So I have a few random thoughts about the games industry right now.  I don't pretend to know what will happen, but I thought I would share my feelings as an armchair analyst.
 
First of all let us discuss the idea of Free to Play.  What is interesting about this is that that there is no one approach.  I feel better about some models than others.  For starters the big dog Zynga and their ilk.  As someone who has never played one of their games it appears from the outside that either you have very strict limitations on how much you can get done in a play session. You can remedy this one of three ways:

1.  pay them money
2. Take a survey sacrificing tonnes of your Personal Information which they are already mining some of for merit of you playing.
3. Harass your friends advertising the game and if I understand the TOS giving some of your friends personal information away if they have not opted out of the platform or blocked the application.

So I have a few random thoughts about the games industry right now.  I don't pretend to know what will happen, but I thought I would share my feelings as an armchair analyst.
 
First of all let us discuss the idea of Free to Play.  What is interesting about this is that that there is no one approach.  I feel better about some models than others.  For starters the big dog Zynga and their ilk.  As someone who has never played one of their games it appears from the outside that either you have very strict limitations on how much you can get done in a play session. You can remedy this one of three ways:

1.  pay them money
2. Take a survey sacrificing tonnes of your Personal Information which they are already mining some of for merit of you playing.
3. Harass your friends advertising the game and if I understand the TOS giving some of your friends personal information away if they have not opted out of the platform or blocked the application.

I agree that the Zynga model is pretty disgusting, I really don't like what they're doing. Just a side note but with TF2 you can not only buy hats but weaponry as well, and of course the big difference between buying hats in TF2, and characters in League of Legends is that one is purely aesthetic while the other is not. Managing F2P is a very difficult issue and I don't think there's one perfect solution which makes everyone happy, but I prefer a system where all content in a game can be accessed if you play for long enough, but micro-transactions or subscription fees allow you easier access to that content. Really I'd also prefer in general that content you have to pay for would be aesthetic only, but that may often be an unreasonable demand of the developer. I don't think you can compare F2P games to MMOs though, one is a business model, the other is a genre. You can't corner the F2P market with one game because while people may prefer F2P, there are still different people who prefer different types of games.

Thank you for your thoughtful response.  My concern in the F2P arena is there will be one FPS which takes, one  RTS one RPG and everything else will be left out in the cold.  I know this happens with retail as well, but through timing and creating something different you can take a small amount of time from the CoD player and have them play your game.  To ask someone who is big into LoL to take away their LoL time to play DOTA, its a harder preposition because you are so invested in LoL.  I am concerned it does not have as much room as pay for sale games.