why Microtransactions, F2P are good for you

by electricpirate , Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 13:31 (4291 days ago) @ Avateur

If you are a "Core" gamer, the type of person who expends a significant portion of energy and time playing, thinking (like those who might post on a developer focussed fan site that ends in .org...) about games, a microtransaction fueled market actually benefits you.

Look at it this way, last generations model of selling games encourage a certain model. You need to sell as many copies as possible of your game. Since games sales decline rapidly after launch, and prices drop immediately afterwards, that results in developers needing to release more games. In that way, supporting an existing game is a bad decision. The devs who do take that on (Valve, Bungie, CDProject) see it as a marketing oportunity, but not everyone has the resources to do that. A great example of this done well was Mass Effect 3, that had microtransactions up the wazoo for MP, but also dropped in a metric ton of free content.

In a model driven primarily by micro-transactions, where you develop fewer titles, but ones that are better supported. You can't just sell a game on hype, you need to have players actually keep playing your game to make it work. For something like an online multiplayer game, or strategy game with lots of replayability, that's a great thing. There are issues to work through, you can slip into Pay 2 Win, or the game can become grindy and slow, but fundamentally, the economics reward developers for caring for their customers.

It's not right for every experience, but reflexively recoiling from it doesn't help anyone.