It seems to me to be a very risky venture for the developer, taking away even the opportunity to snag fifty dollars for a download. Most items in most cash shops do not cost hundreds or even dozens of dollars, instead relying again on the player to enjoy themselves over time. The developer is betting that you will enjoy their game so much, or need their items so much, that you will pay for it. So to me it just makes sense that trust should be even more established in a game that asks for nothing upfront. While that might work out in many many cases, I can promise you that the complaints about subscription games can be as loud and even much louder than anything coming out of the free-to-play market. This situation is really no different than a subscription model, the only difference being that a subscription asks you for your financial faith upfront. In other words, you might lose to that guy that spent 100 dollars, but you will live to fight many many more days.Īll this is to point out that free-to-play games are almost a volunteer opportunity for the developers that make them, based on the whims and pocketbooks of their players. And not in one single game that I have played is the death of the player anything more than a pause in gameplay, and not a deletion from the servers. But none of the games I have played have ever forced combat as the only activity to gain prestige in. Yes, there are great advantages to buying those XP pots, or in buying those health fruit, or in buying that extra fast mount or even better weapon upgrade. They hook you, then force you to spend loads of cash to stay "competitive." While I have seen how this could be true in some cases, there is not a single game that I have ever played that forces the hand that holds the wallet. Some would say that the free-to-play approach is actually a set-up for the eventual cash grab by the developers. It is, if nothing else, a very good deal. Even if I decide to frame it and make it completely my own, I still have to pay nothing. Even after all the wear-and-tear I might put on the art, I can still take it back or refuse to pay. It even goes a few steps further than that, allowing me to take the artwork home, mount it on my wall and to host a dinner party to show it off. To me, the exchange is of a more pure sort the artist showing me their wares then asking for whatever price I think he or she deserves. I am not naive enough to think that I should pay nothing, being that I am getting the same amount of entertainment out of the game that I would out of a game that I paid serious cash for. #ALLODS ONLINE GAME DEBATE TRIAL#This is one of the luxuries of the free-to-play market, allowing essentially a very long trial period (even in the most limited freemium cases) to feel out whether or not the game is worth paying for. When I play a free-to-play game (and I play a lot of them) I try to spend a lot of time on it before I decide if it's going to stay on my hard-drive or not. That financial commitment, even though small compared to other forms of entertainment, seems to lock them into a higher tolerance than when the game is obtained for literally zero dollars. It seems as though the act of paying fifty dollars for a box or fifteen dollars a month puts players in the mood for frustration, or at least brings their tolerance level up some. The recent Allods Online cash shop controversy, in which the developers obviously charged too much for basic cash shop items like extended inventory, showed that the North American audience has almost no patience for a game that, ironically, it paid nothing for.
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