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The real problem with f2p/cash shops?

gurugeorgegurugeorge Member UncommonPosts: 481

It's not moral - what could be more moral than circumventing gold sellers and letting the devs (instead of random hackers and hoodlums) make money from those too lazy or time-pressured to play? 

There's also nothing immoral about market segmentation - having people play as much of the game as they're willing to pay for.  It's good that companies can squeeze every penny out of people to the exact degree that they use their software - it also means more investors will be attracted to the genre.

No, none of that .  The real problem, for me anyway, is psychological

If I pay a subscription, the overall "feel" of the game is that the world is completely open to me.  I'm here, and although they are at present unkown to me, the game possibilities are out there, fixed, open as much as they are, for me to live into, breathe into, explore into.

With an f2p game, immersion is semi-broken.  The world is open to me only as much as I (the real life me) am willing to pay for.  That's not a moral problem, but it does break immersion.  There's less feeling of freedom for me as I live through my avatar in the game.  There's less of a feeling of a "world out there", a virtual world waiting for me to explore it.

Trying to capture something in words here, not sure if I'm getting it right - anybody else feel the same way?

I guess the only point to this is that, even if all MMOs go f2p, I'd applaud that, but I hope they still have subscription (or some other equivalent method of having all in-game possibilities unlocked) as an option, because if I do get right into an MMO, I want to have that feeling of freedom in the game, I don't want to be pulled back into my real life self every few hours to consider how much further I want to open up the game. 

For a game I only play casually, yes, fine.  But for something I get into, I want a "fire and forget" option.

Comments

  • MeowheadMeowhead Member UncommonPosts: 3,716

    This is why I like the Guild Wars 2 model.

    What could be more fire and forget than B2P?

    With a subscription, well... let's just say that one of my big problems with a subscription is I have a fairly sizable collection of useless coasters that are thinly disguised as MMORPGs I bought.

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