I've seen these articles about "Epic's most profitable game... Infinity Blade" floating about over the last couple of days and, to be honest with you, I wasn't going to post them... because they irritated me. I generally hate any game that I can't play (admittedly due to my own lack of initiative to secure the proper platforms). Regardless, I'm posting a few peripheral articles now, mostly because they were sent in by some very good friends, but also because I now have an opinion I can express:
I desperately hope Tim's wrong.
Gamasutra did a great job recapping Tim Sweeney's keynote at GDC Taipei in which he extolled the virtues of Unreal Engine 4 as any good parent would do. But more importantly, he laid out the road map he thought most developers would follow in the future... free-to-play.
That makes me crazy mostly because I happen to agree with Tim. I want to buy a game once. But also because my own experience with F2P has been that it's mostly Pay-to-Win. And most of them are horrible. Give me a complete indie game just about any day of the week. Forbes has a nice opinion piece expressing similar sentiments.
I desperately hope Tim's wrong.
Gamasutra did a great job recapping Tim Sweeney's keynote at GDC Taipei in which he extolled the virtues of Unreal Engine 4 as any good parent would do. But more importantly, he laid out the road map he thought most developers would follow in the future... free-to-play.
"I think like a typical American, in that I just want to buy the game once," he says. But freemium has grown to eclipse the global retail market. "I agree that this is going to be the way that almost all games will be distributed worldwide," he says. "Where is this going in the long-term future? We're at a point in the world's history where we're starting to run into resource limitations. ... The virtual environment is completely unlimited. It makes me wonder if some day the virtual economy could be greater than the economy for physical goods."
That makes me crazy mostly because I happen to agree with Tim. I want to buy a game once. But also because my own experience with F2P has been that it's mostly Pay-to-Win. And most of them are horrible. Give me a complete indie game just about any day of the week. Forbes has a nice opinion piece expressing similar sentiments.