Free to Play

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DeletedUser22493

Just read this interesting comment by Notch. (You'd better know who that is..)

And I agree with him. It's psychological marketing, and its very conspicuous.
Should it be illegal to call it free?

I hate “free to play”.

Ok, that headline it a bit overly inflammatory. While I am sceptical of the free to play trend, what I hate is the wording “free to play”.
The reason some people are moving to this area is that free to play showed up in the “social gaming” segment (facebook) and made a few people (zynga) very rich. It’s been tried in other genres in other markets with decent success. By “success”, I mean “it’s profitable”. The reason anyone switches to “free to play” is to make more money. You get your players hooked on your game, and then you try to monetize them. The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psyhological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than half-life

2.
So instead of calling it “free to play”, we should call it “as expensive as you want it to be” or something.
I do not mind paying for games after the purchase. I like customizing my character, or getting a few extra levels (DX HR:Missing Link, woo!), or even paying a subscription cost for something with running costs.
But let’s get one thing clear: people who think “free to play” is a great future are mostly game developers, not game players.
 

DeletedUser

I don't know how 100% free browser games are going to pay for employees, hardware, and other overhead. I can't speak for everyone else, but I haven't seen a banner ad in four years. If facebook became the only place to play online games, I'd never play another game online. I despise facebook.
 

DeletedUser

It all just depends on the gameplay......as long as you're not playing a farming clone, you should be fine.
 

DeletedUser16008

Elmyr said:
I don't know how 100% free browser games are going to pay for employees, hardware, and other overhead. I can't speak for everyone else, but I haven't seen a banner ad in four years. If facebook became the only place to play online games, I'd never play another game online. I despise facebook.
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+1 big one
 

DeletedUser

ZarekBean said:
whats a farming clone? like gold farming?
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A game that basically follows this format:

You build different buildings that take a while to build, each gives you bonuses like more resources, more troops to build, etc. They cost resources and you can upgrade the buildings level to get more resources/troops/etc. but each level costs more and more resources. By the way those troops you have are useful for attacking other players and stealing their resources. Build your buildings mindlessly and bully other players into submission to win.
 

DeletedUser

rice farmer said:
like farmville, and what teh train robber is true, except you can never win, you can only get more stuff.......like epicmealtime for games
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Yes, there will always be more players to bully and useless buildings to build. And to add to all that you can also have multiple settlements/farms/etc. where you build even more stuff! You have to get the most so you can take the top of the leader boards. But once you have around 10 or so it gets to be one giant headache since you have all those people that you bully start attacking you and you have to build up your smaller cities and you eventually are driven to implosion and collapse! But nobody needs to know that...
 

DeletedUser

But oh yea, this is f2p, so you have option of buying whatever random currency which will give you the special items/extra money/troops/skills to get ahead of the competition.....but wait, there's always someone better than you and those not as good as you wanting to be better than you......so yea, go ahead and spend that $100.....
 

DeletedUser

teh train robber said:
A game that basically follows this format:

You build different buildings that take a while to build, each gives you bonuses like more resources, more troops to build, etc. They cost resources and you can upgrade the buildings level to get more resources/troops/etc. but each level costs more and more resources. By the way those troops you have are useful for attacking other players and stealing their resources. Build your buildings mindlessly and bully other players into submission to win.
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sounds like the game i was playing before i migrated over to here. eventually they atarted merging servers into super servers and eventually people got soo powerful and too massive armies that new players couldnt progress farther than becoming a resource farm for an unsustainable army, where you have to attack ppl 24/7 just to feed ur army. and that dang flashing red bird that indicated an incoming attack played havoc on my anxiety lol.
 
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DeletedUser

And this is why I like The West so much. If you keep being dueled and attacked you can always leave town and quest or do jobs peacefully. And if you do want to fight there is always the option of finding a better town. It's so unique and just a great blend of individual progress and team progress through forts and alliances.
 

DeletedUser

Agreed and I hope it never gets turned into a farming clone in the name of profit.
 

DeletedUser28032

Yeah i played one of those as well, but it wasn't the money that i was bothered about (because i didn't pay for it) but the time. I would find myself spending hours trying to get the timings right on all these armies and attacks i was planning (Normally to watch them fall apart instantly) and then there were other people who would litterally stay up all night just to make sure that their attacks worked.
All in all i decided it was getting a little too intense to be considered "fun"
 

DeletedUser22493

The problem with these "free" games, is that older players tend not to sick around. If you play it for a 3 months, it's already cost you the same a buying a game. You were not intended to stay for a long time.
So the game is constantly getting a new crowd, milking them of some money, and deleting their accounts shortly after they leave.

Hellstromm said:
;)
Game balance is always a tough thing to manage, particularly when you're trying to make a profit. And let's face it, you aren't going to find a good game out there that's entirely for free. Profit is what encourages executives to invest in improvements to the game. Stagnation rides in on a black horse if you don't have a profit-oriented product.

Games of this sort have a user-turnaround. People come and go, some diehards stick around and complain but most just move on. To bring new players, and/or bring back old players, advertising and mailing groups are essential, otherwise the popularity drops and, as we have seen, worlds become less populated.

For awhile Innogames wasn't advertising, that's when the numbers really started dropping. They have since hired an advertising team and are slowly repopulating the worlds. It's clearly not an overnight thing, having left it out of their attention span for so long has hurt this community and the game product as a whole. Still, it's a good product, it's still being developed, and "most" of the additions have been improvements.
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Im a much bigger fan of monthly fee's. Like one of my all time favorite MMO games, was free. The free part gave you access to the mainland. If you bought a prem period, you were granted access to the outer lands, new quests, new monsters, etc..
No itemshop, no single bonuses, no buying cash. Just access to more land. Everyone was equal. A prem player didn't technically have any advantage over a free player.

It's still forbidden to post names of other games. (Which is imho silly and only goes to show how fragile everything is.)
 
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nashy19

nashy19

Nashy (as himself)
I depends on the quality of the game, games which want to build up a loyal community member base and want to be around in the next 5 years wont choose a model which puts off new players. I like the one's which offer a membership price for the full game or sell conveniences which offer no real competitive advantage.

The F2P players should be separated (not necessarily completely) from the members players if they have a major advantage over them.

You'll even put off paying players if you allow players to buy advantages which affect their ability to compete with no cap, or a very expensive one.

Bad quality games can sell all sorts of things, they can get away with basically selling victory and the top positions on the high scores.
Smurfberries? Can people buy popularity on Facebook?

I hope it doesn't become worthwhile for good games to do this, although the could just put up their membership price instead, I think people will always pay for a fair gaming experience.

Also there's some games where you can prove that you've never been a paying player, with that players make unofficial highscores of F2P players.
 
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DeletedUser

"Quality of the game" = bingo, ding ding ding, we have a winner :)
What keeps me playing this game is:
1. I'm not bored yet
2. I haven't reached the level cap yet
3. There are still a lot of things I haven't done yet
4. I haven't surpassed Elmyr in post count and rep yet :p
 
Red Falcon

Red Falcon

Well-Known Member
I think the reason why some games are 'free to play' is because they are honestly free to play. Buying premium options is purely optional. You DO NOT have to buy any premium game bonuses to play the game unless you want to. Some games claim they are free but only after you pay a fee (One time or monthly) to play them. I do not think these games are worth paying to play no matter how good the quality of the graphics or the game play is. I think all online games should be free to play, even if they only offer a free trial period before you have to pay for them. This gives everyone a chance to experience the game and try it out to see if they like it or not. If a game is not free to play, then offering a free trial is one of the best ways (At least to me) to get more people to pay to play it.
 

DeletedUser

So people just make games purely for your express enjoyment? Nope, F2P games are designed so that you really, really want to pay them, otherwise they wouldn't stay in business for long.
 

DeletedUser

Free to Play games are geared to provide a large player base and to keep you playing inbetween paychecks. Part of the problem with monthly fees to play is that it results in servers with small populations, which is a turn off. Such occurs because those who can't pay, don't pay and thus don't play. Also because those who can "occasionally" pay, end up not playing consistently, and thus eventually break their gaming addiction for lack of continuous infusions.

Let's face it, one main reason any of these games (fee or p2p) holds our attention is because of the social networks, the social interaction, the competition, the drug of friendships and adversaries. P2P provides cannon fodder for those who do pay for the "advantages" over the majority public, and provides an audience of friends and enemies to gloat before.

The West is a P2P, as is every game released by Innogames. You can play for free, or you can spend some cash to get a few bonuses. We all know this, we've all been playing this game. When we have some cash, we can opt to buy some benefits, or not. But the "choice" is provided, and thus we're free to play the game without the elitist dependency of a monthly purchase. We're free to choose when, and if, we pay to play... and that makes for both good business and a good time for all of us who don't want to be cutoff from our social network for lack of a paycheck this month.

P2P is both good business and good for the players. Game design, on the other hand, is a different issue altogether. If you design your game poorly, provide unbalancing pay features, you injure the game. Too severe, the game becomes lame and nobody wants to ride it. That is why pay features, premium features, need to be well considered. Just enough to provide advantages, not enough to imbalance.
 
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DeletedUser563

I never paid on a facebook game. They tried so many hooks. All I usually did was create more multies as they get actually paid for their number of players as well in ad revenue. So you can usually get a premium thing by creating a multi such as fuel, crop regeneration etc. Well google+ has no ads atm the one game I like although bit repetitive Millionaire City I have already cracked without a multi. So I will play it for a few months and then leave. A game really must offer me something that I want to repeat doing and will want to for the next few years. Facebook games rarely does. I rarely visit facebook anymore as with google+ you can fine tune your social interaction. I can intrude in the lifes of a few celebs and yet keep my conversations limited to closest friend whilst having game friends who I can share game info on or chat with.
 
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