NYT: Free games say pay up or wait, testing patience

The Finn

Found this to be a good read about the freemium model.

Especially liked this quote: “It does kill the joy of gaming for me,” Hypponen said. He added: “I’m an adult — I’m 44. If I feel like gaming, I want to play right now.”

http://mobile.seattletimes.com/story/today/2024002786/track-.-.-./

CNash

A crucial part of designing an F2P game is striking a balance between providing enough content to make users want to commit their time to the game, and then rationing that content so that users are encouraged to spend money. Some games accomplish this better than others. In a way, Dungeon Keeper's critical failure was instrumental in demonstrating to the industry that customers can only be pushed so far; that if your monetization methods are too intrusive, it will cloud the whole reception of the game, in spite of its quality as a game.

Unknown

Imo something that is overlooked is that these mechanics don't just ask to pay up but play on conditioning/reinforcent which can lead to addiction. The author mentions f2p being like slot machines but doesn't go into that aspect further.

As far as waiting aka paying to play, I'm not bothered too much by it. Arcades back in the day were quarter eating machines. At least the basic gameplay balance is intact.

Pay2win is far worse in my book. It messes too much with the game balance, especially when they try to get players to lose unfairly. If the devs are that obvious with their pay2win it's an automatic uninstall for me.

Slarow

DK failed because the only thing it brought from the original series was the character models. The gameplay was an exact copy of clash of clans, none of the fun from the original DK's was there. It was a huge disappointment.

Unknown

Thanks for the link, it is really interesting.

Unknown

Slarow wrote:

DK failed because the only thing it brought from the original series was the character models. The gameplay was an exact copy of clash of clans, none of the fun from the original DK's was there. It was a huge disappointment.

I avoided dk because of the backlash, being a fan of the original. However, I'm also a fan of coc. Are you saying dk is actually a decent game comparable to coc?

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

As far as waiting aka paying to play, I'm not bothered too much by it. Arcades back in the day were quarter eating machines. At least the basic gameplay balance is intact.

Its funny how there's always a comparison back to the arcade days. Yes it was pay to play, but if you got good you could put in 1 credit and play till you complete the game, or just keep playing. You can't do this one bit with F2P. Its more like having an arcade machine that you pay per level, and to continue if you die, and if your time runs out, etc. People wouldn't put up with Arcade machines like that.

Unknown

Arcade was the cutting edge of gaming so even though it's expensive it was worth paying for the most advanced stuff. F2P is nowhere near the cutting edge of gaming. Like someone mentioned the arcades tend to be unreasonably hard but if you're good enough at the game you can get pretty far with one credit. Most F2P would be comparable to some baseball game I saw where you got to insert a quarter every inning or something along these lines so it doesn't matter how awesome you are you're going to need 9 quarters to finish a game.

At any rate MPQ is far more comparable to an arcade game because it is indeed possible to get very far on 'one credit' if you have a very good roster. Sure that roster takes a long time to build up but the guys who beat the arcade in one credit usually need a lot of effort to practice to get that good too.

Unknown

pwolverine wrote:

ihearthawthats wrote:

As far as waiting aka paying to play, I'm not bothered too much by it. Arcades back in the day were quarter eating machines. At least the basic gameplay balance is intact.

Its funny how there's always a comparison back to the arcade days. Yes it was pay to play, but if you got good you could put in 1 credit and play till you complete the game, or just keep playing. You can't do this one bit with F2P. Its more like having an arcade machine that you pay per level, and to continue if you die, and if your time runs out, etc. People wouldn't put up with Arcade machines like that.

Plenty of arcade makes you pay more for running out of time (e.g. Time Crisis) and there are also games where you only have one life and can die in one hit. But in these games you can still get good enough to get around the difficulty.