Free vs Freemium vs Upfront games (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, March 08, 2018, 18:25 (2453 days ago) @ ManKitten

So this is fun because these are all games that I play(ed)!

Fortnite: First, your $10 buy-in to the battle pass also nets you ~$12 worth of in-game currency (assuming you play the battle pass to completion, which should take me another 3 weeks for a total of 5), and you can use that in-game currency to buy the next season's battle pass, so your initial $10 buy-in basically buys you battle passes forever.

Anyway, I love how fortnite is monetized. It's a 100 player pvp game, so you NEED a large base of players in order to make games happen, period. That means free gets you a dedicated and available base of players. Then there's an attached (and great) pve game that comes with a pricetag, which I purchased just to support my love of the pvp game. Crazy. And then there's a rotating store for the pvp game which contains zero loot boxes and shows you what you're going to be buying up front. I should also mention that the rewards from the battle pass and the items you can buy from the store are all 100% purely cosmetic. Most of the emotes actually make noise, which gives away your position in the game, so they're actually *detrimental* to use. hilarious. Of note: If any of the elements of the for-pay store or battle pass resulted in advantages in the game, I would be 100% against it. But since everything is cosmetic and fun, I'm all-in. My 400+ hours played and more than 60 wins back up my passion for this game.

Candy Crush: I'm 100% with you on this. Don't pay money for this crap. The game has some interesting and depth-ful puzzles to beat, but good god is the pricing structure abusive as hell.

Dest2ny: You didn't mention the in-game store, which is my major gripe with 2Des2ny. In addition to your up front costs, there's an unlimited loot box purchase potential that is being grossly abused. Most of the new items in the last expansion were behind loot box rewards, which should be unacceptable to everyone who plays games. Many other decisions in the game are based around limiting your access to loot in order to drive you to buy stuff (either through exp capping or token collection limitations or simply by putting crappy looking gear in the game world and all of the good looking stuff behind a paywall) - it's totally lame and a big part of why I don't play the game anymore. Games with up-front purchases should not contain real money stores in my opinion, period. Once you pay for the game you should get the whole game. If they want to include a loot box that's only purchasable with in-game currency that cannot be collected or influenced via the expenditure of real money, I'm okay with that. But once real money comes in, I feel like I paid for the opportunity to pay more money, and that's bullshit.