They hate all freeloaders. It costs money to support the freeloaders, money that is never made up by them. For every one committed player like you are a hundred that are not committed and, even having plenty of funds, won't spend a dollar. I could afford to pay for lots of things in those F2P games, but I don't and I never will. The barrier to entry represents my commitment to the product. 0=0=0.
Populating servers only costs them money, though. They get nothing out of it. If they could figue out a way to keep you playing for a while and also force you to pay at some point that was guaranteed, they would do it. F2P models are designed to bring a constant stream of income. If that stream dries up, the game goes away. It happens all the time.
And so you completely disregard what I said about one of said games, despite watching every turn of it and the huge amount of great opportunities they had to introduce such low blows to win tons of cash, and they didn't?
I will just say this once more: the F2P you know is changing, and you have a ton of free users and some paid users, but population is key to bring it to the light.
They don't win money from players alone, something that is popular brings partnerships, contracts, and a shitload of other funds from elsewhere, and a F2P is bound to get more popular than any other games since you don't have to pay a dime to try it for real.
The paid players will only play if the free players are in the game too, so the free ones serve as part of the product itself, saying that they hate the free players is the same as saying that they hate their own product, and that doesn't make any sense at all.
No one wants to play a dry game, much less pay for things in it, so free players are part of the investment, and if it's profitable, there's no reason to "hate".
F2P has many clever ways to win money, and it's not transactions from players alone, because once a F2P game gets mainstreamed, there are a bunch of other entities who want to join the bandwagon (and again, I also saw this happening a lot in the past year).
No, I don't. It could cost 100 times more, if the cost benefit ratio is unbalanced, then it's not worth it. If you can't make a game viable, then don't make it. The fact that so many companies are making them despite the increased cost simply says that they see the cost benefit ratio in their favor.
True, they only make games if it has a chance to be profitable. However, games still get released at somewhat the same prices, therefore if you higher the costs but apply the same prices, the profit-cost gap starts to be closed up, and if you higher the price, many won't even buy it.
However, you disregard the fact that many many games are done by reusing previous versions assets, and that alone makes their development much much cheaper, thus viable as a full paid product, for example: CoD.
Did you forget what I just said about Tim Sweeney's declarations on costs? He said it himself that the costs are starting to get too high to make game development profitable, thus they had to restructure many things within Epic itself to lower those costs, and even so they are going to be higher anyway and things are still getting evaluated. Even he admitted that the only way out is to start to invest in F2P.
He wouldn't say this if they could still profit from paid games in the next years.
I don't expect a lifetime of support, unless you mean a game I can play in the future regardless of the company's current commitment to said product. Unreal came out almost 15 years ago and you can still play it. How much time and money does Epic spend on that game? The cost is more than likely next to zero.
The fact that the game has still master servers up is a cost. Of course, it's not a huge cost, but it's a cost nonetheless.
Plus, you forget that one of the strongest points of UT for instance, is not the online play, but the play against bots, since UT is still a reference when it comes to bots AI.
It's a game that you can play for hours offline, unlike the new ones which get old rather quickly if you don't play them online, and here's the whole problem.
However, for instance, from what I have heard (and this one I am not sure) that once the new Gears game comes out, many of their dedicated servers relative the previous version will move to run the new one, and the old version will have less dedicated servers and players are rather pissed off about it.
So why they don't simply buy more dedicated servers? Costs.
By buying a full game, they keep X number of dedicated servers, and move them once a new version comes out, and unless you buy the new version, you get a crappier gameplay in general.
In F2P, I am seeing the exact opposite: once it gets more profitable and more players, they add more dedicated servers. This is what I am seeing for little over a year, not sure what games you played, but this is what I saw so far.
UT has only still the master servers up since they are the only thing the game needs, since all the servers are created by the community, and paid and maintained by that same community.
The game needed (and still needs) very important patches that never saw the light of the day, since they would represent a cost to Epic. They simply dropped the ball, although they're still selling it (probably the reason they even keep up the servers is because they are still selling the game).
And DLC is paid for because it costs money. This is no different than the old expansion pack model, they are made if they think they can justify the expense. They generally have much smaller teams involved or are outsourced.
F2P also costs money to develop.... free bonus packs (which are pretty much free DLCs) for games like UT2k4 also costed money to develop... so what's your point exactly?
The thing is: in F2P you get that money back in one way, and with DLC in another, with the catch that nowadays DLCs are not exactly "expansions" per se in plenty of games, but parts of the full game that weren't released together with the game as they should, so the cost in doing them is rather minimal, yet they still have high prices.
DLC is the tactic to get a game more profitable and to keep it viable.
DLCs are the equivalent of the deleted scenes of a DVD version of a movie, with the difference that you actually pay for them in games.
Also, Unreal has "retail" dedicated servers and people run their own. So do games like Left 4 Dead. You can give a good experience and make it relatively open if you really want to.
Afaik Unreal does not have any "retail" dedicated servers any longer, it only has a master server, and I think that in UT's case is maintained by Epic, but in Unreal is another entity that does so.
And for people to run their own, they have a cost. It's no different from running a premium server in Blacklight for example, besides a more open modability, but which is not significant because admins generally run the same tools and mods relative each others.
It is generally easier to judge pre-release interest in a game when it is paid for. With F2P you are guessing, the game could be shut down in 2 months for all you know. Judging the pre-release interest is not really possible. There are hundreds of F2P games that had high interest in the beta and then at the final release, everyone stopped playing. I've played dozens of them.
The fact that they can pull the plug at anytime is a downside, and I referred and explained it so in my previous post, so I won't reiterate the same.
However, in F2P you can take a better grasp on the actual gameplay, so I am not sure what your point is?
How many paid games seemed fun at the beginning in a pre-release or a demo, to only be below mediocre as a full product? Countless. Why? Because just like trailers, they ensure to fill you with the best they have in a smaller package to get your money, to then provide the sub-par "rests" as a full product.
What many of them don't tell you is the time investment required to get such items.
Indeed. I played PlanetSide 2 myself to try it out. I played it for little over than a week to have solid opinion on it, and then I stopped.
The grinding needed, their claim of "sidegrades" when there are clearly full on upgrades instead, the boredom of the game itself despite its hype... I didn't like it at all, and the time needed to get the items worth the trouble was just too immense.
However, should I base my opinion on ALL F2P based in this game alone? No. Plus the sole fact that I play another F2P for a year shows that someone else did it right, since they were honest most of the time with the players, listened, there's almost no grinding needed and everything are really sidegrades and you don't need them at all to be competitive, UNLESS some items fits your own playstyle better, and that is all.
Also, I'm not saying that F2P shouldn't exist, I'm saying that too many developers are jumping in head first and they can't even see the bottom of the lake. For most of them it's 2 feet down and they are paralyzed and potentially die because they weren't thinking right. There is no one business model that is the future or always works. There is room for games in both camps. I tend to avoid F2P simply because I have lots of games I have paid for that I still haven't played and I'd rather invest my time in them than games that require time grinding to get items to make you competitive after a certain point. Even Team Fortress 2 has this problem to a certain degree, and lots of people did buy that game. That's an issue with microtransactions, though, not F2P per se
Indeed, there are many failed attempts in F2P because developers and publishers are being reckless about it, but the same can be said about paid games, there's no difference in that aspect, however in F2P you still have time to get out and not having spent anything more than time, when in paid games, once you get the full thing you may regret it later on and you can't do a thing about it other than not buy any other games from said publisher/developer.
I also played TF2 myself, when it was already a F2P, and I didn't like the game. What did I loose? Nothing. Does that mean it's a bad F2P model? Nope, I just like it's style. If it was a paid game, I couldn't judge the game after have given money for it (and no, demos and such do not provide the slightest about its real gameplay as a full product, that's why a few prefer the demo version of UT rather than the full game actually, they always end up being different products).
Anyway, conclusion: you clearly have a different view and opinion on this, and I respect that, but you can't disregard the latest batch of F2P attempts that are actually making it a better model to follow than what it was a few years ago, and the actual declarations of developers worried about the costs of the next batch of paid games exactly due to the reasons I stated in this and my previous posts. That is all.
