1) I see auction houses working for games with loot, but outside of that.. no. You are correct with this response, though, because there are definitely single player games focused around loot. I don't see many companies trying to monetize this route, but it is possible. It definitely takes more effort than other means.

2) isn't this what our boxed products already do, or do you mean making important weapons (weapons being one example) along the story-line costing money?

3) What do you mean by this? When I think of classes, I think of multiplayer. If so, you have a point here that I understand. But what about games with no multiplayer?

4) Unlikely to be a viable source by itself, but could add on to other means I suppose.

5) So you'd give the base game away for free, but rely on users to pay more into a kickstarter sort of deal to get more content? This could work.. only problem is you wouldn't necessarily be able to reach all of your consumers (unless you messaged this concept in-game) and they would have to pay knowing they have to wait months to see the content. Not sure this would work.

Every point you brought up was definitely a possibility, but I don't see any of them carrying a real high quality game to market profitably. Would you honestly use the above mentioned ways to monetize a Zelda game, for instance? I still don't see it working.

That makes sense. Imagine if all PC gaming was F2P lol

2) Boxed products do it somehwhat, not to a HUGE extent though.  People who play F2P games tend to buy a lot of stuff they wouldn't buy in games they paid for.

3) Imagine a Dungeons and dragons type game.  Something like a Battlemage, or a special race.  Or those extras you often see in mods like "Play as so and so" etc.

5) You'd be surprised how well it's worked in the past.  The Mount and Blade series was kind of like this, though actually the money came upfront.

A Zelda game?  Sure, i bet they could fund a zelda game pretty easy.  Zelda games aren't really THAT expensive.   Something like Crisis would be harder... but games like Crisis really shouldn't exist anyway, being far too risky and unprofitable more often then not.

So, if you count digital sales, there are actually 100 Million people with Skyrim on their PC? And they call COD a juggernaut...

Trying to stem the tide of people pirating games? Just make them free in the first place!

Problem?!?

The only people I know that pirate are Mormons with Nintendo DS games. All my friends are PC gamers and we buy our games from Steam.

Your math is wrong. If 3% is sold, then you have 33 million players for 1 million sold. If sold is 5% it's 20 million players.

It is in that ballpark, 10:1 or even 20:1. I remember how they counted Bioshock pirated copies versus sales, and same with MW and Crysis and it was more than 10 pirated to 1 sale.

Just do the math yourself. You say Sleeping dogs has 5000 leetchers right now on Pirate Bay alone. If every leetcher takes around 3 hours on average to download the game, it means 40,000 people will have downloaded Sleeping Dogs in just 24 hours.

A rough guess, but let's assume Pirate Bay has about half of the torrent market. That means 80K downloaded Sleeping Dogs today. The torrent has been out for a few days already so you can't blame a first day spike, so in a week you'll have roughly 500K downloads and I even think I am lowballing here.

Now the question is how many first week sales will Sleeping Dogs on PC have? On consoles maybe 100K for PS360 each, which suggests around 20K physical copies for the PC version as tracked by VGC. With digital purchases we get perhaps 30K or 40k in total.

30-40K bought copies versus 500K pirated in one week. Do the math. That translates to 6-7% who pay, and 93-94% who pirate.

Guillemot is right.

Haven't bothered to read anything apart from OP...

But I'll just say free to play will never make mainstream simply because the game bricks and mortar industry is so big, it will cause more harm than good to an economy and things will be done (where or how I don't know, not important) to prevent this happening.

Not a chance.

Wow, I didn't realize the percentage is that high. But it could easily be, and that seems sad.

They had a similar version of 'free to play' in the 1990's with Apogee and other game companies where you get the first part free. Then if you like it, you buy the rest of the levels.

The original Duke Nukem,' Commander Keen, and the one where the kid saved the puppies and kittens from the zombies in his pj's. Were all distributed that way.

It's more than most demos. You get a full 'boss' run.