Sony, Microsoft going 'heavily' on free-to-play next-gen, says Epic VP Rein...

An interesting article has just surfaced: http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/09/sony-microsoft-going-heavily-on-free-to-play-next-gen-says-e/

Apparently Sony and Microsoft are going heavily on free to play and in app purchase...

How do the good people of ASSEMbler feel about this?

Perhaps I'm getting old but for me in-app purchases (and somewhat DLCs) are open ended money spend. I don't see myself paying for weapons or cars for every bloody game just to be able to play or finish it. Free to play while an interesting model in my view devalues games. If it's free why bother? Just hop from one game to the other.

I much prefer spending a set amount for a game and enjoy it rather than having to constantly pay for it, that's not going to happen with me ;p.

 

Oh, so microtransactions? No thanks. Would prefer just one price to buy the game.

 

I hate to always sound like a Negative Nancy, but with each rumor/news I hear about next gen gaming my interest in video games deteriorates bit by bit.

 

Likewise. Retro is the way to go

 

Im okay with Free to Play. A good game will be a good game. Planetside 2 is awesome.

 

EVERY next gen rumor has turned out to be bullshit so far, this is no different.

 

This must mean they are also going heavily on digital downloads. You wouldn't give away a disc for free... Half he fun of gaming is actually owning games, reading the instruction manual, trading, borrowing, etc...

I'm curious to see how this plays out. Will Street Fighter V be free, but only have Ryu & Ken, but you have to buy every other character for $5-10 per? Will the next Final Fantasy limit your level to 10 until you pay more? Will they limit you based on storyarc?

I've been begging for something like this for sports games, where instead of buying a new game every year you could just by updated rules/rosters, but, then again game companies are never going to come out with ways to make games cheaper...

 

This is pretty terrible but not surprising. The board members at Sony and Microsoft don't care about the hardcore gamer who like to pay full price for games that have a complete experience. They all want that casual gaming money that is being lost to the iphone. Free to play with in-game microtransactions look great on paper and can be developed by three people as opposed to huge teams. To a corporate executive who spends half the week golfing and the rest in the boardroom, this is the future of gaming.

 

I call bullshit until I see it for my self

 

Apple has disrupted the market, having gamed on the iPad/iPhone for about 9 months, I've grown out of it quickly since I got my Vita. iPad/iPhone are now 90% business tools for me. Gaming sucks on iOS for people like me not into casual games.

Agreed, I'm taking this with a pinch of salt + recent backlash on in-app purchase get it out of control with kids in the press will not help.

 

Microtransactions, if meaningful (not just optional costumes etc) destroy the game in my opinion. For example, Tetris on facebook introduced in-app purchases last year or so and until then, the game was a pretty awesome Tetris variant. After the change, you could buy "extra lines in the last 10 seconds for your opponent" at $0.99 - an unfair advantage in trade for money. They may call this "microtransaction", I call it cheating. The same applies to games such as Tiny Tower, in which they want you to spend $30 on 1000 "TowerBux". Regardless of how well you play, you can only earn around 75 TowerBux in around 5hrs of gameplay... with elevators costing up to 1000 TowerBux, you'd want a shortcut. It's an unfair advantage they give you: They make the game unbalanced and unfair (like having a 1000 TB elevator if you can only earn 75 in a whole damn day of tedious tasks!) in order to generate money, or in other words: It's not a game anymore if there are no defined rules of what you can do.

What if there was "Online Chess" on the next Xbox. Want your Queen to have an extra life? Buy *Super Energy* for only $1.49. Ooh, your opponent is superior in strategy? No worries, just buy back some Pawns for $0.49 each... !! So much fun and fair competition! Isn't that what gaming is all about??

I fucking hate this new wave of in-game purchases, download-distribution and all that crap. I will never support it in my whole life (and haven't done it so far!).

Oh, about the Tiny Tower example: I just changed some file in the game and it got me 1,400,000 TowerBux for free I used around 300,000 of those until I pretty much completed the game 99% perfectly. "in-game" purchases would've run me $9,000 real dollars... seems like a GREAT deal for an unbalanced cell phone game.

 

As long as it's a balanced system then I'm fine with it, by which I mean, it's not impossible to make good progress without paying.

A good example is Nimble Quest by Nimblebit.

It started off way too difficult and tried to force your hand into paying for extras but as time has gone on they've listened to feedback and made adjustments to make it more fun for those who invest a lot of time into it.

Sega did the same thing with Sonic Dash.

It's a great way for smaller studios to get noticed and still turn a profit as long as they don't get too greedy.

All I want to see from the next gen consoles is an appstore system that offers a decent SDK for the every day developer.

 

You were never able to do the following in the past-

-be able to graph "difficulty of game" over "amount of money"
-not finish a game because you don't have enough money
-game casually.

And it should stay that way. Microtransactions are definitely beneficial to the developer for raking in cash, but to the quickly declining population of actual gamers, it's atrocious.
Not to mention casuals, the plague of the gaming community. I can't stand it when people are shocked to see there are no games on my phone.

 

Do you have this feeling? That going retro is limited?

I always feel it, that I about to know everything any retro console has to offer.


on topic: next gen will crash the video game market, period.

 

If true and I already said I doubt it is there is a simple solution.

IF you don't like it, don't partake in it if enough don't partake, then it dies.

 

I'm not sure what your definition of casual gaming is, but you could certainly play short games and beat them back in the day. In fact, the wikipedia page for casual game lists Pac-Man (1980) as the first real casual game. I don't agree with microtransactions either, but I don't understand how casuals are the plague of the gaming community. As far as games on your phone go, you can find full length console games for Android/iOS.

 

I do, but I have so many unfinished games on current and previous platforms that I can easily skip a gen

 

I've actually been trying a few free to play games this past week.

First I tried Dust 514. The only reason I showed any interest at all was because of the link with Eve Online. Sadly, Dust 514 is a crock of sheet. Kinda like a poor mans PlanetSide, except with worse graphics, which believe me, is hard to imagine given as PlanetSide is a decade old game.

The only good thing to come out of Dust 514 for me was to try another free to play game, PlanetSide 2. It isn't quite as good or as fun as the original PlanetSide, but it does have a few positives. The action is much faster paced than the original and it doesn't have the god awful Core Combat expansion. It does seem to have way too many certification points to unlock though and even more annoyingly, different character classes using the exact same gun as the other class, have to rebuy the exact same certificates, or in the case of vehicles, they have to unlock the other features of identical turrets on different mounting points... WTF! I would have preferred the game was closer to the original PlanetSide and had a more classless system where you can use any armour you are certified to do so and whatever equipment you can fit in your bags, so one could be a hacker engineer medic all rolled into one if they so desired, but meh. Despite these issues amongst others I have found PlanetSide 2 to be enjoyable, free to play or not. I haven't bothered to pick up a subscription yet, though I'd be tempted to pay a token amount for a short time to accelerate my character learning and as a thankyou.

Free to play can be done well or it can be done badly. I don't have a huge problem with the idea in principle, but in practice OCD types are going to find themselves paying more than the game was ever worth to collect all manner of useless cosmetic items which will end up deleted in 3-5 years time. I have mixed feelings on pay to win too though. EA Games have been selling kit shortcut bundles for some time on their paid for games, but at least there is only a finite amount of kit to unlock and for those with the talent or the time they can be unlocked rather quickly rendering the kit bundle moot. The downside of the free to play model is new kit comes out thick and fast, yet it is difficult to earn in good time without handing over a few bucks and it is at that point where I start to have a problem with it.

 

I understand the complaints about microtransactions, but bashing "casuals" is just pointless elitism.

 

Oh really? LOL that's really funny to know!!! I'm really not into these kind of stuff so this Tetris thing is surprising to me. I wonder what kind o person came with this idea.

The good point: People who play browser games deserve it! lol

The bad point: Some idiots believe this is "the new way" and follow the most pathetic trend I've seen...