Has Free 2 Play become a garant for success?

[Deleted]

As a long-time Gamer I've had a natural aversion towards F2P games. The concept of "play to win" went against a lot of my fundamental "gaming principles".

I used to think that F2P was always a cop-out option for low-quality games that didn't make it in the subscription based market.


However my opinion has changed. It seems like F2P has given so many games a 2nd chance at success and has contributed a great deal to diversifying the MMO market. It also seems like a game cannot fail with F2P (at least I haven't heard of any F2P games failing as of recent) thus reducing the inherent risk of creating a large MMO title.

Example: A couple of years ago it seemed like an MMO couldn't succeed unless it followed the WoW model and game-design concepts. So any big MMO naturally had to be a copy of WoW and ended up competing against a matured and addictive MMO that was hard to beat. Most MMOs in that time were considered a "failure" by most people standards.

But F2P has given all these games, be it DDO, LotRO, various Superhero MMOs etc. a 2nd chance. And most of these games have flourished ever since.

None of these games would still be around if it wasn't for F2P and we'd be forever stuck to the WoW model of MMOs.

I must admit that even I as a conservative gamer are becoming more and more open-minded about F2P games. Without F2P, the MMO market would be a lot blander and uncompetitive.

[Relente]

I think B2P and F2P will be the new direction developers will go with for future MMOs. A lot of games are going F2P now and the only ones that are still P2P are the big name MMOs like WoW, Aion (East), and Lineage 2 (East).

A lot of developers have been interviewed about this and said that they really don't even need the monthly subscription to run the game. I think having the game as F2P with almost everything accessible is a great idea, and then if players like it, they can buy more content through micro transactions like what Dungeons and Dragons or Age of Empires Online is doing.

Or just buying the game once and paying for big content patches or expansions is another way to go, which is what GW2 will be doing. I think it works out for both the players and the developers, because people will only buy it if they like the game so the developers will have to be releasing quality content if they want to get paid, but they will know they are making a good game.

P2P really needs to go IMO. Developers are getting paid whether or not they are releasing good content or content at all. If Blizzard was doing a B2P model for WoW, the game would be much better if they wanted to make money, which we all know they do. Releasing a raid or a couple of instances every 5-6 months is not a steady flow of content for how much they are getting paid.