Is Free to Play Inherently Bad?

I don't know what else to make of it. Pay to play makes sense. I went to a local arcade called the Pinball Hall of Fame here in town and blew $2.00, played 4 games and then watched some guys play TMNT for 5 minutes. It was pretty cool. There were humans there. I didn't feel cheated by the games. One credit clears are a real thing, it's not the game's fault I'm not good enough.

These f2p games though... they're all the same:
1) You can't die. Only soft restart.
2) There's no wrong way to play.
3) Kittens and Grandma's muffins...?
4) full screen click trap Ads
5) DO YOU WANT TO BUY 40,000 COINS for $99.99????

No. I do not.

I don't care about the money. Just don't lie to me.

I bought Plants vs Zombies for $20 and put it on multiple computers, me and my wife played it. Fun. Never regretted buying a game.

Then the mobile version came out. Still fun, but they actually put content I own behind a pay wall.

Here's a free to play Pokemon game... you have to pay for each pokemon, though, 1.99 ea. Pokecenter can only be used every 12hr unless you pay to accelerate it. Pokeballs are $1.00 for 10. Pikachu is $4.99.

Legend of Zelda, blue ring is $2.55. That door is locked... enemies randomly drop keys at %0.001 chance or you can buy a master key that lasts for 5 uses. Etc.

Super Mario... want a mushroom? Gotta pay to unlock that feature.

...what's happened? Is it too late?

 

You're totally right, F2P gone wrong. Some companies use micro-transactions when it's necessary. Others earn money off F2P apps with a brand name slapped on top.

However, when game is F2P it doesn't mean it's bad and its only intention is to make money. There are a lot of games which are f2p but gameplay matters the most. League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 etc.

F2P games have a lot of potential, it's just game companies use them wrong.

 

I agree, F2P itself is not the problem, it's how you use it. Lots of great F2P examples as mentioned makes you feel great about your purchases. I don't spend much money on LoL, but every time I do I do it because I felt that I really wanted to spend the money and that the money is very well spent. I also felt great about giving back to the developers for the time and effort they put in supporting the game.

There's a great episode of Extra Credits on this subject:

(If you don't know what Extra Credits is, well frankly you're doing it wrong)

 

Micro transactions that have an effect on gameplay are bad (pay to win).
Micro transactions that have an effect on aesthetics via cosmetics are fine (pay to skin).

I think the issue with 'bad' F2P games is that they're built to be almost impossible to enjoy without spending a few dollars. The developers of those games intend to survive off of people paying for the game more than they are playing the game.

If I were going to monetize a game somehow, it would be with non-intrusive ads that offer rewards. The example I give most but have never tried is...

When you need a break from the game, set your adventurer down and have him/her/it watch tv. Then players can be amused by seeing their character watch an ad on a little in game TV and react as if it was a comedy or horror film or whatever. The incentive can be a stat boost or 'magic find' boost. Something that makes sense in the game world. Or even a 4th wall joke - your character needs to sit through ads occasionally in order to get sponsorship funds to buy specific items.

Think of it like those recent call of duty commercials where the soldier in the exo suit gets his hand stuck inside the mountain dew dispenser, but happening in game.

 

League of Legends is a perfect example of a well designed F2P game. Don't know any on mobile, but well i don't play mobile games so...

 

Yes, I think they are inherently bad.

Putting aside all the things they do wrong, they're still bad.

People are predisposed to spending as little as they can on things. If they can play the game for $0 and enjoy it, they will. The only way to get them to pay is to put up roadblocks (in which case it's not free to play, but merely a demo) or things that annoy them. And annoying things are bad game design.

 

I really like that idea of watching advertisements to give yourself in-game things. The problem I have with the whole free to play thing is it completely destroys the 4th wall. There is no game there's just a marketing campaign that you are participating in.

It's like paying to watch a commercial.

Everyone here seems to agree with me. F2P is going to destroy games completely. Paying money so that something you're playing is more fun is stupid. The more you pay the more fun you have. Horse doo doo.

 

Agreed. It can be done better and make them even more money if they integrate ads into the game in a more amusing way. Imagine that in R6V2 (or R6V1) you're rescuing hostages and when you walk into the room all of the hostages are tied up and being forced to watch ads... which you will see as a cutscene for the duration of 1 ad before you can save them.

Freemium is different from F2P. Unfortunately, F2P is being associated with every free game as freemium. I have seen games try to stand out by saying "Completely/totally free to play" instead of just "free to play".

 

Well look at DOTA for example, everything is free the only thing you pay for is new skins or audio packs. It took like 6 moths of playing it before i started spending money in it, i bought a few sound packs myself the Stanley parable and the portal robot one.

I remember playing Army of darkness defence -- and i beat the whole game and i got to around level 40+ something before i spent any money on it.

 

Maybe part of the meta game is to see how much you can play before paying?

 

You left one out. There's the rare gem that manages to allow you to unlock content and items with cash, but also lets you do it on your own, and the items/content do not give you an edge. It gives the game new dimension.

Tribes: Ascension did this swimmingly (and it is the only F2P game I have ever spent a dime on).

 

Oh, I didn't count those because none of the in game items in that marvelous scenario are restricted to cash only. Maplestory is like this for their non-premium classes. You can buy skill scrolls, or you can grind the hardest areas in the game for weeks to find them. Maplestory was fun. Burned out on the game with the demon classes because they were too fun.

 

I think there is one other thing you forgot, the games with timers/energy bars.

well, some are mostly OK, but most are about restricting free players as much as possible, while giving them a look at what they can attain, and try to push the player to pay, saying "what's 20 cents?", but multiply everywhere, amounting for more than a full budget title for a few hours of continuous play.

Personally, I like the cosmetic, don't mind too much the "boosts", and when it's done withing reasonable limits, paying for items that can be found/unlocked is something I can tolerate.

I have spent way more money willingly in a few "free to play" than I would have paid if they were subscriptions.
At the same time, I dislike the subscription model, because you end up spending a lot, and it's not even related to the time spent playing, it's just because you often don't know if you are going to want to play next month (you pay at the start of a month, not after it finished).

But like for most topics, it really depends on how well it's done.

I mean, even paying for power that can't be gotten any other way could in theory be OK-ish, if the game that results from it is fun for everyone, not just the paying ones.

 

I think that's a bit of an over simplification. For example take Hearthstone, to acquire all available cards via playing is very arduous and will only get worse as the new expansions are released. I think its reasonable to assume that a casual player who is not paying will be at some disadvantage to someone who pays. However there are lots of mitigating factors: after some threshold skill trumps cards, some competitive deck archetypes are cheap meaning they can be acquired for free even by casual players, the arena provides an area where you can us skill to acquire cards at an accelerated rate, etc.

The reality is that some micro-transactions that affect gameplay are the most economically viable F2P model (yes a few games like LoL have managed to succeed without pay to win, but its an exception). Personally I'm fine with this model as long as the advantage is controlled in some fashion (and doesn't just amount to pay == win).

 

I think pay to win is ok as long as it's not pitting your wallet against someone else's. If someone's purchase can benefit your experience and theirs, there's no downside. If it is a game about pistol duels and someone buys a machine gun with premium currency, that could be a little annoying.

Hearthstone is hard to classify because it began digital. A lot of trading card games now have digital versions but started as a trading card game in which everything is bought. It is not unreasonable for blizzard to have hearthstone designed to be a cashcow, it's just what all trading card games are. They can push out new content more easily than games that start off as physical cards and they can also control the odds for players who pay vs players who don't pay... diablo 3 was just a social experiment to see just how much crap their player base can stand. There seems to be no depth to what the blizzard community will put up with, so while I'm unfamiliar with hearthstone at all, I would not be surprised to hear that you have to spend quite a bit of money before getting any cards that are very good.

 

I found their reward system pretty good, on the Asian servers I have a zero spend account (seeing how far I could get), and although I only play it a few hours a week at most it is only a little less competitive as my main account.

On the US servers I have spent about 2x the cost of a boxed game and have almost all cards. That said I've got more playing time out of this game than anything I've played since Runescape many years ago

I do expect it will get much harder not to spend with the new expansion coming out next month, fortunately I don't mind

Anyway getting maybe a bit too focused on one game, my main point was about providing a reasonable alternative path to acquiring the paid items. I'm fine with the grind vs pay system in this context. But that said I wouldn't think it would work as well in an MMO where skill is relatively less of a factor (compared to XP/levels/gear).

 

Reasonable alternatives are always good. Some companies offer [in game] ways to obtain premium currency instead. Sometimes I like that better. Slightly arduous task --> obtain premium currency --> skip a 4 month long grind to obtain the desired item

Also, runescape, woo! A game that let you be whatever you wanted to be, as long as you blew enough time on it. On my long list of things to do before I die, a runescape clone is there right before / after (it's tied) with making a .hack// fragment clone.

 

I don't think it's the "free to play" that's bad. It's the other stuff that's typically dumped on top of it - a heavy-handed micro-transaction economy, or designs that deliberately waste user time to get them to see more adverts, or stuff like that.

When I say "bad" I don't mean that they offend me or anything, but I certainly can't hold an interest in games that heavily feature these things.

Partly because I'd rather be more open an honest than that as both a player and a developer - why dance around the fact that developers need to make money and players want to get bang for their buck? As a player I'd rather fork over $x at the beginning of an experience and know that the experience isn't secretly designed to milk my wallet ever after. As a developer, I'd rather not have money get between me and my game design, and I'd also rather not have to pander my design to people who are secretly trying to pay me as little as possible. Why not just get all that out of the way up front?

Partly it's also because I value my time. I'd rather have a short, clean, strong and unique experience in a game than the same thing drawn out over more time. Something should be as short as it can be without being rushed, because then I get more time to enjoy other cool experiences. Games that rely on making money from users via adverts suck at this, not because the game is bad but because they have to stretch everything out over the longest time possible so the player gets as many impressions/opportunities to click as possible. Regardless of how cool the game is, I just can't maintain interest in something when it makes me arbitrarily wait for reasons that have nothing to do with the game. If I get a choice between that and playing a different game, I'll pick the different game, even if otherwise it's still a perfectly good game.

 

Of course free to play isn't bad. And of course it isn't going to destroy the industry.

My all-time favorite example whenever one of these threads comes up is Team Fortress 2. That, IMHO, is one of the best free to play games money doesn't have to buy.

Items the player can purchase can affect gameplay, so long as it does so in a balanced manner. Basically, treat paid items as you would unlockable items in a non-freemium game - if it would be OP in a non-freemium game, then it would be pay-2-win in a freemium game.
Plus, of course, always sell hats

 

I think it's mainly all about lowering the barrier to entry, and then trying to avoid doing things which make people leave. It's been sort of the same since `shareware`... you get the thing, you get to try it out first, then if they did a good job of making you a believer you may be inclined to cough up some money... and so then rather than have you forget/avoid paying the shareware fee, they prompt you or tempt you or try to give you extra value to get you to contribute. And then they get you to pay smaller amounts than, say, a $19.99 pricetag, so that more people will pay, overall. I guess it's a math thing.

What I mainly don't like about some of the free to play is just that... the commerce of it all, often seems to dilute the gameplay or the `game-ness` of the game. It sort of turns into a cache wagon with ads at every turn or suggestions to buy stuff on every menu screen etc. It's just a different way of monetizing. For me personally, old-school maybe, I still prefer a one-time payment and then get on with not having all that crap shoved in my face when I'm trying to immerse in the game world.

Gotta say though much the same thing happens on ecommerce website.... if you want to make more money, you start sacrificing `design` for things like conversion rate, analytics, `optimizing` for maximum profit rather than for maximum enjoyment or whatever... maybe the two are linked, I dunno, but I also see a site become stark and void of character often because it's trying to be too optimized and not so `human`.

 

I see that a lot too.
It's my opinion that shoving too much in the player's face actually hurts the business model... you want them to pay you on their terms, with no irritation involved (they paid you because they wanted to, and that's all). Otherwise you risk bleeding out disgruntled potential customers.
Pay to win also runs this risk IMHO - if someone plays your multiplayer FPS for example, and gets their ass handed to them by somebody who paid more to get an advantage, the most likely outcome isn't that they pay you money, it's that they will immediately uninstall the game out of frustration and never play it again. And so you can bleed potential paying customers that way.

You DO have to encourage people to buy things, but you can't be too in-your-face about it, else you might just start irritating people. It's also good to be generous - give out rewards like non-premium currency or even small amounts of premium currency for doing well in the game, logging in consecutive days, etc. It's all about trust, really. If the player doesn't trust you, the player isn't likely to trust you with their wallet either.

 

Sure, but since that's the core purpose of an e-commerce website - it exists solely for the purpose of selling stuff - then surely the design goal is to optimize for sales? Sales aren't at odds with the goals of the site, they are the goals of the site. It's not a "problem", it's the fundamental raison d'etre.

Or, to consider it differently, if people were buying less stuff because the website was so darn awesome that people got distracted away from making their purchases... well, that is a problem, isn't it?

All of that exact same stuff applies to games as well, of course. The practical difference is that where you go to online shops for the purpose of buying stuff, you play a game for the purpose of being entertained. When the design of the game puts sales ahead of that entertainment then the design very much is at odds with the purpose. It kind of goes back to the openness of intention thing I talked about in my last post, too.

For what it's worth, the same applies in areas completely outside of games, too. For instance, my local cheap airline companies are clearly looking for every opportunity to milk you of cash on the flight - low baggage limits unless you pay for more, credit card readers on the in-flight entertainment system, refreshments cost money, etc. etc. The premium airlines, on the other hand, charge more up front... but the entertainment system is open to all, refreshments are available if you just ask, much bigger baggage limits, etc. etc.

 

Free to play, like pay to play, exists so content producers can make money off games and thus (hopefully) produce more and better games.

With either model, there are creators who craft beautiful things and those who are just out to make a buck - vote with your wallet and support the former, don't buy from the latter.

 

Yeah, I suppose on the flip side of this argument, there's quite a few pay-to-play games which are nothing short of crapware cash grabs, and yet we don't call pay-to-play "evil" and it certainly isn't going to destroy the industry

 

Absolutely. It's not about the model used, it's about what you do with it.

 

Everyone was cool with "DLC" back when it was whacked on a CD and called an "expansion pack"...

Same deal with "pay walls", too. Back when we called stuff "shareware" everyone was cool with it...

 

There's some truth in there, conceptually, there's not much of a difference.
But actual "DLC" was introduced in the worst way possible and has to fight that image since day one. And even today, DLC that's actually worth getting is not as common as I would wish it was.

An expansion pack from back in the day just "felt" different. It came in its own box and was more expensive. Games would get only one or two and they usually released well after the original game, so magazines would give them another detailed review.

DLCs on the other hand came to the general public as "horse armor" and content that was deliberately locked away from you, while physically being on the same disc as the whole game.
I would have thought that this is a level of perversion that such a distribution/business model could only achieve after some years of practice, but it's been almost satirically twisted right from the start and seems to have gotten better over the years.


So yes, the two are similar in what they do, but there are good resons why people were cool with expansion packs and hated DLC. It's a matter of experience and trust.

 

In the example I gave, Plants vs. Zombies 2, to buy the original roster of plants would cost more than I paid for the entire first game.

We're talking about pure evil, here.

 

We're talking "Buy One Tire for $599.99: Get Three Free!" We're talking "Car Stereo for $499.99, Free Install!" We're talking "100% Pure Meat!"

This is epic scamming. It's like they hired used car salesmen and US congressmen to build a business model together.

 

Well, even in the "expansion pack" era, it was very often an incredibly high price for what it offered.

I mean, an other 60 dollars a second 40 hours campaign?
It introduces only content, usually a lot of reuse, nearly no new code or mechanisms.
What that means is that it was possible on a budget that's nowhere near what the cost of the initial game, yet they were asking us to pay an insanely price, because we view it as a lot of value as an end user. In the end, it's still still exploiting the end user for more money than it should cost.
And it's still only the examples that added a somewhat "long" experience to the table.

I think that a lot of the worst of the current free to play comes from the wild west of milking that the mobile gaming world became, by hunting down every tiny opportunity to draw more and more from our pockets.
Not to say that all mobile games go that far, but it is definitely a place where no template was there, and it became so common place that it is even embraced by its users.

Also, what is "OK" and what is not can vary widely from one person or a country from an other.
The corean F2P market embraces games that sells that shiny +1 sword, as long as it is fairly priced and doesn't forces it down your throat.
The american and european market tends to say that if it says it's free to play, it should really be free to do everything in that game, and that only thing that don't affect the game should be sold, like skins.

 

Cost != value, and if price had to be based on cost rather than value then our form of society and economy couldn't exist, because nobody could ever improve their own lives by doing work for others.

 

cost != value, but it's still true that those big margins won't mean that they will use this extra from the margins as an actual extra for other things.

In the end, this extra usually ends up in the pockets of a few investors and similars, and don't end up making anything better for that game or the next.

Overall, I would agree, as well as the fact that more hours don't always mean better value.

 

A) This is the very purpose of investment.
B) If the investors don't make money overall from games then they won't keep investing in games. So it does allow for the next games to be better, in that it supports ongoing sources of investment without which there will be fewer/lower budget games.
C) Most game projects don't get their money back. The ones that do have to cover the ones that don't and provide profit.

I don't mind expansion packs or DLCs being high margin items. The core games often are not, if I don't like what's on offer I don't have to buy it so it doesn't bother me, and if these people can't effectively monetise their games they'll stop making them.

 

In my opinion, during this day and age with the economy and all people are trying to maximize their profits any way possible because were all hurting for cash. As a result were losing quality games. It happened when video games first came out in a similar way, people seen the possible gain by selling them so they dumped as many as they could and sacrificed gameplay and as a result video games almost died out. But now with these so called F2P games that completely halt gameplay unless you pay for aspects will essentially kill games again. What I mean is nobody will play games that have the potential to be very good due to the fact that they can't progress in the game without paying some dumb fee. I will be the first to say that I am a HUGE fan of free to play games, mainly because they are easily accessed and I don't really have the income to afford paying for games and buying more memory for them.
BUT!
I will also spend money on video games that I genuinely enjoy, mainly on dlc. why? simply because they offered unique gameplay aspects or even added some unique features to the game. The point I'm trying to make is yes you can make enough money off of a F2P game using ''ads'' and what to keep the game up. Then put up dlc for your players to buy and make more money...
As a lifelong gamer I can easily say that if your patient, you make a quality game that is fun to play and has potential. People WILL if fact buy your DLC. To post a game as F2P then constantly force players to pay to speed things up or even make the game ''fair'' will lose you money in the long run and will ultimately be the death of the game.

That's just my opinion...

 

I personally am one that spend quite a lot on games, compared to most I know (mostly because I don't spend it on other things like cinemas or fast foods), but I still love the ability the free to play gives.

It lets you try a real version of the game without having to pay a cent, and then lets you decide on what you want to invest, depending on how much you play and how much you have.
You don't have to fork 15 euros every month up front, but you can end up spending way more if you feel like it.

I personally don't want ads on a free to play, because it would be a "pay X to get rid of the ads", and that amount usually would give you something more significant in other games, like a cool hat, a nice little bird pet that does nothing but fly around and follow you, but at least something.

The ads way is actually one of the way that's far from fair, and that intrude on the experience of everyone, paying or not.

 

The problem with F2P, I think, is that it is a poor translation of enjoyment of the game to money earned, compared to other business models. I'm going to call this concept "business model purity" and give a few examples. (I hate naming things, I always feel like somebody's already talked about it and gave it a better name...)

Pay to Play (traditional) - medium purity: I don't know if I'll enjoy the game until I buy it and play it. I might buy it and have fun, but I might also buy it and hate it. Alternatively, I might never buy a game that I would enjoy because the cost turns me off. The major redeeming factor of the model is that if I enjoy the game, I will tell my friends that they should buy it.

Pay for Extras (DLC, expansion packs) - medium-high purity: I enjoy the game, and I want more content. Downside: there's no guarantee that content is as good as the base game.

Subscription (e.g. last-gen MMOs) - medium purity (medium-high if done well): Players are asked each and every month if they are still enjoying the game enough to pay the fee. Downside: Players feel pressured to "get their money's worth" each month and play as much as possible, and feel cheated by the developer if they don't have the time. You also have to extend the game as much as possible, because if they beat it in a month, there goes your cash flow from that player. This can lead to a lot of grinding!

Pay for Cosmetics (e.g. Dota2) - medium-high purity: I buy a cosmetic item because I want to support the developers. That means I really enjoy the game. Downside: lots of people won't do this (because they see no benefit), and it's basically useless in a singleplayer game where you can't show off the cosmetics you bought.

Pay for In-Game Goods (typical "F2P" / Pay to Win) - low purity: You practically have to make the game less enjoyable so that players are compelled to spend money to enjoy it more.

(sorry, mixing my persons here, I'm tired right now -_-)

There is no 100% pure business model. (The closest I can think of would be a donation-based model in a perfect world where people would actually donate) But Pay-to-Win is as far from it as you can get. The best F2P games I've seen are actually a combination of Pay-for-Cosmetics and Pay-for-Extras - example: League of Legends and Hearthstone. They skirt a fine line between Pay-for-Extras and Pay-to-Win, but ultimately, I feel these games are not withholding gameplay from the player, and in fact, not providing all the champions/cards from the beginning makes the game more accessible and easier to learn.

 

Very insightful, as always. Outside of the gaming industry there's a whole lot of pure business models. Many of them are illegal because they could rip apart the fabric of society (controlled substances, prostitution). I particularly enjoy the "ordering pizza" business model. This is one in which something that I like is made by someone who is not me and delivered to my house so I can enjoy it. Nobody expects to get rich delivering pizzas, nobody expects a pizza to change their lives.

 

I personally would see subscription on the same purity as "pay for ingame goods", because both are twisting the gameplay in order to make money as long as possible for the first, and as much as possible for the second.

The subscription base tends to fool your sense of achievement and time spent in order to keep you paying for the next month.

Some of this translates into the free to play, and is often less hidden (grinding for resources and levels, for example), because they need people playing for them to envision paying at all.

Pay to play, in my book, is the only model that does not have to twist the game for its needs, because once the player bought it, it doesn't really matter if he abandons it after an hour or spends a thousand on it, as long as he enjoyed the product, and gives it a thumbs up.
You pay, you play, maybe you stop for a while, maybe definitely, but no matter how long you play, how sparsely you play, it is not going to cost you differently.

When DLC and the rest come to play, it's a different story, because of perceived value. I mean, the sims is a great exemple of this, it sells the same DLCs for every one of their games.
Some are completely ok with it, because new game, new content, new graphics and all that, but others will feel that paying the same for a reskin of what they already bought for the last game should cost less.

Also, WoW is subscriptions, but still asks you to pay upfront for the game and all its expansions, even introducing micro transactions to draw money from all the models at once.
I have no idea how it feels for the player inside the game, but from the outside, that game seems at least as predatory as any of those games labeled "pay to win" in the way the whole thing sucks as much from player as possible.
I mean, "pay 50 dollars to get to max level", seriously?
That's Eve online's clothing's level of ripping off, and for a 1 time consumable at that.
For those that don't know, Eve online allows to buy "better" clothing that's almost unoticeable in most of the game, for prices of the real world ones.

 

Reminds me of the 2014 GDC talk, by Ben Cousins: "Is your business model evil? The moral maze of the new games business".

TL;DR: 'Free with ads' is the most ethical business model (aka Flappy Bird and television).
Gigi

 

If the ads mean completely free otherwise, then yes, it's like how most of the web manages to give free quality content to the end users while not doing it for free, like youtube, imgur, and many, many other sites.

In games, they tend to overdo the ads, making them really annoying to the end user, and then say "pay X to remove the ads for Y days".
And no matter how you look at it, the pricing of this makes it a worse value proposition than most subscriptions, because you are often still limited in other ways, that will ask for yet more to unlock the full potential of the game.

On the other hand, a whole category of free games mostly live off advertising without overdoing it, in the form of the web-based ones that play in browsers.

EDIT: Finally finished to watch the video (damn you crap internet), and I have to say that I found it very biased, following a pseudo-scientific method of "this example here proves that this never really happen".
Not all that bad to watch, and there is value in a lot of the arguments, but a lot of these points felt like they evaded the real question by giving a counter example or a single source.
Well, I'm biased too, and a bit in the same way as they were in that, but not in the same arguments, so my biases might be talking for me.

 

I can't wait to get into the world of ads. I plan to integrate them right into the game in a way that's amusing and hopefully even fun. Maybe even a slot machine in the game where...

nothing - the user gets a minor reward or nothing
3 skulls - the user has to watch an ad
3 gold bars - lots of stuff!

heh.

 

Making it free and just asking people to watch a few advertisements actually works well for everybody, it also contribute to the economy.

My main gripe is that a lot of these companies actually sell you things in a game, which is essentially just advertising for more products and their other games so you're paying to watch commercials

Although I rather did like Minecraft, when you bought the game you own the software you can do whatever you want with it modify it whatever make your own game with it doesn't matter.

Not that many people did any of that but a few people did modify it and make different things out of it so that's pretty cool.

Also I think you sell a game to somebody as long as you keep updating it at least for several years... It balances out

 

Free-to-play is an easier concept to understand by those managers who think "okay, users seems to like [x], let's add more [x] and that will make a S***load of money for us!". Because game became sliced into small, I say, "units of monetization" instead of a single big one, the game itself, which is hard to estimate.

And when the "game" is begging money from you each step and each moment (the state any game degenerates to when managers taking control of decisions), it is not a game anymore.

Free-to-play concept makes you to think from the very beginning "how it will suck money from a player's pockets". Haven't heard it is a fun idea for a new game.

But it has bright future anyway because, you know, you can run out of money, but you can't run out of dupes.

 

Yuuuuuup

 

It's kind of like a Vegas casino, whenever I talk to somebody local who gambles all the time they tell me all their stories of winning money. You should see their faces when I asked them to estimate how much money they are up or down over their entire lifetime of gambling... They have no idea what I'm talking about, they don't even understand the concept of balance as in being up or down.

Is that exact same kind of lack of basic math skills which fuels this entire f2p industry

When somebody with a eighth grade education would be able to understand that the casino wins a minimum of 51 percent of all games...

 

To me, "free with ads" is an oxymoron. People all too easily fall for the idea that wasting some time rather than spending some money "costs" them less. In some cases that can be true, but it's by no means a given.

Personally, financially I can easily afford all the game stuff I want. However, time wise I don't have enough hours to enjoy all that I could buy. So to me it's a no brainer that I don't play games (or use other forms of entertainment) where the associated cost is paid in time rather than dollars.

If I get two hours in a given week to play games, I want to spend that two hours playing games - not watching adverts for other junk or waiting for arbitrary timers to expire while my impression count climbs.

And you may think that most people aren't in that position and would rather save the dollars. The thing is, I see that as a terrible and destructive habit to be in. If you added up all the time some people waste with this kind of thing, what could they have done with that instead?

I learned my first computer language in less time than some people spend watching TV adverts in a year.

 

Free with ads is not always the most ethical. For example it would be wrong to give gamified educational software to schools 'free' with ads.

Something that bothers me with FtP is that a lot of arguments people make are based on a best case rational thinker, not a an average person who, for whatever reason, is more easily exploited than our hypothetical perfectly rational friend. You ought to know that this is the case, and therefore ought to know you are taking advantage of many people to get them to pay more money than they would 'otherwise' have done.

 

My argument, personally, has been that F2P can be designed not to exploit those individuals (and that, in fact, those individuals are not necessarily the best source of income for a game).

 

It can be designed that way, but that is designing around free to play. To see how a system works in it's 'natural' state, look at what happens when left to it's own devices. You end up with $99 'chest of gems' is more games than I can count. You end up with kids games by major publishers (like Rovio's Angry Birds Go) charging kids $50 for a single in game vehicle that can only be used on 1 race track.

So can F2P can be designed around? Yes. But to answer the op's question, I would have to say that it is inherently bad, because it tends towards exploitation unless external forces are added.