When Will You Care About Free-To-Play Games?

EA officially released Need For Speed World this week, marking yet another attempt by the publisher to get into this... God, what are we calling it now? "Free-to-play" technically isn't accurate, since it has plenty of hooks in place for you to pay for extra items. Freemium? Is that the weird-sounding marketing guy term for "game that you can download and technically play for free but boy, we'd sure appreciate it if you bought some extra stuff to unlock better stuff for your game more quickly?" It's hard to keep track of all the different business models posing as games these days. Hmm... yeah, maybe I'm being overly reductive. Everyone keeps saying that this sort of thing is eventually going to take North America by storm... but I can't help but feel like we aren't going to get anywhere with any of these alternative business models until the companies publishing these games start treating their free-to-play games like they're pay-us-to-play games.

OK, you've got me. I haven't gone out and researched every single freely downloadable, micropayment-driven game in the world. So I can only really talk anecdotally. But it feels like every time I bite on one of these free games, I come away feeling like I've wasted my time. Need For Speed World is just the latest example, and the crazy part is that it's really not a bad game. It just doesn't feel current or particularly well-conceived. Visually, the game looks like it's one or two iterations back when you compare it to the other Need For Speed games EA has released. The convenience side isn't in place, either, but hey... maybe that's why the game's site still says "beta" on it, right? So even though the game offers gamepad support, it doesn't offer the things that fans of driving games would actually expect it to have. Like... reconfigurable buttons and keys might be nice. Also, from a design perspective, the game is rooted heavily in the Most Wanted era of open-world driving mixed with race events and the occasional cop chase, if that's your thing. But you're limited to only a handful of events, and it seems like you're sort of expected to grind against these five or six races until you can level up and unlock one or two more options for your race grind.

Then there's the pay side. To get past level 10, you have to buy the Starter Pack for 20 bucks. Then you feed additional money into the system in exchange for "boost," which you can then exchange for powerups, like nitrous oxide speed boosts. Now, I don't know if you're into the Need For Speed series, but nitrous is sort of key to the experience in most of the other games. Well-timed nitrous use can mean the difference between first place and the middle of the pack. It gives the game a strategic side. While there are ways to freely earn additional uses of nitrous, the game seems to really want you to buy some more with actual money. It also has a ton of other powerups, like "slingshot," which just sort of makes your car go faster if you're behind. It's like you're turning up the game's rubberbanding at the touch of a button. Like NOS boosts, you're limited on slingshots, and all of the other game's power-ups, too. The end result? Most players today seemed to avoid the abilities completely, leaving behind a barebones driving game where are you do is peg the gas pedal down and hope for the best. Given the Need For Speed legacy, this is a pretty poor way to represent the series.

Add to that some dicey online glitches that have awarded me first place in races that I clearly lost on my end of the Internet, and you've got a sloppy game. If you went out and bought it in a box in July 2010, you'd feel like you made a poor choice. It'll probably get better--after all, this is only the first full day of proper, widely available service. But it's still a great example of the free-to-play problem, if you'll allow me to continue generalizing a bit. These games aren't as good as the ones we're already paying $50 or $60 to acquire. Forget about money, why would I want to level up my driving ability in NFS World or unlock additional weapons in GunZ: The Duel if the core game isn't actually worth the time investment? Persistent worlds only pay off when the world is good enough to make me feel good about investing all of that time. Most paid games can't even do that these days. Being that I'm not the most price-sensitive consumer in the world, how the heck is a free download supposed to compete with that?

There's no need to continue picking on NFS World. As these things go, it's probably one of the better ones. But by being directly comparable to a boxed retail product, its pay side seems way more damaging than most. The things that make Need For Speed feel like Need For Speed are made worse by having dollar amounts attached directly to their use. I wonder if Company of Heroes Online will feel the same way?

For awhile, I thought that SOE's Free Realms might actually usher in a bit of change. Not that it's some amazing MMO that you all must play or anything, but as a kid-focused online game, it felt well-made. It felt like a "real" game in spots. Of course, I'm not 11, so it also felt pretty boring after an hour or two. Now SOE is in the middle of a quick promotion to sell "lifetime memberships" to the game. For players hooked on the members-only content found in that game, dropping the equivalent of six months' worth of fees to play with that stuff forever is probably a pretty good deal.

But there I go again, talking more about the business models behind the games rather than the games themselves. And that's the real problem. Debating the dollars and sense behind these games has become more interesting than the third-tier gameplay experiences that are typically on offer. Perhaps that won't always be the case. Some maintain that there's an entire generation of kids out there getting used to these sorts of micropayments, and that a shift away from the traditional sales model for games is inevitable. I just hope that by the time those kids grow up and take over, the games they're choosing to (not) pay for have gotten better.

So where do you guys actually stand on these games? Are you playing any of this stuff? Do you actually enjoy any of it, or are you only playing it because better games cost too much?