Let's talk about Team Fortress 2, Valve's first big F2P game. The model is this: If you play for long enough, you'll receive new equippable weapons at random t

Let's talk about Team Fortress 2, Valve's first big F2P game. The model is this: If you play for long enough, you'll receive new equippable weapons at random times. You can trade these with other players, craft them together to create different items, or simply buy them with real money. So far so standard. What's interesting is that the non-default weapons are all balanced against each other. In theory, players who grinded for a long time or paid real money are still on an equal footing with players who joined the game yesterday - actual skill at the game notwithstanding. In practice, mistakes are made (the Soldier's default melee weapon is a lot weaker than all the available alternates, although the alternates are all roughly equal in power), but the idea is there. And there are items that can only be earned through the shop, or as part of one-time giveaways, or by earning achievements in different games. But all of those are either completely useless (hats and badges), or cosmetic variations on existing items. Their value is not that they make the player stronger, but they simply tell other players "I have something you don't have". TF2 demonstrates that pay-to-play can be done right. It's simply a matter of striking the balance between creating something that lots of people will play and creating something that earns a lot of money per player. Unfortunately, in the mobile world, 10 mediocre apps are a lot more profitable than 1 excellent app, so there's little incentive to create quality. That's the real problem, not pay-to-play.