I thought I might share a discourse on a certain business model many of us are familiar with. You know, the free-to-play game? Think any Korean multiplayer game and you're quite close.
I've never been a big fan of this model, and I'll illustrate this below. Even as an astutely cruel being of business-nature myself, I still find this system incredibly cruel and inhumane.
Basically, a free-to-play model is just that, a free to play game. The key word is in "play". It is, for all reasons and purposes, free to "play"... usually. However, the clincher is that you usually need to pay microtransactions to get stand a chance in the environment, which is usually hypercompetitive by nature. For example, one might need to pay $1 to get a larger exp gain for one day, and $1 for a chance to get rare items, and $0.50 for teleportation back to a city, etc. etc. etc.
The thing is that these free-to-play games tend to always stray away from the essential nature that forms games; the concept of fun. It usually always turns into a mess of grinding or obscure "playing" in the form that it would be inherently impossible without some miraculous force of will to continue without engaging in the microtransactions. Even then, one would need to engage in more and more of these microtransactions until the cost of playing the game, be it time or money, greatly exceeds the opportunity cost had you merely played a subscription-based MMO in the first place.
Here's a cute story though:
I used to play this MUD several years back called Imperian, a member of the Iron Realms series of games. A MUD is basically an MMORPG that only has text. So, you get incredible detail in text, but in the end, it's all text. Not that that's a bad thing. I thought it was incredible in the beginning. So much depth for a world controlled solely by players. Everything was run by players, governments, shops, the economy. So there I was, a young lad who just encountered a nice free-to-play MUD. I got caught up in all the new formalities (many of which stick with me today, such as never typing lowercase "i") that come from a extreme-roleplaying heavy game. The real world doesn't exist in Imperian, it is only mentioned as an "external distraction". I'm not joking.
I spent a year or so leveling and engaging in roleplay with my socially-inept bard who spent a lot of time drinking himself to death while butchering orcs with painful song and annoying other players to sell him blade toxins to coat his mandolin with. But after all that time, I noticed that it was taking forever for me to level and that the super players were all that, super players. I couldn't do anything competitive and remained that useless whelp as long as I could remember.
Then I learned the gritty truth of the world of Imperian:
1. Nobody truly controlled anything. The moderators dictated if anything could happen. Wars couldn't be won and the balance of power was always the same. Even if somebody managed to overthrow a king, that king would be put back in place "by the Gods" in half-an-hour and the person who overthrew him would be banned.
2. It was impossible to become any sort of important character unless you purchased in-game currency called credits. Credits could either be bought with external distraction money or in-game gold. In my time, each credit would cost around 3000 gold, more or less depending on the current trading values. Credits would then be used to buy levels, get skills, and the like. Without credits, it would take years to get anywhere. Credits were also extremely expensive, and powerful characters would take thousands of dollars to fund.
3. Combat in the game, though advertised as realistic and in-depth compared to a simple "attack goblin with hammer", boiled down to who could program the best macro to counter all combats. Essentially, anyone without a macro couldn't survive even killing normal creeps. High level PVP was about as realistic and in-depth as pushing a keystroke and letting the program kill your enemy for you.
4. The players really did believe that the world of Imperian was a real world.
That's when I started hating it. It was hard to leave because so much time was already invested into it, and if I left, no one would remember me. That sucked. Then one of my friends who I quested often with told me how he discovered a bug that got us unlimited gold. We looked at it, examined it, experimented, and soon... we were wallowing in trillions of gold.
Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh. Thus began the greatest few days of my entire time of the year or so I spent in the game. Here's what happened:
1. The in-game credit market skyrocketed thanks to us. It went from an average of 3000 gold per credit to 15000 per credit and rising. Every single credit that appeared on market, we would buy instantly, regardless of price.
2. Using the hordes of credits we accumulated, we turned our characters into gods. We were the most powerful characters in the game by far. Nothing could harm us. We could point our fingers at others and they would literally explode.
3. My friend was a more lenient guy, using his ill gotten gains to finance his leveling and creep-killing career. Whereas I would sponsor contests with prizes of millions of dollars for whoever could kill whoever. Inflation was rampant, the whole world went chaotic to the march of us.
It was the time of our lives in the game. People worshiped the ground we walked on. We were immortal. We were ultimate. We were beyond-moderator. Rookies were lining up to attempt to be accepted as our disciples. All the oldbies who had invested thousands of dollars were now fumbling before our feet. Then we got perma-banned. Oh well.
I guess the moral of the story is that free-to-play games are usually something along the lines of an internet pyramid scam. But if you find a way to fight the system, embrace it and love the overwhelming power.
Good article concerning an extreme case of free-to-play microtransactions and scams: http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_away_in_zt.php
[ May 02, 2008: Message edited by: umiman ]
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Topic: Free To Play (Read 12358 times)