Why do people hate free 2 play??

[Fonejackerjon]

Im sorry I just dont get it. Would you rather spend $60 on a game outright hope and pray you like it then $15 on DLC.OR would you rather have the game free then only pay if you enjoying it or YOU think its worth it.

Im sorry but I have yet to see a F2P game that FORCES you to buy something to progress, You may have to wait hours or may have to grind but so what? the thing is free.

Jimquisition has said for a long time the $60 business model isnt working, so why are so many gamers intent on keeping it the way it is and sleep walking the industry into another crash? I really dont get it.

Sure free to play can get abused by despicable publishers *cough* Square *cough* but it is the future and we should embrace it! games are not worth $60. Period. No ifs no buts. Killer instinct and Blacklight show how its done. Pay a little bit see if you like and pay some more if you want to carry on or get new characters ITS GOOD BUSINESS why do so many gamers resist it? honestly it really annoys me. Imagine if you could buy the single player and multiplayer separately, how good would that be?

Free to play is good if done right and without it the industry will not have a future!

Can you can honestly say you are happy with the rip off $60 price model as it is now or would you rather a future where you have the choice what parts of the game you want?

 

[Caiphus]

Uh, well.

I can't speak for other people. But personally, I'd rather just

spend $60 on a game outright

and watch Let's Plays and read reviews so I don't have to

hope and pray you like it

Because I'd rather do that than

wait hours or may have to grind

Now, hating free to play by itself is a bit silly. It can be done well or poorly. A quick comparison of Rift and ToR, for example, will give you a good case study on how to go about setting up a decent model.

But companies have to make their money somehow. So no game is truly free to play. I'd rather just get my money taken up front for a product I want. It seems simpler that way.

 

[Joccaren]

People dislike the pay-2-win mechanics implemented into many F2P games, which make the games unenjoyable for those who can't pay. I have this problem in numerous cheap strategy games where I have no money to spend, and my enemies have a seemingly infinite supply. They attack me, then shield themselves so they cannot be counterattacked. If I manage to counter attack them, they'll keep buying moral so that their base doesn't fall until they are ready to take it back. The only way to acquire these bonuses is through real money [Moral can be done with moral boosts, which are a rare item that can be bought with real money. The number of moral boosts these people use though... there is no way they didn't buy at least half].
Likewise in the current competition in another game, you are limited to 4 battles per 1.5 hours. Battles earn you points which can win you the war. Well, when I say limited I mean you can't attack more than 4 times per 1.5 hours without paying money to refill your battle meter, and allow you to go forward and keep battling, earning more points and winning simply because you had the money to keep fighting whilst your opponent had to wait 1.5 hours to fight.

That is BS mechanics, which really suck.

Likewise, there are also some games that DO lock you out of content until you pay money. Runescape hits me as a very obvious and old example. Exclusive content for subscribers, those who played free didn't get everything, and couldn't even venture to certain parts of the world.

Granted I'm not too fussed with F2P as it lets me play games for free that I otherwise wouldn't have played at all 'cause I had no money for that. However, people who do pay for F2P advancement often pay more than the $60 base cost of a new game, simply because to get everything you have to pay more. That's why its a successful business model. If it didn't bring in more revenue, companies wouldn't do it. It comes down to play for free and be locked out of content [Or have to grind for literally a year or more to get the content], or pay more than $60. For those who could afford the $60 base game, and would have prefered to pay that, it is a ripoff. It merely helps those who can't pay, and gives a demo before people commit to paying.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

I'm going to say it's because Free to Play is usually done wrong.

The latest F2P game I've tried is Elsword, and while yes, you can probably get through the basic game if you want, they make it so obnoxious to do anything even remotely advanced that it will either force you to pay for those things, or tun you off completely. Example: you have three character slots at the start (meaning, you can only make 3 out of the 6 (8 for Koreans) possible characters). Assuming that all the characters play differently, I made 3 to see which one(s) I liked, and which one suited my usual playstyle, hoping to eventually try all of them and end up with 2 or 3. Turns out you need to wait a week (7 frigging days!) before a character is deleted. After having marked one for deletion, if you change your mind, it takes 24 hours before you can use it again. The only way around this is to buy character slots if you want to keep playing. Now I can hear you say, just do something else in the meantime. That's what I did and it completely killed any interest I had in the game.

And that's not mentioning the vanity items like costumes and such, which are considered a major selling point for the game. Granted, you can possibly get them as drops from Bosses, but they're incredibly rare to get that way, so most people end up getting them either from the player market (not available for new characters right away, you need to wait 2 days and go through a class upgrade, but at least you can use in-game currency to buy stuff... if you're a billionaire) or from the real money store. The real money store shows at least 2 prices for each item: the normal version, which is already too expensive in my book, and another that cost double. The difference? The one that costs double is permanent, while the other one expire after X days. That's right, you need to pay double the shown price to get a vanity item that doesn't goes poof after a while.

Then you have the quests to unlock the best abilities (oh yes, forgot to mention, the best abilities are locked from the start) that are serious grindfest that will take days to complete, because they require acquiring very rare drops from monsters in large quantities, and those quests are usually in three parts, each needing more items (as an example, it took me 2 days of non-stop grinding to get half way through one such quest). But of course, you can use the real money store to buy an item to unlock those skills if you want to save time.


As for an example of a F2P game done right (or at least it was last time I checked, which was before a major overall that apparently turned a lot of people off) was Champions Online: sure, you were limited to 2 characters at a time, but you could delete them at any point if you wished to start another; you had a huge choice in costume parts, with the ability to relatively easily get more through quests in game (quests that while they needed X amount of items Y, were easy on account of those items dropping every time you killed a target) or buy some more for real money; you could experience the whole game from start to finish (exceptions were some side dungeons that you needed to buy to access); you could use all the features such as mail storage, trading and such from the get go.

Moral of the story, F2P devs are usually way too greedy for the good of their game and unfortunately, it seems like there's an endless supply of people with more money than sense for that model to change any time soon.

 

[Doom972]

Most F2P games seem to give you the choice between micro-payments and repetitive grinding to progress in the game. Many people don't like either option, and therefore don't like most F2P game.

Also, I don't like to buy a game for $60 and pray I like it. I prefer to watch/read reviews to know if I might like it, wait for a big price drop/discount sale, and buy the game for about $10 (price depends on the game). Don't assume that just because people don't like one extreme, they automatically like the other.

 

[Eve Charm]

Well killer instinct if ready to be the shining example of failure. People are only going the buy the character's people tell them are cheap and op. Also whats going to happen if they try to balance the game. Something you bought and paid money for gets nerfed people will go up in arms.



But anyway the problem with F2P is they just don't have the right payment options yet. Some people would rather prefer " here's 60-100 dollars let me play forever or let me have access to everything. When if they really wanted to buy everything at the jacked up price because you only expect the normal user to buy 1 or 2 things, it'll cost in the thousands.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

F2P games enforce a lot of silly constrictions on free-to-players that try and wear them down into purchasing a membership. Random cooldowns times, getting locked out of certain items, being unable to fully interact with members, a slower leveling up (meaning two or three times the amount of grind just to level up) and generally speaking gaining belated access to everything members get from the get-go. It's the kind of thing you don't mind on principle, because you're playing the damn game for free, but in the long run you're either supposed to succumb and purchase a membership or simply give up on a game you would've liked were it not for a few stupid constrictions.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, case in point. Fun and immersive game to engage at first. But in the long rung it's just not worth it. You end up fighting the game as much as anything else.

 

[Username Redacted]

Well killer instinct if ready to be the shining example of failure. People are only going the buy the character's people tell them are cheap and op. Also whats going to happen if they try to balance the game. Something you bought and paid money for gets nerfed people will go up in arms.

I think Killer Instinct is just generally failing from what I've seen. Whereas from what I've seen, so far, Dead or Alive 5: Ultimate is approaching free-2-play in a more intelligent fashion. Firstly they've got a larger roster available for free. Secondly the paid content is (as best I can remember) ONLY additional characters and non-essential game modes. Lastly they're offering multiple ways to purchase the full game. Unlike what someone said earlier I actually think that fighting games are one of the better applications of free to play.

That said in direct response to the incredibly loaded question from the OP I don't think that people necessarily hate free-2-play games they just hate shitty games and most F2P games would certainly fall under that umbrella being little more than colorful skinner boxes designed to milk as much money out of the player while providing the bare minimum of experiences in return. To go back to my DoA5U example I'm still getting into the free version of the game and having played its predecessor am in the process of deciding whether or not I like the changes that they've made in 'Ultimate' and if it's worth dropping $39.99 for the full version of the game. In this case f2p is serving as a robust demo.

 

[Rack]

The issue with F2P is there's never a way to play the game that isn't made worse by the design. You're either being bored into submission or just continually paying through the nose. The value proposition is always messed up.

 

[Bloodstain]

"Free 2 play" is no issue at all, actually. "Pay to win" is an issue. However, sadly, they oftentimes accompany each other.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

To be frank, my ideal business model would be F2P, but with a $60 option that grants you all additional (atleast gameplay-related) content. Normal F2P games tend to nickle and dime you for literally hundreds of dollars and have massive issues with overpowered paid items, optimal F2P games like Team Fortress 2 only work when the developer owns the platform its run on and subscriptions just suck dockey cock (or whatever you're into, I don't judge).

I don't think the standard "pay money for game, you own full game" will go away. The issue with the AAA business model is that devs blow most of their budget on marketing and graphics which both have diminishing returns, not that it's sold in a traditional money-for-product manner.

 

[Sectan]

TF2 is a great F2P game, because it avoids the #1 sin of F2P - Pay to win. Every item you buy may give you benefits, but they give you disadvantages as well. The standard loadout is the most balanced all around so you can dominate with skill alone instead of buying "THE NEW SUPER AWESOME WEAPON OF THE WEEK" that's a literal money trap and will be nerfed once people stop buying it. Yeah I'm looking at you Planetside 2... If games followed Valve's footsteps on F2P models the hate wouldn't be as bad. When people constantly get killed by some guy who buys top tier gear and weapons they would rather just spend $60 dollars on a game and avoid that all together.

Plus after you spend 49 cents on TF2 you can start finding hats!

 

[Best of the 3]

Free to play is pretty good. As long as it doesn't divulge into a pay to win. Some other drawbacks can be that you get the very bare bones for free and end up paying more for an actual game in some cases. And lastly but on a slightly less important point, being free to play invites some players in games you may not want.

Other then that I can't see many problems with free to play.

 

[evilneko]

Because most times free to play means pay to win.

Or at least, that's the main reason for me.

 

[cthulhuspawn82]

Because free to play games suck. They are monotonous, boring grinds that try to push you into paying more money in the real money store than you would ever spend on a regular AAA title. Being free means nothing, watching paint dry is free.

 

[Harleykin]

Because free to play games suck. They are monotonous, boring grinds that try to push you into paying more money in the real money store than you would ever spend on a regular AAA title. Being free means nothing, watching paint dry is free.

ALL OF THEM....huh? yeah ...

as many before me said: pay to win sucks!
what i dislike mostly is a way of making you want to play the game and like after 1 hour ( or the tutorial or whatever) you realise that all of the game you saw was advertising it

most of the time free to play feels like a demo that turns into pay to win if you REALLY want to play