Free2Play Games

Celever

Celever

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With the announcement of Nintendo's second Free2Play/Pay2Win/Freemium game, Pokémon Rumble World, I think it's time we get a discussion going about Free2Play games in general and your thoughts on them, as well as your thoughts on Nintendo going down the route with a couple of their games.

I'll post my thoughts later, I'm interested in hearing all of your's first.
 
Free to play games pay my mortgage so I'm totally ok with them :)

I think F2P games get a bad rep. There are too many gamers who will knee jerk dismiss a game the second they hear it's free to play and assume it's going to be just another Farmville. The Zynga style money machines are on the decline and there are more and more games that offering more interesting and engaging gameplay using the F2P model. A lot of the casual players who never touched a video game before Farmville etc came along are growing out of the simple tap-tap-tap style games and looking for something with a bit more challenge, as seen by the fact that Candy Crush has replaced it as the number one casual game. If people are downloading these games and enjoying them, then good for them. It's not for anyone else to say they shouldn't enjoy them.

I do believe there is a right and a wrong way to do freemium but I also think that developers who get too greedy and demand too much too quickly will turn off more free players than they convert. Pay to win is a strange concept that requires fine balance. I believe players who pay for games should have an advantage over someone who spends nothing at all. If you don't want to pay with money then you pay with advert watching or with your time by grinding. If you don't want to pay, watch, or wait then you should not receive the same kind of benefits of someone who does, otherwise what would be the incentive for anyone to spend?

On a totally unrelated note, you should all go and download Bloons Monkey City. Available now on iOS and Android! ;)
 
I think it is smart of Nintendo because I am sure they make good money off of Shuffle and most likely will off of Rumble. Go them for branching out! I don't mind F2P games at all. If you play casually you get to play a fun free game, if not then spend some $ and get more out of it.
 
I expected to see something like this happen, especially after the way Shuffle really took off in popularity. It's really not a surprise.

This also ties into their whole mobile push they announced a little bit ago. I would just expect more of this kind of stuff in the future sadly.

dmaster out.
 
ilovecommas said:
If you play casually you get to play a fun free game, if not then spend some $ and get more out of it.
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And if this was truly how it worked, then F2P games would be fine. But inherently, that's not at all how they work.

I hear a lot of complaints about games with microtransactions but not many people really think about why they're objectively bad for consumers. Theoretically, you get to play a sort of "demo" of the game for free, and then you can pay as much as you want to get as much as you want out of the game. Rather than paying $40 or whatever up front, you slowly dish out small amounts of money, and when you've reached that $40 point, you've gotten the same amount out of the game as you would have had you paid $40 originally. The advantage here is that you still get some of a game for free, and if you end up getting bored of it, you don't have to go all the way up to $40. Or, if you really love the game, you can pay more than $40, and get even more out of it.

Of course, that's never how it works. The two primary ways F2P games function are on a "hearts" system or having some kind of premium currency to buy stuff like powers (or sometimes you can just buy the powerups directly). Nearly every game I've played with the "hearts" system has felt the same--the game is designed to make you lose often enough that you have to keep on paying if you actually want to make progress. That's because if the game was designed as I described it above, there would be little benefit for the companies involved because they'd rather just sell the game at a normal retail price. But the absolute worst crime that F2P games commit, especially the premium currency ones, is that they're all pay to win. What is the point of paying for a powerup? Is it really enjoyable to beat a game because you paid money to make it easier? The point of a game is to experience it, not complete it. The idea of paying money to make progress destroys the entire point of even playing a game.

I have faith in Nintendo because despite a lot of stupid things they've done over the years, they rarely screw over their customers with bad game design (they're DLC has always been excellent). But F2P is an idiotic system that should never, EVER be used. I currently will refuse to buy most F2P games, and if I do, I won't spend money on them. Speak with your wallet.
 
Free2Play games can be good depending on how well they are executed. As long as Nintendo lets people able to play for a good length of time per session then I think it should be alright. If they make any levels really tough just to get people to pay then I'll be a little mad but I guess that's what they have to do sometimes.
 
I can't really tell how I feel about Nintendo doing free2play style games just yet. Pokemon Shuffle was ok I guess.. not SUPER dependent on money, but the game itself was pretty boring after awhile. The fact that Nintendo is going to start pumping out mobile games makes me fear a future where Nintendo becomes the next EA.

Besides Nintendo, free2play seems to get a horrible rep, for good reasoning though. Anyone see the South Park episode which parodied free2play mobile games? Yeah. That sums it up basically. There are on the other hand very good free2play games that don't REQUIRE money to play like Path of Exile, No More Room in Hell, and Hearthstone (that last one might be debatable).
 
Free2Play is something I don't trust. There are many of these games which are just downright bad, or are just for you to kill some time while waiting for the train (like 90% of mobile games) and are something that you won't touch at any other point. And unfortunately, most of these so-called "free" games are in fact pay2win. The option alone of being able to pay in order to advance faster in a game which is supposed to be free is what truly ruins most F2P games for me. Sure, you can allow payment on some extra stuff for vanity or collectible value, but downright giving somebody the ability to pay instead of playing in order to get the advantage is hugely contradicting the whole concept of free, as well as making the point of playing somewhat null; indeed, where's the pleasure on paying in order to advance or become stronger than the other players?

I rarely play F2P, and even when I do I almost never spend extra money on whatever I may have bought, with the exception of a few vanity items I have purchased over the years.

And, while I generally love Blizzard games, don't tell me that HS isn't pay2win.
 
If you don't feel like giving your money to F2P games then don't. Consider the game a demo if the idea of having to pay to play as often as you like really bothers you.
 
Chaos Jackal said:
And, while I generally love Blizzard games, don't tell me that HS isn't pay2win.
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Hearthstone is a CCG. CCGs pretty much invented Pay2Win. If you buy the better cards you have a better chance of winning. It's the same in Pokemon and most of us play that. I actually think Hearthstone is pretty generous. It hands out gold pretty regularly to buy booster packs with, you can disenchant cards you dont use to get the ones you need, and there are a guides on how to build competitive decks using only the free cards.

I think Nintendo will have more success with F2P when it starts releasing smartphone games. Smartphone audiences are used to F2P where as I don't know if 3DS users are.
 
Maximinn said:
Hearthstone is a CCG. CCGs pretty much invented Pay2Win. If you buy the better cards you have a better chance of winning. It's the same in Pokemon and most of us play that. I actually think Hearthstone is pretty generous. It hands out gold pretty regularly to buy booster packs with, you can disenchant cards you dont use to get the ones you need, and there are a guides on how to build competitive decks using only the free cards.
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This is the only reason I wouldn't call HS pay2win. You can't buy individual cards and you can't trade packs. That combined with the fact that getting gold is very easy (if you're good you can just grind Arena for as much gold as you really want) I feel that HS is one of the better free2play games, it's not perfect, but it's very well made for the player.

To keep this from turning into a HS thread, how do people feel about Path of Exile? That's probably IMO one of the best free2play games for PC. The only real purchases you can make on there are all cosmetic, meaning you have the same chance against someone who's payed $100+ on the game (also the game is beautiful for something that's free).
 
Pokemon Shuffle was a bad attempt at Free2Play. It was a terrible way of trying to mimic the success of Puzzle & Dragons and no one can convince me otherwise. They just didn't do it right, and clearly have no intention of fixing what makes Shuffle such a bad game.

With that being said I think Rumble World will be much more generous and fair compared to Shuffle since it has a player rank system that Shuffle should have had.

Puzzle & Dragons is a great Free2Play game. Been considering Crusaders Quest myself too
 
Just got Pokemon Rumble World today (Pokemon's second attempt at free2play). I actually really like it. It's extremely simple, but for a free game it has a lot of great features that had effort actually put into them. Hopefully there next free2play can follow a pattern and be even better (assuming they'll make another) than the last.
 
A lot depends on how the game is setup. Microtransactions were done poorly in Pokemon Shuffle. Jewels have 3 purposes in that game: continue a stage if you failed to defeat it, exchange for hearts, or exchange for coins. Continuing a stage was the biggest waste of a Jewels in Pokemon Shuffle. It'd be better just to use another heart to get another attempt at the level. Exchanging for hearts is a valid option because then you can continually play it without having to wait for half an hour to get another heart back. Exchanging for coins is the best use because with coins you can get power-ups for stages making you more likely to win. They also were able to be used to throw Great Balls giving you twice the catch ratio.

Now lets talk about Pokemon Rumble World. This game is much more friendly than Pokemon Shuffle to free players. As you rank up you'll be able to get more balloons so your sessions will get longer. The most important thing in Rumble World is diamonds. They are used to purchase balloons which give new stages, stop the roulette wheel on stage select once it is unlocked, revisit the last level you played, continue if your Pokemon got KO'd, play a level by a visiting Mii character, certain trees, and customization.

In this game diamonds are much more valuable so it is more likely for people to purchase them. There are also things you can do while you wait for the balloon cool down time to pass. The game also caps how much you can spend and once you reach that level, you can get special rewards that cannot be earned any other way.
 
Teal said:
What does this mean?
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Once you've purchased 3000 diamonds you are unable to purchase anymore. One of the perks of purchasing the 3000 diamonds is you get a mine that gives you 20 diamonds daily. You can also use the time stop on stage select for 1 diamond instead of 2. Balloons also will only cost 1 diamond to refill instead of their normal amount.
 
Huh. So they basically sell you the full game for about 30 bucks. That's actually even fairer than I thought.
 
If you ain't played Agario yet, I insist you try. It is the single most silly idea for an MMO ever. But it's fun, it's addictive, and it's free so... Give it a shot. Just be careful and don't play for four hours straight like I did.

I burnt out on Rumble World really quickly. It works on a handheld better than on a console, but you can only make a Diablo-lite so simple before it becomes a game of repetitive button mashing. Got four hours out of it, though. That's more than I could say for most FTP games.
 
I have really enjoyed the Pokemon Rumble series and Rumble World is pretty standard (I wish they would make Rumble games with multiplayer like the first one on the Wii). My favorite part honestly is the $$ limit they put on buying Poke-diamonds. It really makes me see Nintendo as a company that cares for more than just scamming young kids out of their parents money with super fast credit card transactions and I felt like that design is what I hated most about freemium gaming.

So good on you Pokemon Rumble World.
 
In Rumble World, you can actually go pretty far without ponying up real money for Poke Diamonds. Calling on friends and other Miis and doing the daily missions will net you enough to go by. And frankly, you only need Poke Diamonds for balloons and storage space - you can skip the clothes and continues.

And by the time you do need to pay for extra Poke Diamonds, the price is reasonable - 5 bucks and change for 500, if I remember correctly - which should be enough to get you the last few balloons. (You can skip the mine - by the time you have it, you don't need it.)

Kudos to you, Nintendo, for making a well-designed freemium game - one in which a mooch may drink and a serious player may drown.
 
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