Free to play gets a really negative image thanks to years and years of sub par games that were impossible to play unless you paid the stupidly high prices for small items. Some popular examples would be Runescape, Silkroad Online, restricted MMOs like Dungeons and Dragons online or Lord of the Rings Online which don't let you play the full game without paying, crappy Counterstrike rip offs like War Rock and Combat Arms, half-assed attempts to port full games to free to play like Battlefield Play 4 Free and FEAR Combat, or extremely outdated games like Quake Arena and the original Command and Conquer or GTA games.
These games never provided the same experiances as a full game despite some of them having some fantastic production values. They always felt unfinished and never really stood out in the market. However in the past few years that has all changed.
While the F2P style of retail was being explored by MMOs about to go belly up, Leauge of Legends kicked it into high gear showing that free players can be given a full game experience without having to pay a penny. The difference between League of Legends and other F2P games at the time was that the developers designed the full game to be F2P from the beginning and were very generous with their pricing strategy. They also continue to add content and enhance and balance the game. Today LoL has 32 million subscribers and now has Valve breathing down their necks with DotA 2, which will also be F2P.
Speaking of Valve, they decided to go full on with the F2P with Team Fortress 2. Instead of stripping out stuff between free and premium, they built a cash shop with cosmetic items that had no real effect on gameplay. The result was massive amount of profits with the game being totally free to everybody.
Now this year we have a slew of very innovative titles that are being built from the ground up with the F2P mentality.
Tribes Ascend is in beta right now and is a full revitalization of the series. It's totally free to play with players being able to unlock new ****s to play the more they play. The game is also being talored for strict competition with a lot of gameplay and balancing tweaks being added weekly to make the game as competitive as possible. This should prove marketable in the recent surge of e-sports.
Firefall is a FPS/TPS action MMO that puts hundreds of players together in a world where they fight to stay alive. The game also looks extremely innovative with a very colorful art**** a PvE focus, jetpacks, and a very innovative way of building the game world using real life terrain on a 1:1 scale.
End of Nations is the first true MMORTS ever made. Being developed by the original Westwood team and the creator of Dune 2, End of Nations features 50 players in a single environment fighting against one large AI driven enemy.
Planetside 2. The sequel to Planetside. This one promises to be bigger and better in every single way. While other shooters like BF3 proudly boast their 32 vs 32 player matches Planetside 2 has battle across a persistent world feature 500 vs 500 vs 500 player battles over 64 square kilometers of terrain. Item shop is purely cosmetic. Teamwork is an absolute must.
Super Monday Night Combat. I loved Monday Night Combat on the Xbox 360 but I always felt it really had a lot of untapped potential. Well they've tapped it. SMNC is a TPS MOBA game in the same light as League of Legends. It's still highly in beta right now but is a ton of fun and has a lot of ****
Those fivegames are some of the most unique and innovative games I've ever seen in my life and they are coming to the PC.
My question is, what the heck can the consoles do to combat this? All of those games above are being built for F2P customers. This means that while their high end graphical reqiurements will be for gamers, the games will scale for people who don't have gaming rigs. This expansion of their market will really help rake in the sales as gamers have proven they are willing to spend some money on these free to play games.
Microsoft charges for online play and Sony is pushing online passes while the PC gamers get innovative and high quality games for free. Seems almost unfair.
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