| Pavolink said: That's actually a nice idea. Maybe the first one was Nintendo testing the waters. |
Looking more into Splatoon, it seems literally made to follow Rusty's F2P model. Just look at the way the shops are set up compared to that game:
Rusty -
Splatoon -
All the shops are set up just like Rusty's. Each of these characters and their shops could be restructured to have a Rusty-like relationship with the player. Instead of winning coins while playing online, you would win their accosiated haggle items. For Rusty, its things like doughnuts, tweezers, wigs, etc. In Splatwo (again, genius), they could have items like that but specific ones made for each shopkeeper. Then all they'd have to do is tweak the dialog so that going to the shop was a minigame centered around learning each of their backstories in order to use it to your advantage in the haggling process. Still have the better items unlock as you level up the way it is now. As long as the prices are fair, and they were plenty fair in Rusty, this should be extremely successful and dare I say more fun and engaging than what is currently in Splatoon.
And if players don't want to pay for anything, they could still play and enjoy the game for free. The vanilla version would come with a few basic choices in clothes as well as one or two weapons of each or at least most types, and they'd still have access to every mode and every map 100% for free. This would also much better follow their model of "free to start" rather than "free to play." They want you to spend money on their games, and they want you to be happy to. They feel that the latter devalues games, so making sure there's a clear discintion between playing Splatwo for free and paying for things in Splatwo in a way that doesn't feel like you're paying to win, being scammed, or getting a raw deal is exactly the kind of thing they'd want.
Whether they actually plan on doing it is a completely different story, though.
