F2P games is the real world.

GuntherBlobel

Every time there is a big "nerf" shake up, I once again realize that some people are playing this game mostly for the money-based meta game. That's really strange to me, but it's the norm for video games now, right? So, I guess lots of people like playing money-based games. I've mentioned this before, but I recently downloaded an UNO game for my 3 yr. old son, which I promptly deleted once I saw that they encourage kids to pay real money for "boosts." I do not want to teach my kid that cheating is fun.

So, I can't help but wonder, when is F2P coming to all our other traditional skill-based games? Is it already here?

I can just imagine going to the golf course with some of our fellow forumites. I'll tee up and line up my shot, but then watch as my friend walks in front of me to the children's tee. He or she will drop a $20 in a vending machine to get an exclusive "better" ball.

"You should really play from over here too!" they'll say. "You do know that removing strokes from your score costs $100 per point, so the ROI at the children's tee is so much better." "Besides, who has time for a par 3, anyway!" "I hate golf!"

EDIT: Changed "my competition" to "my friend." The problem isn't that I'm going lose the game to him, it's that he's not even playing golf anymore and he hates it.

franckynight

what the hell are you talking about????? there is no skill in this game.. ppl just learnt how to game the system.. and boosting is one of those tools.. i see no cheat here.. you keep coming here telling tales about how all of us are wrong to spend money into this game.. yada.. yada.. its growing tiresome..you re a f2p.. good for you.. we got it. now stop spamming the forum with your ethical talk about video gaming.. play your way and let others have theirs.. thank you..the only thing that bothers is that we all have fun..rest is history..

Unknown

GuntherBlobel wrote:

Every time there is a big "nerf" shake up, I once again realize that some people are playing this game mostly for the money-based meta game. That's really strange to me, but it's the norm for video games now, right? So, I guess lot's of people like playing money-based games. I've mentioned this before, but I recently downloaded an UNO game for my 3 yr. old son, which I promptly deleted once I saw that they encourage kids to pay real money for "boosts." I do not want to teach my kid that cheating is fun.

So, I can't help but wonder, when is F2P coming to all our other traditional skill-based games? Is it already here?

I can just imagine going to the golf course with some of our fellow forumites. I'll tee up and line up my shot, but then watch as my competition walks in front of me to the children's tee. He or she will drop a $20 in a vending machine to get an exclusive "better" ball.

"You should really play from over here too!" they'll say. "You do know that removing strokes from your score costs $100 per point, so the ROI at the children's tee is so much better." "Besides, who has time for a par 3, anyway!" "I hate golf!"

Why would I want to spend literally 100+ hours grinding for low value rewards, sacrificing family time, sacrificing work time, sacrificing free time...when I can just pay $100 to take 50 steps forward and actually enjoy the game? How much is 100+ hours worth to you? A lot more than $100 for some people.

You talk about encouraging kids. How many grown men on here are ignoring their children and grinding PVE for hours a day on this game? LOL

If anything, it actually teaches your son that if you work hard in real life you can afford fun advantages in the rest of your life. A real world lesson.

ShadowX1984

Interesting you chose the golf analogy... because I regularly hear my golf friends complaining that if they could just afford a better set of clubs they could bring their game to "the next level." Do you have a bicylcle out in your garage? Odds are you couldn't hop on that and compete in professional racing... it'll be thousands of dollars to get a competetive model. People have been paying for advantages in games for as long as there have been games (better clubs, better gloves, more streamlined uniforms, lighter bikes, etc.)
Whether this is cheating or min/maxing depends on how that game is regulated.

evil panda

Switchman wrote:

You talk about encouraging kids. How many grown men on here are ignoring their children and grinding PVE for hours a day on this game? LOL

Ouch...this one hit a little close to home.

GuntherBlobel

For the record, I'm not F2P. I want to support the game because I actually do enjoy it. I spend more like $2-5 a month, which is my "no regrets" budget.

Another pro tip: I also avoid these 4* release PvEs like the plague. You won't see my name on any "the Hunt" leaderboard. I could play it casually, but I don't even want to be tempted to try for a Top 50. As someone pointed out, I've got a family and other responsibilities.

xellessanova

Golf is a vastly more expensive RW hobby than MPQ. And to be fair, almost every hobby costs more than MPQ.

Then again, golf doesn't demand you play it constantly in order to get a fancy new 33-iron this tournament, and then two weeks later you need to play a 6.5-day tournament without sleeping for the chance to win the brand new 15-wood in three different colors + 1 more if your team does well.

Unknown

Freemium gaming is the new “it” gaming mechanic.

For the longest time, games were a one time buy.

You go to a video game store. You buy a game. You play it. You keep it or sell it.

Those were the only transactions associated with gaming. Buying and selling.

Then the Xbox/PS3 Online gaming series came out and started offering “downloadable content” for a small fee. Usually 5 or 10 dollars. What’s 5 dollars when you spent 60 dollars on the game? So you spend 5 dollars for an extra level or 2. You finish that level. Then you sell the game again.

Then developers started intentionally leaving out parts of a game and then selling them as downloadable content as well. Like a character that plays a large role in the plot that could be purchased or an ending that you previously would not have had access to. So it got to the point where you were purchasing an incomplete game for 60 dollars.

Back in the 8 bit and 16 bit gaming time, most games could turn a profit from the one time purchase model. But as games got more graphically complicated and more expensive to manufacture, not only in graphics but also story line development and other premium features, gaming companies realized it was much harder to make a profit off of the one time purchase model.

And that’s when it really clicked for gaming companies. Why charge anything at all up front? That is, after all, the biggest barrier to purchasing the game.

A lot of people, if they see something even mildly interesting and it’s free they’d say “hey, why not?” and download it, just in case they had some free time on their hands.

Before they know it, they’re spending 5 dollars a week on it. Then 10 dollars a week. Before you know it, they’re buying a “new game” by old gaming standards every single week, just to play a game that was originally advertised as free.

Psychologically speaking, the most difficult part of a transitional period is the introduction. It’s why advertisement is such a huge market in every serious media business; movies, games, television.

The biggest barrier is getting people to want to initiate your media. Once you get a person started either playing or watching your game/show, it is much easier to get them to continue with small charges here and there.

Just like in Poker, the hardest part is getting people to bid. Once they’ve bid, they’ll likely continue calling because they are “pot committed.” It’s, literally, the exact same concept in freemium games.

Not only that, but many games employ a skinner box model. Make your players complete a relatively mindless task on a timed basis in order to keep pace in the game and occasionally reward them for their efforts. Sound familiar? (PVE). Daily bonuses that stack every day, hence requiring you to play at least once a day, are another common tactic that relates to this model.

The less frequent the rewards are, the more often they’ll “press the button” so to speak.

Any freemium game is possible to be played for free. But you’ll never have 100% access to the game, or you won’t have the same or, arguably, the necessary advantages to excel in the game.

And no free game will ever be content to let you play at its full capacity for free. They will always endorse spending money and encourage you to spend a little more than you’re comfortable. They are a business after all.

I don’t fault the companies for this psychological manipulation. They are just following the tried and true approach to earning money. But I think every person who plays the game should be aware of what the game is trying to make you do.

If you recognize what the game is doing, and are okay with it, then ethically there is no problem with spending money on it. My problem is that so many people have no idea that they’re being manipulated and, before they even realize it is happening, they get themselves in significant debt that they now need to dig themselves out of.

All for the sake of a “free game.”

/rant

Unknown

It's psychological but also social. There's a reason why those facebook games spams you with 'soandso just beat your score!' or 'soandso needs your help'. Although there seems to be some fatigue to the freemium model, as long as there's no shortage of guys supporting these games it's not likely to change. I'm currently looking at Dragonball Xenoverse and hope it's a sign of good things to come. That game is literally made for DLC and I can totally see the game being free but you need $20 for a Super Saiyan transform and $5 per Dragonball or whatever, but instead it's just a $60 pay-once game and everything you can get by playing (might take a long time, no one said it was easy) and the only thing you can buy is pay money to skip the rather long grinding you'd need to unlock the characters. If this game keeps up its success, maybe there's hope that we won't be subjected to paying $20 per level of Super Saiyan you need in the future.

Unknown

That said:
This game is incredibly unique because it has a model of HP and ISO distribution that makes playing it self sustaining after a certain point.

Each PVP, you are awarded 100 HP. Then you can get 50 or 100 more HP from each PVP placement and, for everyone not in a top 3 alliance, up to 100 more HP in alliance placement awards.

So if you’re in a top 50 alliance, place top 10 and hit 725 each PVP, you’re making 300 HP per PVP. It is very easy to get that high without spending 300 HP on shields (I get 900 to 1050 every PVP and only spend about 225 per PVP), so you’re actually turning an HP profit as the season goes on. Add in PVE placement and progression rewards and daily rewards, plus the random HP in each DDQ token, and you have a very sustainable HP model that does not require money input except when buying covers or occasionally when buying character slots.

That is a sustainability mechanism that I’ve never seen in a freemium game before. And for that, I tip my hat to D3. They are far from the worst exploitation out there.

Unknown

Keep in mind before we had console games we had arcade games. Which operate on the same level as P2W do now.

For a quarter you can play this game until your character dies, fun fun fun, just a quarter, are you GOOD* enough to beat the game in one life?? This one guy** got a score of one MILLION points***, can you beat his score??
Aww you died, keep playing from here for another quarter, wouldn't want to lose all those points would you now?

*To have that level of skill you need to practice hard and spend several hours at the arcade every day and spend ~only~ a few bucks each day but it will add up to an embarrassingly large sum over time. Also there are several spots designed to be impossible without multiple continues, enjoy.
**That guy spent 10 hours and $50 in quarters in one sitting to get that high score
***Points have no inherent value outside of bragging rights.

evil panda

I do remember those arcade games. If I spent on MPQ what I spent there (adjusted for 20 years of inflation), I probably could max out 20 goddesses

GuntherBlobel

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Keep in mind before we had console games we had arcade games. Which operate on the same level as P2W do now.

For a quarter you can play this game until your character dies, fun fun fun, just a quarter, are you GOOD* enough to beat the game in one life?? This one guy** got a score of one MILLION points***, can you beat his score??
Aww you died, keep playing from here for another quarter, wouldn't want to lose all those points would you now?

*To have that level of skill you need to practice hard and spend several hours at the arcade every day and spend ~only~ a few bucks each day but it will add up to an embarrassingly large sum over time. Also there are several spots designed to be impossible without multiple continues, enjoy.
**That guy spent 10 hours and $50 in quarters in one sitting to get that high score
***Points have no inherent value outside of bragging rights.

The best part about arcade games was that you never, ever, paid money to not play the game. I'll admit it, I bought 5 Health Packs to keep playing the Gauntlet even though the Event wasn't ending that day. I was having fun and I didn't want to leave the arcade just yet. I'll totally drop a few more quarters in the machine when it's me vs. the game and I'm having fun. But come to the Forum and you'd be told to never, ever buy Health Packs because they give you too little competitive advantage for the HP spent.

Unknown

F2P is one of the many possible models for financing a videogame.
There's the traditional pay-upfront one, the heavy DLC one, the kickstarter one, the shareware one, and I'm sure many more exist. I doubt any of them will reign supreme, so I wouldn't be to afraid of everything, games or else, turning into freemium overnight.
Besides, F2P isn't intrinsically evil, it's rather what people do with it which can be subject to quite a few discussions.

Unknown

I guess we could try to kickstart a MPQ2 that is not freemium at all.

Unknown

So, who wants to take care of the negotiations with Marvel ?

Unknown

Grosnours wrote:

F2P is one of the many possible models for financing a videogame.
There's the traditional pay-upfront one, the heavy DLC one, the kickstarter one, the shareware one, and I'm sure many more exist. I doubt any of them will reign supreme, so I wouldn't be to afraid of everything, games or else, turning into freemium overnight.
Besides, F2P isn't intrinsically evil, it's rather what people do with it which can be subject to quite a few discussions.

You're wrong. Freemium will dominate the market, and soon. There are just too many examples of games that became comically successful doing it. It's based on behavioral psychology, which has been applied to games for decades now, but it applies in a way that taps directly into our addiction centers. We used to have cheat codes in almost every game. Those will soon be replaced with IAPs.

Unknown

I don't think arcade is a good example because those games are a premium compared to anything else at that time. There's nothing premium about what passes for a F2P game these days, especially on the mobile market where by definition the game cannot possibly be competitive in terms of firepower to a dedicated system. F2P preys on social/psychological pressure and I think some of it should be regulated. I think either Google or Apple, possibly both, have made it so that you can't advertise game as a 'free' because it's pretty much a blatant lie and there should be more stuff like that. For example, all gamble packs should have their odds disclosed. MPQ actually does this, but I know plenty of game where you'd be buying the equivalent of a heroic 10 pack and have absolutely no idea what the draw percentage is. That shouldn't be legal.