As I sit here in bed next to my asleep girlfriend, I am closely watching Steam during one of it's many sales, this time of Ubisoft games. I am hoping that one of the days will be for the assassins creed series and that with it, I'll be able to buy them for well under their current price. I guess I should start off by saying that I am by no means a penny pincher. I spend money quite a bit actually having just booked a Disney World vacation for me and my girlfriend this coming June, but with this introduction of free to play games I can not help but wonder what it brings for the future.

The 3 best examples of free to play games that I have seen are League of Legends (of which I have played probably 600+ hours), World of Tanks (100+ hours, and no, it isn't as stupid as the name sounds) and the upcoming PlanetSide 2, which based on gameplay videos looks quite amazing (well that's my opinion any ways).

I have to ponder though, all of these games have one thing in common, they are all multiplayer games. The free to play model that they have all adopted is based on the impatient nature of the people playing their games. This is by no means a bad or deceitful thing to do, infact many businesses all around the world do this too. Let me explain, in any of the free to play games I just mentioned above (well maybe except PS 2 because it's not out yet and I don't know) you are given a choice to either play the game over and over again to get the higher level equipment/characters or you can pay a minimal fee and have them unlocked for you.

This is similar (and I may be stretching my logic a bit I admit haha) to something like food vendors (aka restaurants and things like them), you can either go out, buy the ingredients and make the meal yourself, or you can (usually) pay a premium and have it made for you, thus saving you time, but costing you more.

This is all well and good, and I do believe that most if not all multiplayer games will go this way in the future, but what about single player games ? As I said at the start of this article, I am waiting to see if I can pick up a few of the Assassins Creed games on the cheap, but in the future, will I be able to play these games for free ? I wonder how they would do it.

Current free to play multiplayer games have the benefit of getting people hooked on their games, and then keeping them hooked by releasing content on a regular basis, and putting this content behind a wall that can be surpassed by playing the game a lot or for a few bucks charge. And thus the free to play multiplayer model continues to thrive and be effective, but what about a singleplayer free to play model ? Could it even be done ?

What kind of things could they put in place that would not make the game frustrating but give people the option to either pay or play for free ? I am going to think of ways they could do this and maybe post again soon on my ideas. If anyone out there reading this have any ideas or comments about this feel free to post and let me know I think it could be interesting to see what people come up with.