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In our latest in-depth article, game reviewer Joe Sinicki dives into the wave of free to play games. Are they good or bad for the industry? Are they good for the consumer or is it just a ploy to drain even more money than it the game were not free?

Please chime in with your opinion!

IMHO there's a good middle ground here, examples of this are the free to play models of Dota 2, TF2, and Path of Exile. it being that all aspects of gameplay are free to access and all you can buy are cosmetics, granted Valve is starting to get notorious for laying groundwork to underage gambling in their F2P titles. Another good example of this is the model that Blizzard is employing across their franchises, I highly recommend checking the starter edition StarCraft2 for this.


The worst example of F2P for me was World of Tanks, it was basically F2P but Pay to Enjoy. This is also disregarding the quagmire that is F2P mobile gaming.

[Edited by ZS, 2/8/2017 10:35:05 AM]

You're not really a "Customer" if you're not paying anything, are you? And there's a fair few things besides SWTOR that puts official support behind a subscriber paywall. If it's something they give do you free, that's great, that's "above and beyond" stuff, but they're not obligated to give anything to anyone who hasn't given them a dime. That said, their official support is abysmal. You still need to grab a burner email address to "verify" your account on reaching level 20, whether you're a paying subscriber or not.

And locking sprinting away from F2P players? That's a bit of a cheap shot, hey? Heh, "cheap".

I'll just say this, they know exactly who to target. You wanna stay competitive, pay, wanna win, pay, want cool stuff, pay, wanna remove a lot of the grind, pay.

Don't get me started on mobile games, with Star wars hero's EA got a lot of my money, too much, enough that I am ashamed to admit how much and had to uninstall it because it was becoming an addiction.

Using SWTOR's customer support as an example of a paywall is a bit out of date I'd say, due to the fact that their customer support is almost non-existent at this point. It's just bots sending you copy/paste stuff. I never played SWTOR without a sub because I know it just isn't worth the amount of time and nerves I'd have to waste to tolerate it, but even then locking end-game raids, end-game gear, customization, titles, and seemingly meaningful stuff behind a paywall is more unfair to me than not having their customer support, because simply put I'm there for the content and not for their support services.

I would recommend playing games like War Thunder and World of Tanks to truly experience a paywall. Unless you're in the top 5% of world's best players in these 2 games, without a premium account, gold and premium tanks which cost $50, you simply won't be able to keep progressing and making profits after the battles. It's not as much Pay-2-Win as it is Pay-2-Progress, but considering just how OP the new T8 premium tanks are, Skorpion G/Liberte/Patriot, compared to other premium tanks which have been in the game for years now, I do get the idea of them going slightly more P2W lately.

And yeah, games which were buy to play at the beginning then go F2P is a kick in the nads for everyone who pre-ordered or supported the development through founder packs, but majority of people would place the blame on those very people because "pre-ordering is for idiots".

I've long since adopted a stance of no longer even looking at F2P games or games that are even largely multi-player.

I wasted a total of ~600 USD, about evenly split, between WoT and WarThunder. Of the two, I enjoyed WarThunder far more because of the quality of the graphics and general mechanics. That said, WoT as turned into a nightmare in terms of player quality, with most matches resulting in a landslide loss/victory depending on your team and WT has horribly broken balance and aimbots that break the mechanics that aren't already broken.

On the whole it has soured me to playing games with others and planted me back into a firm stance of finding solo play far more enjoyable. The upside is that with full titles that have single-player I'm not forced to accept updates or game changes either, which was another thing I hated about MMOs and F2Ps.

Play Warframe. Just about everything that is truly, truly paywall is only cosmetic stuff. And even that occasionally comes around as a mission reward.

I do not play F2P game's anymore. I did play WoT/WoP/WoS and navyfield long long long time, and the amount of money I spent on it, I do not even want to check it. I do not have problems with items that are €40+ its just to much, but the cheaper stuff like 1 and 2 euro's are the problem (at least for me).

Games are free to play but to there are only a few games that you really can win to the end without paying or having a huge patient.