiny print. I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever. This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it. To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bootloop 5y ago
This is absurd. So you also don't use any software products which are a) free to use or b) habe a free tier?
- midasuni 5y ago
  Back in the 90s shareware was common, you’d get the first level of Duke Nukem, but to get the rest you had to pay That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.
  - rolph 5y ago
    also if you wanted to you could generate your own levels and manipulate the skins for the game. there used to be a big scene for this spanning many games, for free and thats the kind of game i want to pay 50 or 60 bucks for and get a disk or zip. beyond that it seems im not a gamer anymore,specifically because of what contemporary gaming has become.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    First level? They gave away Part 1 of the whole game! The full game included a Part 2 and Part 3.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  for games I want an immersive experience, any kind of shops, popups, ads, or any other prompt to purchase anything in game disrupts that immersion and is a turn off much the same way ads during a video/movie are. Some accept ads as inevitable but all dislike them for their immersion breaking. Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help. Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.
wink 5y ago
I think context matters a lot. If it's an F2P MMO then it's not a decision on a whim by the studio/publisher - it's been the default for a few years and good luck launching a subscription MMO in the last few years. If it's an AAA single player title and you have loot boxes then it's just someone being greedy. If it's a mobile game then it would probably not exist without f2p. But I get your point, I used to not like this F2P trend but over the years I actually like to not completely stop playing some MMOs because I don't want to pay the sub. With F2P I can login three times per month and play for an hour. This might be different if I was willing to pay 10$ for 3h of play.
slightwinder 5y ago
> The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me. How is it dishonest? F2P does not automatically mean using dark patterns or openly making it Pay2win. Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game and still allow the developers to eat. Do you consider demos also dishonest?
- nanochad 5y ago
  In F2P games you need to spend hundreds of hours to either grind to unlock basic functionality, or even if they don't have grinding, you still need skins or everyone will leave your party because they assume you're a noob. Skins drag down game performance. I've seen literal billion dollar games where it ran perfectly fine until they added waves of skins. Also multiple games where each time someone comes near you with a skin, the game freezes to load the skin (probably a blocking socket call in the middle of the main game client loop, as that's the quality you get in such games). And in most games, emotes and skins allow unintended behavior that gives advantages to their users. This is what happens when you focus all dev work on designing skins and zero thought goes into how they would affect the game. Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map. > zero impact Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.
- qwery 5y ago
  > Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really. But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do? > allow the developers to eat How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)
mihaaly 5y ago
Call it trial version then. ; )
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
What for example is dishonest about the "free-to-play" of Rocket League or Fortnite? It literally is free to play.
rovek 5y ago
For me the biggest negative to F2P is in competitive games, so especially Rocket League in this case, because being F2P means that the competitive element and matchmaking system is 100% worthless.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Why is it worthless? Aren't for example a lot of chess servers also free to play, and thousands of chess players play there all the time?
- danaris 5y ago
  Many of the most popular esports are free to play. Is the competitive element and matchmaking system of TF2, DOTA2 or LoL worthless?
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  League of Legends is the most popular competitive game in the world, and is free to play. Calling the competitive aspect and matchmaking worthless in f2p games is incredibly naive.
  - rovek 5y ago
    My experience of two games going free to play, PUBG and Rocket League, is that in the former 100% of games now have cheaters in and in the latter ~25-40% games have people playing on fresh accounts to keep their rank artificially low.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Haven't played either, but I can tell you that cheating is exceedingly rare in League and that their ranking system does a good job of figuring out if a new account is from an experienced player or a legitimately fresh face. By the time you've played 10 games you are given a reasonably good matchmaking experience. Perhaps that's why League is so much more popular than PUBG and Rocket League?
asdfasxcdf 5y ago

chrismcb 5y ago

I don't follow. Tapped out is free to play, and for years was one of the top money earners. I'm pretty sure the developers were eating quite well. If someone releases their game for free, it is their prerogative. Either they want to give it away for free, it they've figured out another way to monetize it.

Kiro 5y ago

Good thing they have whales like me who will spend 100x of what you would have paid. They don't need you when they can milk me.

soultrees 5y ago
Genuine question out of curiosity - what do you get out spending that much on a game? I’ve heard some whales spending 10-20k a week and that’s probably not even the highest. Do you get genuine enjoyment out of it or do you ever feel fleeced at all?
- Kiro 5y ago
  It depends on what kind of loot box. For cosmetics it's pretty random. When the game itself feels stale I want a new outfit to make it feel fresh. For P2W it's a treat after I've been grinding freemium for a while. It's like opening a beer on Friday after work. I don't spend 10-20k a week but I do occasionally spend that amount on one game during its whole lifetime. However, that also means I've gotten thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it. But yes, while I'm only a 1000x (1000x compared to someone who just pays $20 upfront) there are certainly people who are 1000000x and much bigger whales than me. I can't speak for them.
  - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
    The beer on Friday metaphor resonates with me (even though I don’t drink beer), that’s how I perceive buying in game items. Out of curiosity which game(s) did you spend 10-20k on?
  - dvlsg 5y ago
    I think that's part of the problem. Because skipping the grind by paying money is seen as a treat, game companies now have the incentive to turn their games into a chore on purpose to convince people to treat themselves.
- yomly 5y ago
  I think those numbers are all relative? If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays? Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix? Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla. We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Just to follow up on what you said, one of the things I've learned after a couple of years in online retail is that a huge proportion of people genuinely enjoy spending money. They don't consider the opportunity cost or feel the pain of lost potential, but get a rush of "feeling rich" whenever they spend $50 on a T-shirt they'll wear once. It's cross-cultural, natural psychology, and I doubt it'll go anywhere.
    - Beltalowda 5y ago
      A lot of people have this; I certainly do: when I buy something new it feels good, for a short time. I actually live a fairly frugal life, and I think acknowledging this is important: "do I really want or need this or am I just making myself feel better for a few hours?"
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Some people have enough money that they don't care about the money. But other people become addicted and end up spending money they don't have. Just like some people dropping 100k in Vegas in a weekend are paying for the experience and VIP treatment and others just need one more bet to replenish Johnnys college fund.
- foobarian 5y ago
  I don't spend near as much as GP but I found that I am OK spending a comparable number (or a little more) to a classic boxed game such as a console title, so around $50-$100, if I enjoy the game enough. Two examples: Roblox and Genshin Impact. Me and the kid got into Roblox entirely for free. Beyond all the games she enjoys even without any paid features, we got a dead-simple game creation platform with world-class MMO built in. I thought that was nice enough to warrant buying a few gift cards for her and the peers. We got into GI for free as well. I was apprehensive at first because I heard from friends that GI is an evil gacha game preying on addict personalities. But once we started it we enjoyed the artwork and the game so much through the hours of main quest lines and beautiful content that I thought it was as good or better than Zelda BOTW so why not kick back at least the BOTW purchase price?
legalcorrection 5y ago
This is like bragging about being in the demographic that keeps celebrity gossip tabloids afloat. Do you also lose a lot of money on MLM schemes? Are Vegas casinos comping week-long stays for you?
- Kiro 5y ago
  I'm not into MLM schemes (or gambling) but I do love celebrity gossip. Since apparently you get to decide what interests are cool or not, I would love to hear what kind of amazing things you are into!
  - legalcorrection 5y ago
    Mostly telling people on the internet that they are wrong.
    - Handytinge 5y ago
      This is the funniest thing I've seen on HN!
    - Loughla 5y ago
      This is either the most amazingly self-aware joke I've seen, or a completely tone-deaf unbelievably cynical response. I can't tell.
      - legalcorrection 5y ago
        :)
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  You are implying that F2P is unethical. What Kiro is saying, I believe, is that the person they responded to had an invalid point. Someone was suggesting that F2P is inherently dishonest because "developers need to eat" and clearly there are unethical moneymaking behaviors happening. Kiro is saying "No, it isn't inherently unethical, and there are people like me willing to spend the money on cosmetics and lootboxes to cover the development of the game". You are making the same logical fallacy (or simple opinion) that "There is no way for F2P is ethical".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sofixa 5y ago

I disagree. There are ways to do it in which it's obvious where the business model is, and it isn't too forceful or gambling. The World of Tanks/Battleships/Warplanes series, are free to play, with progression through experience ( you unlock higher level machines based on xp points you accumulate through playing and success at it), or through paying to go up the ladder faster or unlock special machines. You can play the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?

Semaphor 5y ago
Isn’t WoT the game where you can pay to get slightly better bullets? Even if that’s just a small bonus, that makes it P2W instantly.
- automatic6131 5y ago
  Yes, and they used to be premium, real money shells only. But years ago they made them simply purchaseable with ingame money. But to have any of that spare, you need to play with "premium" time (which is fairly easy to get for free) or be really good at the game.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Ah, I guess that makes it a more complex thing to argue about. I only played it many years ago for a short time and remembered the golden bullets that were real money only.
dkersten 5y ago
The problem I have with these games is they are almost universally tuned to make them very time consuming and grindy if you don't pay. That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay. Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.

freedom2099 5y ago

I hear you! Same goes for me… if a game is free to play for me it’s a NO GO!

duckmysick 5y ago

I've been wondering why we have such different reactions to free to play games and free software. I know gaming has different value proposition, but free software and services share a lot of similarities. It's not just feeding the creators. There are tricks and "addictions" too. Do you like the free version but want to scale up, remove that restrictive license, or unlock new features? No problem, just pay up a bit. It's no big deal; look at our landing page where you can see other players - I'm sorry, other businesses - who happily have done that. Some even do cosmetics too (we'll show your logo and remove ours in the UI facing your customers). Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
I think the issue is that it doesn't do what it says on the box, or if it does, there are disclaimers in super-tiny print. I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever. This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it. To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bootloop 5y ago

This is absurd. So you also don't use any software products which are a) free to use or b) habe a free tier?

midasuni 5y ago
Back in the 90s shareware was common, you’d get the first level of Duke Nukem, but to get the rest you had to pay That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.
- rolph 5y ago
  also if you wanted to you could generate your own levels and manipulate the skins for the game. there used to be a big scene for this spanning many games, for free and thats the kind of game i want to pay 50 or 60 bucks for and get a disk or zip. beyond that it seems im not a gamer anymore,specifically because of what contemporary gaming has become.
- rchaud 5y ago
  First level? They gave away Part 1 of the whole game! The full game included a Part 2 and Part 3.
michaelbrave 5y ago
for games I want an immersive experience, any kind of shops, popups, ads, or any other prompt to purchase anything in game disrupts that immersion and is a turn off much the same way ads during a video/movie are. Some accept ads as inevitable but all dislike them for their immersion breaking. Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help. Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.

wink 5y ago

I think context matters a lot. If it's an F2P MMO then it's not a decision on a whim by the studio/publisher - it's been the default for a few years and good luck launching a subscription MMO in the last few years. If it's an AAA single player title and you have loot boxes then it's just someone being greedy. If it's a mobile game then it would probably not exist without f2p. But I get your point, I used to not like this F2P trend but over the years I actually like to not completely stop playing some MMOs because I don't want to pay the sub. With F2P I can login three times per month and play for an hour. This might be different if I was willing to pay 10$ for 3h of play.

slightwinder 5y ago

> The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me. How is it dishonest? F2P does not automatically mean using dark patterns or openly making it Pay2win. Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game and still allow the developers to eat. Do you consider demos also dishonest?

nanochad 5y ago
In F2P games you need to spend hundreds of hours to either grind to unlock basic functionality, or even if they don't have grinding, you still need skins or everyone will leave your party because they assume you're a noob. Skins drag down game performance. I've seen literal billion dollar games where it ran perfectly fine until they added waves of skins. Also multiple games where each time someone comes near you with a skin, the game freezes to load the skin (probably a blocking socket call in the middle of the main game client loop, as that's the quality you get in such games). And in most games, emotes and skins allow unintended behavior that gives advantages to their users. This is what happens when you focus all dev work on designing skins and zero thought goes into how they would affect the game. Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map. > zero impact Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.
qwery 5y ago
> Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really. But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do? > allow the developers to eat How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

mihaaly 5y ago

Call it trial version then. ; )

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

What for example is dishonest about the "free-to-play" of Rocket League or Fortnite? It literally is free to play.

rovek 5y ago

For me the biggest negative to F2P is in competitive games, so especially Rocket League in this case, because being F2P means that the competitive element and matchmaking system is 100% worthless.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
Why is it worthless? Aren't for example a lot of chess servers also free to play, and thousands of chess players play there all the time?
danaris 5y ago
Many of the most popular esports are free to play. Is the competitive element and matchmaking system of TF2, DOTA2 or LoL worthless?
colinmhayes 5y ago
League of Legends is the most popular competitive game in the world, and is free to play. Calling the competitive aspect and matchmaking worthless in f2p games is incredibly naive.
- rovek 5y ago
  My experience of two games going free to play, PUBG and Rocket League, is that in the former 100% of games now have cheaters in and in the latter ~25-40% games have people playing on fresh accounts to keep their rank artificially low.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Haven't played either, but I can tell you that cheating is exceedingly rare in League and that their ranking system does a good job of figuring out if a new account is from an experienced player or a legitimately fresh face. By the time you've played 10 games you are given a reasonably good matchmaking experience. Perhaps that's why League is so much more popular than PUBG and Rocket League?

asdfasxcdf 5y ago