Tobold is at it again: pretending not to know the difference between toys and games. I pointed it out to him back in 2013. He doesn't want to know, though, because he wants to buy his progress in the cash store, and doesn't want to acknowledge that this hurts other people's games (see Toys and Games for why)
By the way, that's the second time Tobold has used the title "Everything is Pay2Win". The previous time was back in 2013. which prompted me to ask how Free2Play games could be monetized without being Pay2Win. Nobody came up with any suggestions. Can you think of any?
Not just one Overton window
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I was reading an article in The Atlantic about the decline of cancel culture.
What struck me, was a phrase saying: *"A small group of committed activists
c...
1 hour ago
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"how Free2Play games could be monetized without being Pay2Win. Nobody came up with any suggestions. Can you think of any?"
ReplyDeleteAmazed nobody has said Hearthstone, and I'm sure that there are many other games that pre-date it that operate on the same model.
Yes, SOH. Hearthstone has an interesting twist on it, one that's common to card-collection games: pay for the chance to win power. It's gamble2win!
ReplyDeleteI would definitely pay Blizzard money if I could expand my deck collection beyond nine decks. I'm loth to delete a deck to make way for a new idea, but that's what I must do. I'd prefer if I could keep my old decks for a fee.
In World of Tanks, I've got 75 tanks in my garage. That means I've paid for well over 60 garage slots. I can only play one tank at a time! But I hate throwing away old tanks, so I pay wargaming.net real-world money just to hang on to them for me.
"Nobody came up with any suggestions. Can you think of any?"
ReplyDeleteExplain how you believe LoL is pay-4-power (pay-2-win is a flawed term, as almost no game allows you to pay to guarantee a win, while plenty of badly made F2P games allow you to buy power that assists but doesn't guarantee a win).
Note: Pay-2-skip isn't the same as pay-4-power, so paying to get a champ faster with RP than LP isn't buying power, its skipping ahead. Once a game starts, your RP-bought champ isn't any stronger than my LP-bought champ. Buying power is gold ammo in WoT prior to the change, where no amount of playtime could earn you that power advantage.
Unless I am mistaken, Dà Chéng isn't asserting that monetising F2P without P2W cannot be done. She's just pointing out that her readers were too lazy to come up with any.
DeleteThe LoL way could actually be adapted fairly easily to an MMO, substituting other types of content for champions. Lotro does that, albeit not very well. Essentially, you’re selling flavour (which encompasses a bit more than cosmetics) rather than power.
Imagine, for simplicity’s sake, a fantasy-trope themepark with a top boss in the current tier. You lock yourself in as an elf, human or dwarf, with the appropriate faction-loyalty fluff thrown into the storyline to sweeten the limitations. As you progress up the levels, your faction’s zones and a selection of shared neutral zones are available to you, but to access the other factions' territories (including capturable pets, achievements, training in race-specific ‘advanced classes’) you have to grind dailies for the appropriate embassy, or pay up.
The difference between this model and Lotro is that you don’t sell bags. Or legacy slots. Or crafting boosts. Or the right to have a horse sooner. You remain honest with your players and make absolutely sure that a guild full of players who have opted out of your shell game and (for example) stayed human, in human/neutral zones, using human advanced classes can kill that top boss and compete at the same rate for any benchmark achievement in your game. Just like almost any LoL champ is competitive.
Thank you Esteban, your explanation was better than mine! And I like your suggestion for adapting LoL and LotRO monetization options to other games.
DeleteHi Syncaine, I don't think I ever said that LoL is pay-4-power (I agree that that's what we really mean by pay2win). If I did say it, I withdraw it! I've never played League of Legends.
ReplyDeleteI think I get what you mean. LoL is an example of a free-2-play game that is monetized without selling power. I just meant that none of my readers made any suggestions!
Fair enough, read the "no one has come up with any" line as a bit of a challenge or a "because there aren't any" kind of statement. Seems we are on the same page that F2P done 'right' doesn't have to be P4P.
DeleteI really don't understand this paradigm of naming MMO monetisation models using a portmanteau of two words with a number between them? Is it a deliberate stylistic choice, or does blogspot have a strict character limit?
ReplyDeleteIt makes us all think we're cool, Coreus!
ReplyDelete