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.