Free-to-play is the WORST thing to happen to video gaming.

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Its a system a developer can use to finance their game. Its neither good nor bad, just like full releases can have things like Aliens Colonial Marines could be considered exploitave of the traditional model of selling games and especially preorders: Theres no try before you buy, drop a hundred dollars Australian on a game only to discover its an unplayable POS? Too late we have your money! Make lots of hype with doctored gameplay videos and get preorders before the game goes on sale for tons of profit!

F2P can be awesome, in the hands of a smart company that knows how to treat its customers with respect. Or it can be absued for evil practices. Its just a tool and tools are neutral.

 

[Kyrian007]

As a particularly self-centered person, since F2P has never been a problem for me... self-centered logic dictates that it cannot be the WORST thing in video games. I would counter that it's not even a particularly bad thing; it?s rather like the lottery. It allows the industry to take money from other people, to pay people who may work to benefit me in some capacity someday.

Kidding, I'm not that much of an ass. Really it's just that no F2P game has ever addicted me strongly enough to over-ride my enjoyment of having money. SALES encourage me to buy. Feels like I'm getting a bargain... and surely I'll play all those games in my Steam backlog. Eventually I mean. Right?

I've tried several F2P games. Most times it goes "(play, play, play) oh, I have to buy those. I'm out. (play something else) I don't play games I don't like, and since I've never liked a F2P... I don't really get bothered by their existence because they don't affect me in any meaningful way.

Regardless of the mostly awful games ftp has created, motion controls are the worst thing to happen to video gaming. Yes worse than the Virtual Boy, worse than touch screen controls on a tablet, and worse than those god awful Atari Jaguar commercials.

I'd have to say touch-screens anger me the most. A screen is an OUTPUT device. When you try and hybridize it as an input/output device you ruin its effectiveness as both. Motion controls do bug me, but I believe that there is some possible hope to making them useful in some way. Perhaps a gesture or two to serve as a quickfunction for something you'd otherwise have to open a menu or hold down a different button for.

 

[Jandau]

For the most part, I agree. I particularly hate that it's taken such root in the MMO market. People used to whine about hating monthly subs, but then turn around and end up paying even more over the same period of time in microtransactions for the same content. One of the reasons my MMO of choice is FF14 is precisely because it's a sub game (in addition to being pretty damn good), and I don't need to weigh my options, consider the best value, wonder if I should get piece or content or not. I just log in and know the whole game is available to me.

 

[Shymer]

The main problem I have with Free-to-play is that I play games to escape (for a brief moment) worrying about money and other real-world concerns. Free-to-play games have a habit of having mechanics that jerk you out of flow and remind you of the real world. It's like having someone at your table in the pub constantly talking about the price of beer, the discounts off beer if you buy beer right now, the snacks you can buy with your beer.

You end up wanting to punch him in the nose and drive him away so you can enjoy the beer you're having.

It was a similar feeling in Dragon Age when you meet an NPC in the camp that tells you (in-character) of a ruined castle that you can visit, and then says you have to buy the DLC, would I like to log in now and pay the money to continue the quest...!? I was jerked so hard out of character and into the real world that I stopped playing. Cardinal sin. Worse than a quick-time event.

Actually - an early example above, Mechwarrior Online, doesn't do too badly - it's not in your face and the dev has worked hard to avoid pay-to-win. The gold 'Mechs are silly and non-one buys them (but clearly deter new players from looking deeper - already programmed to avoid ostentatious displays of wealth) - it drains dev time/resource from gameplay innovation and bug-fixing.

So, in summary, I'm not a fan. It has negative impacts on gameplay immersion and the availability of an up-front payment model. I, too, would prefer to pay once and enjoy my game in my time with no interruptions.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't know if anyone brought up that F2P games tend to cause the community to go into the toilet but it definitely does. Oh how I wish Path of Exile had charged a 10 dollar price tag instead of being 100% free. It'd keep out so many freeloading whiners. It was so nice and friendly in closed beta when it cost 10 dollars to get in.

 

[sanquin]

Some do it the right way. Like guild wars 2. Not entirely ftp, but still. I think Archeage does a decent job too, considering the differences between sub and ftp. There are games that do it correctly, but I have to agree that I don't like the concept as a whole. I'd rather pay a sub and get ALL features, or do a one-time purchase.

 

[Denamic]

Dota 2 lets you play for free without any sort of disadvantage. You can pick it up and never pay a cent, and you'll be on a completely level playing field with people who has spent thousands of dollars on the game. Everything you can buy in the game is purely cosmetic, or tickets to watch tournaments in-game, but even those are almost always streamed on twitch for free as well.

 

[Cryselle]

Devs need to be paid, players need to pay for games in one fashion or another if they want more games to be made. That's how a business works. F2P is a perfectly fine base model, and I think it's a great thing for video-gaming as a whole, with a few caveats.

There are, of course, some games that completely abuse the customer, and are disgusting cash grabs that highlight how truly soulless the people behind them are. HOWEVER, that is true in all categories of gaming. People level the same accusations of Aliens: Colonial Marines. There are early access games on Steam that are practically criminal. It's all in the presentation, whether they're upfront and honest about what you get for your money and what you don't, whether or not they try to bully customers into spending money they don't want to spend, and ultimately, do you come out of the experience feeling like you enjoyed a game, or got taken for a ride.

I can hardly begrudge TF2 for the 5 or so dollars I've spent on it given the over 100 hours of enjoyment I've gotten out of the game. There are very few hobbies where I could get so much for so little.

 

[jklinders]

Wargaming.net with World of Tanks and World of Warplanes seems to have a pretty fair business model. You simply Can. Not. Buy. Your. Way. to competence there. Sure there are premium vehicles that legitimately cost a mint but they are only as good as the player using them. Good game, too bad it's community is overrun with elitist snobs who only give a shit about their stats and start insulting their own team before the match even begins.

I've seen a lot of FTP done badly. Some done fairly and a quite a bit of it in some kind of middle ground between the two. We need to keep in mind that they need to make money somehow so prices can be a bit wonky, but with any of the middle ground or fair models the only thing keeping you spending money is a lack of impulse control. The shittily done ones shouldn't be played at all. Kind of like gaming in general, only with FTP you have no upfront risk.

 

[Ol'gamer BOB]

Path of Exile is completely Free-To-Play. It is also the Game of the Year at Gamespot. Most free to play games are horrible. But POE and Robocraft are among the best of the FTP genre. Also another good game is Team Fortress 2. Not all free to play games are buy to win.

I play Path of Exile. It is a much improved version of Diablo II. IMO the best hack'n'slash rpg in the market currently. Some even compare it as better than Diablo III. Path of Exile has one of the best skill trees I have ever seen in a rpg/mmo.

To our OP. Perhaps you are looking in the wrong place for FTP games. All 3 of the games above are found on Steam. :-D

 

[lechat]

cracked.com had a good article about addiction and skinner boxes and how game companies steal your money because you are dumb and love clicking buttons for useless shit.
for the most part if i see free to play (pay to win) i immediately tune out but something like gemcraft, which is arguably the best tower defense game on the planet offers game improvements which massively boost your xp and limit your grind time for tiny fees, sure you can still play the game if you feel like grinding for 20 hours a day and the devs could have balanced the game to not need grinding but if you want to support the devs and your time is worth more than a few bucks you are given the chance to progress much faster for a one time fee without disadvantaging any other players.

Borderlands is a half decent game that i enjoy playing but if you offered me a bundle pack that meant i didn't have to open 50 chests every 5 minuets to get 2 bucks per box and instead could just open 1 chest with 1000 bucks i would buy it in a second.

 

[Emanuele Ciriachi]

I'm not against it as long as they don't sell power.
If they sell power, I just won't play it - unless it's Star Citizen I guess...

 

[Daft Ada]

It's down to simple economics. Games cost money to make, more so now than ever before. The 'core' market is small and pretty fickle (sticking to established franchises), and the entire market is riddled with piracy and second-hand purchasing that further reduces the income for developers and publishers. Something had to give. The market hasn't expanded enough to keep the industry healthy like it was in the last two generations, and creativity has been stifled. Either games had to stick to Ps3/360 levels, graphically, to be viable or developers had to pursue other avenues to generate revenue - ie DLC & F2P. The number of big studios that have died off the back of one under-performing game in the last five years clearly shows that the margins aren't there any more to sustain the industry in its current guise.

I don't like it much, but the market is what it is. Want to change things? Start putting your money where your mouth is and stick to new games, or buy games that try and do something a little different. Don't just whinge about games not giving you what you want, when what you buy is the same rubbish year-in, year-out.

 

[Bigggg BRIM77]

I should add that I've tried Path of Exile, TF2 and Dota 2 and these are the only FTP games that do it right. Unfortunately, these are anomalies in the giant steaming pile of shit known as free-to-play games.

 

[War_Dyn27]

Dota 2 lets you play for free without any sort of disadvantage. You can pick it up and never pay a cent, and you'll be on a completely level playing field with people who has spent thousands of dollars on the game. Everything you can buy in the game is purely cosmetic, or tickets to watch tournaments in-game, but even those are almost always streamed on twitch for free as well.

add to that you can actually make money off of dota 2 by selling the free cosmetic drops on the steam market, so if you get lucky you end up getting payed to play it.

 

[loa]

And yet you only scraped the surface.
Selling consumable items such as extra lives for real money is standard practice on mobile "free" games.
League is tame compared to that.
If you unlock annie in league, that's it, annie unlocked and eventually you have everything you can unlock.
Games that keep the black money hole that keeps nagging and nagging open are the next level.

 

[Bigggg BRIM77]

It's down to simple economics. Games cost money to make, more so now than ever before. The 'core' market is small and pretty fickle (sticking to established franchises), and the entire market is riddled with piracy and second-hand purchasing that further reduces the income for developers and publishers. Something had to give. The market hasn't expanded enough to keep the industry healthy like it was in the last two generations, and creativity has been stifled. Either games had to stick to Ps3/360 levels, graphically, to be viable or developers had to pursue other avenues to generate revenue - ie DLC & F2P. The number of big studios that have died off the back of one under-performing game in the last five years clearly shows that the margins aren't there any more to sustain the industry in its current guise.

I don't like it much, but the market is what it is. Want to change things? Start putting your money where your mouth is and stick to new games, or buy games that try and do something a little different. Don't just whinge about games not giving you what you want, when what you buy is the same rubbish year-in, year-out.

You have no idea what you're talking about. The only games that cost alot more money to develop are the ones with massive marketing budgets and cutting edge graphics, neither of which are needed for a successful game. Minecraft is a good example. And video games have grown into a $100 billion dollar global industry. If studios can't figure out how to profit off of a market that size, then it is their problem. And show me a big game studio that "died off the back of one under-performing game" and I'll show you a game studio that made extremely poor financial decisions unrelated to the actual development of the game.

 

[MHR]

I love F2P, as long as that actually means free to play, and not free to get to lvl 20/90 (world of warcraft) or free to get pwned by people that bought better weapons than you.

F2P is a way to get access to game content for free. You can't really beat free. "And I'm the demographic for free, because I am unemployed, and unemployable!" as Master Shake puts it. But seriously, I love it. Less EXP gain means jack when I'm invested enough in the game that I'm going to be playing that long anyway. Grind can be fun, for example I love doing it in Robocraft since all you do is play team deathmatch; the game doesn't actually do anything besides that, so call it a grind if you want.

I've played TF2 for 3500 hours, and besides buying it initially in the Orange Box, I've spent <20$ on the in-game store for various little things. Now that's F2P done perfectly. Premium players have absolutely nothing over F2P players except bigger inventory space and the ability to trade. Most of the regular default weapons are actually the best, anyone can find the unlockable weapons randomly while playing, and they use TF2 to sell lots of other games on Steam with all their promo tie-in items.

Another example of a decent F2P system would be Guild Wars 2, if they ever get around to dropping the up-front game price. You can use pay money to buy cosmetics, game money, bank space, or various minor pieces of gear, or you can convert the game money into that pay currency to buy whatever it is people pay real money to buy. After buying the game, I never spent anything on the in-game store, but still got a lot of sweet premium swag.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Agreed.
I maintain that Free-to-Play is an exceptionally misleading name on the whole; though there are a few extremely rare exceptions of genuinely good gameplay for free (Path of Exile and the Valve Wonder Twins: DOTA2 and TF2 don't gate you from gameplay mechanics; just cosmetics).

But in practice, Free-to-Play has been so badly handled, it's not unreasonable to be extremely wary of any game using the model; the few good F2P games come from already stable, affluent companies like Valve and Blizzard. (Path of Exile is the only notable exception I can think of, but even there, I question it being F2P)

The rest MUST rely on exploiting "Whales" or imposing some sort of oppression measures like Grind to be profitable. Which suggests to me that F2P is costly to make good/fair by default, and even then of very limited usage to gaming.

In those cases, the majority of F2P games just take the worst parts of service-based games (basically from MMOs), drop the cost of entry to "free", and then hope you get hooked on them enough that you start sinking horrifying amounts of cash on them on a whim.

LONGER VERSION Or for a rubric:

*"Traditional" Game
-Front loaded costs
-Monetary costs
-Baseline price of industry
-Product centric model


*"Free" To Play
-Back loaded costs
-Heavy opportunity cost (initially)
-Much more expensive price per unit content than traditional (mainly cosmetics and "boosts")
-Service-centric model

From there, one can delve into the matters of Cost:Content, nuances of PvP vs PvE (Pay2Win and "Whale-centric" design)...but generally speaking, the main benefit F2P provides over a traditional game is Centralization for competition. Everyone plays on the same servers, and the game rules are (hopefully) better enforced than the "wild west" of private servers.

Outside of that (like for PvE games; like Warframe or PoE), the model is rather head scratching in exactly what benefit it actually provides (PoE is great, but I wouldn't complain if it was for sale so I could play it offline or in LAN).

In exchange, the player basically waives any and all practical advantages they have as a consumer.
For one, all progress and in game purchases will inevitably "poof".
For another, acquired in-game assets may (and often do) devalue due to "balancing" mechanisms.
Grind is all but required.

A high, persistent server population is necessary to keep the game interesting (more if PvP; less for PvE).
I cannot stress how badly these games need players with a diverse skill group; This is the one big benefit "freeloaders" provide.

(Learn from the failure of HAWKEN: Without a lot of players, matchmaking gets borked, and once that happens, new player turnover skyrockets, you don't attract those "whales", and your game bombs.)

QUICKER PERSONAL TAKE

I don't like the F2P model much at all, and it's not for a lack of trying.
The match-based games benefit from forced centralization, but this is too often countered by the grind elements (pacing and progress are largely artificial rather than organic).

Outside of competition, there's no real benefits to using the model. The one big benefit, "Free", comes with too many necessary trailing asterisks to be realistic: if you do invest into the game it's no longer actually "free", while if you don't, horrible pacing or some other gating mechanism will get you in the end.

Some people may enjoy that, but I don't.
It breaks my heart when otherwise good (or niche) games are absolutely hamstrung by the concessions required of the F2P model. (Warframe, HAWKEN, Tribes:Ascend and MechWarrior Online all suffer from this)

When those games fail, the suits will NEVER, EVER, look at the innate issues of the model, but always pin it on something else because from their perspective, the only thing that mattered was exploitation (that's why they chose the model to begin with; because someone else exploited it to great effect): "It didn't work because the franchise was weak" or "We just didn't market our price-gouging smart enough".

(the weak performance of MWO and failure of HAWKEN all but ensure that the Mech genre will remain effectively dead, or stuck in service-centric Hell)