Barrier to Entry

After my earlier failed video attempt I got into a discussion about how much it costs to play Magic Online. To create an account you need to part with US$9.99, which gets you an account, one M12 booster, 2 Magic Online tickets, 5 Avatars, 1 Planeswalker 2012 Deck Pack (cards that can only be used in the Planeswalker format), and 300 additional cards, after this it is up to you how much you want to spend buying new cards and playing in tournaments. However, it is worth noting that is cost nothing to play casual games.

With this in mind I have put together two casual decks that each cost less than two tickets. The first is an aggressive tribal deck featuring allies, and the second is a combo deck with creatures that have the unearth ability. Once again I had some trouble making the videos, of the seven games I attempted to record with the Allies deck (all of which I won) only one of them actually worked. The Unearth deck actually recorded but in all three games I had to revert to plan B of actually playing creatures, rather than being able to combo off. However, I did manage a turn four win in a test game I played when I was first putting the deck together.

I'm still not 100% happy with the videos, I become far to quite when thinking so have resorted to using some of kurtjmac's patented snarky yellow text to try and stop things getting too boring, but this provides a starting point for future videos to improve on. If you are having trouble reading the cards then you need to increase the video resolution.

I've Gone Mad

The free to play model for games has really taken off lately. Everquest II, DC Universe Online, Team Fortress 2, and Star Trek Online all changed to free to play and from what I understand have higher profits because of it. There are also games which have just released as free to play such as Realm of the Mad God and Tribes Ascend, both of which I started playing recently.

The strange thing about these games is that they have almost all of the content available to free users. The only items a non-free user can't obtain in Tribes is bonus xp and possibly some cosmetic upgrades, while in Realm real currency is used to buy extra character slots, guilds, additional vault space, and cosmetic changes. Personally I don't understand why someone would part with real money just to change the colour of their character's costume, but plenty of people seem to be quite happy handing over £1 just to have a polka-dot shirt. In truth, had they just asked me for a few quid to buy the game and have all the features then I probably would have, but I'm not willing to pay for cosmetic changes or just for the additional convenience of extra space in the item vault.

In Tribes the use of real money is purely so that you don't have to spend excessive amounts of time playing just to unlock everything. For example to unlock a new class you can either play for several hours, or simply hand over a couple of dollars. For $50 you can unlock and buy practically everything in the game, which is the equivalent of having just bought a new game. However, for me at least, part of the fun associated with the game is the levelling up process. As my experience and skill with a character increases so too will the equipment and items that character has, this could just be because I enjoy RPG's and other people who play more FPS style games would be more frustrated and bothered by not having access to all the equipment, then again CoD also uses a level system.

I suspect that the market for free to play is getting over saturated. The business model of get people into the game, take a few dollars off them as they try it out and then not care if they leave only works when people have enough time to try out all the different games. I think of this as similar to Facebook games where there are now so many of them that I just can not be bothered trying to work out which are worth while any more and have stopped even trying new ones.