Publisher Namco Bandai has gone on record to say that free-to-play titles are not only impossible to create at a ‘high quality’ level, but also affirmed that the current trend in gaming could spell huge consequences for the industry at large.  Speaking at Cloud Gaming Europe, senior VP for Europe Olivier Comte spoke against the growing F2P industry, saying that the influx of cheap games is going to be a major problem for gaming as a whole if allowed to continue unabated.

"Free-to-play games can't be high quality," said Comte rather sternly.  The business model for smaller, easier titles, is making an expectation to consumers that is whittling away at triple-A development, argues the Namco Bandai executive. 

"We need to put certain value on certain work," he offered. "When you're a big company… you can't take risks too quickly, you can't make a change just because there's a fashion for a couple of years; you want to be there in 20 or 30 years."

Still though, F2P seems to be gaining steam in the gaming industry.  With Wargaming leading a major push on quality F2P titles in World of Tanks and the ‘World of…’ franchise, there is solid ground on developing a quality title from the ground up.  Major titles from Sony Online Entertainment and others have also shown that titles can be successful when using a ‘freemium’ model.  

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/namco-bandai-says-premium-f2p-titles-not-possible/

Seems like a dangerous position to take, especially with games like League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 out in the world. Free 2 play looks like it is here to stay TBH it rules the Asian markets which is are the fastest growing markets, companies like Crytech are even developing free to play games. Not that I can see a world where F2P is the only business model I don't see it dissapearing in a couple years ether especially now they are on Steam and Sony are even bringing F2P games to consoles. 

For the most part, I don't believe pure free-to-play buisness models are currently viable for what many people would call a fully featured high quality game ... With that said, a dramatically reduced feature set could many many free to play games viable.

To explain, the cost to create the content for a story driven single player game is too high and users consume it too quickly which makes it nearly impossible to generate enough revenue from ads to ever cover the cost of development. In contrast, with how often people play the same handful of levels over and over again for months, it is possible that a multiplayer FPS could be viable under this business model; especially if it was limited to only a handful of levels.

Namco Bandai Europe.

He's tarring with a large brush, but he's not entirely wrong depending on what you want out of a game and what you'd consider to be high quality. I'm not sure if TF2 really counts because it was already a high quality game before it became F2P. And if we're speaking about high quality games, why is SOE even being mentioned?

I can agree with him on that. Still their are the companies that go from charging to f2p just to survive and stay profitable which isn't a negative thing as long as their still going. though calling your free game a AAA high quality game is not right lol.

League of Legends

League of Legends is great, it's definitely no AAA experience though. Same goes for DotA2 if they decide to make it F2P.