@funkydupe said:
@bisonhero said:
@rhaknar: Well, 0.00005% is a one in two million chance. I probably exaggerated a little bit. Definitely a fraction of a percent, but I probably added one or two more zeroes than is realistic.
Still, it seems like an abysmally low chance, that all the magic find in the world couldn't really dig you out of.
[Assume You Care About Marvel] By design this should make you both angry and frustrated; ultimately causing you to possibly, in your desperation, cave and just buy the hero you wanted to play since they won't let you pick from the entire pool for your free starter hero. Dr. Evil would be proud.
I sort of don't see any way that free to play isn't inherently awful, on an ethical level. The business model clearly makes no sense if the playerbase were purely 10-year-olds paying zero money, or somebody who buys a single character and stops. The business model preys upon people with poor self control, spanning the spectrum of people like Brad Shoemaker (spending like $50-$150 on fucking Dota 2 chest keys at this point, or something like it) all the way to those crazy bastards that every F2P game must have that have bought literally everything in the store. It's the only way these games pull in enough revenue to make sense. So to review:
Regular-ass retail (or digital marketplace) game: the deal is that each person gives a fixed amount of money up front, and hopefully the game you get is on par with other games of a similar price, giving you a sense of value. Whether you have poor self-control or not, you pay the current industry standard for that game. End of transaction, though DLC complicates that slightly (though most retail games have a limited amount of DLC).
Free-to-play game: the deal is that most players pay little to no money, and actually get to enjoy a pretty sweet game (in the case of any Valve F2P game, for example), while a small percentage of players pay an exorbitant amount to make up the difference. In theory, every player could spend $20-$30 on Marvel Heroes (let's assume that is about what it would cost if it had a cost) and it would work out, but since that is almost certainly not the case, there would have to be people paying much more to justify its continued existence. The unethical part is that even if costumes are worth $5 (or whatever) to that player, that price really is not representative of the minimal amount of effort from a concept artist and texture artist to actually make that costume. Also unethical is that most games put in some manner of barrier or roadblock, intentionally making their game slightly frustrating to entice you to buy boosters or more inventory slots or whatever. ("Yes, let's make the game more irritating", said no self-respecting game designer ever). Potentially, one player could spend hundreds of dollars on a game that isn't of extraordinary quality, nor does it require the sort of server maintenance costs of an MMO.
People are flocking to F2P because it's where the money is, but the whole thing seems morally bankrupt. You either fleece people out of money by frustrating them, or you trick them into gambling (like Valve does), or you don't do either very well and probably don't ever turn a profit (Double Fine's F2P mobile game must be in this category, because it is so inoffensive and you really don't need to spend money in it to progress, but the option is there).
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