@IceColdGamer said:
@Forum_User: Simply because a few games are successful doesn't mean every developer on the planet can crank out a highly successful free-to-play game. Team Fortress 2 was released because of the dedicated fan base of TFC as well as Valve's popularity as a highly successful and creative development studio. LoL is based off of a DOTA system created for the wildly popular Warcraft 3 system, bringing with it another huge dedicated fan base.
Guild Wars 2 will use the same model. Bringing a vast fan base from a previous title and exploiting their desire for new content for their beloved franchises.
These free-to-play models are a great idea until these huge developers realize that the return on their investment is most likely going to minimal. Especially with the flood of F2P's on the market.
What makes you so convinced that all these other games would do so much better as pay-up-front products? Free-to-play gets more people to even try the game. It's kind of the point. Of course, it tends to work best with online multiplayer games that people keep going back to, not games that most people are going to play for a dozen hours and never touch again.
Also, Guild Wars 2 isn't free-to-play. $60 isn't free. I don't know why people keep misusing the term for MMOs in regards to the lack of a subscription fee. That's not what it means. Incidentally, Guild Wars 2, in a roundabout way, shows the underlying logic of free-to-play games. I mean, Guild Wars 2 is kind of double dipping. You have to buy the game, and then it also has some of the sorts of things a free-to-play MMO might have in its store. What I mean is that a lot of these companies making free-to-play games would do that, if they thought it would be more profitable, but instead they give people the base game, because it gets them hooked.
Then you have The Secret World, which triple dips. You have to buy the box, it has a subscription fee, and then they also sell some cash shop crap. (Of course, it's pretty obvious that game will be free-to-play soon enough, based on Funcom's other titles, and the trajectory that most MMOs have been on lately.)
So I find your logic is actually kind of backwards. The free-to-play model works best for games that are relative unknowns or games that have sold most of the boxed copies that they are going to already (hence why a lot of recent fairly big name MMOs launch with the traditional model and then transition to free-to-play once that well has dried up.) The games that are going to sell well for $60 - those are the ones that have little incentive to launch as free-to-play.
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