Yerli: “We’ll figure out” how to make free-to-play AAA work

[zarx]

Slimebeast said:

I don't know the details of the models for those games but the thing is that if the paying part only is about superficial stuff like hats and costumes, then that will not bring signifcant revenue to the publishers. Team Fortress 2, Dota and League of Legends were relatively cheap mods or multiplayer extensions that didn't cost $60 to begin with.

Yes, we will see a few decent indie games try the F2P model and in these games when you pay for some useless item it basically works as a form of "thank you" from the player to the developer (kinda like all that PC software was free back in the 90's and then a few moral individuals actually paid for it, I don't remember the name used for it) and that's great. I don't have any problems with that.

But that form of F2P is not what we are talking about. We are talking about AAA games, games with big budgets. To get those big budgets you need revenue flows and gamers will only pay for features in the game that benefit the gameplay.

The inherent problem to F2P is that the publishers must make money through some method and the temptation is big to make as much as possible. That is achieved by giving the player incentives and that's where pay to win comes in. Players don't spend big bucks on hats and costumes, they spend big bucks to win. The vast majority of F2P games have that problem.

 

The first AAA F2P play games are comming soon with things like Planetside 2, and the devs have said that there won't be pay to win. We will see how it plays out but I doubt that they will go the pay to win model. Infact I can't actually think of a successful competitive F2P game that is pay to win. Pay to win is only realy big in things like farmvill, outside of Asia anyway.

League of Legends doesn't offer any microtransactions that give players an unfair advantage in the game. And yet it is one of the most successful games arround right now, with revenue of 65 million in 2011. And the game is still growing picking up another 10 million accounts in the last year.