Plants vs zombies 2 goes F2P

Well, it’s a given that PvZ2 will be ported onto other platforms, but yeah, it’s a bit disappointing. Same for the business model - I’d like to be more optimistic, but stuff like Real Racing 3 helps me remain cautious.

I have an iOS device but never liked playing the game on it, I preferred the PC version. I found collecting the “sun” to be easier with my mouse than my finger.

I am not an unmitigated hater of free-to-play. It works perfectly for certain games–or more precisely, certain gamePLAY. But I’m really afraid that taking PvZ (the best game of the last five years, if you ask me) this direction will destroy one of its truly great qualities, which is the game’s generous spirit. I’m not just talking about how generous it is with its gameplay modes and its content, which it is, but its generous sense of fun. All those little blurbs they wrote for the in-game encyclopedias… The unique minigames for each platform. The totally gratuitous Zen Garden, with snail upgrade! Now all of these things have a price tag, either in cash or in time. They better have something in the chamber to compensate for losing this great gushing generosity if they want it to live up to its predecessor, and I have no idea what that could be.

It has taken them ages to cash in on the success of PVZ and they’re not even releasing it on all platforms at the same time? And no Steam? wtf. I don’t own any iOS devices and I don’t plan to, this is bullshit.

Out of curiosity, what gameplay do you think works perfectly for FtP? Some might be tolerable, but to describe it as “perfect”? About the only thing I can think of where it might be better than any other option would be a collectible card or similar game.

The problem with F2P is that if only one of them is a success the vultures will keep on pushing it to everything (EA).
Therefore this concept has to die out / starve to death and I won’t support any game using it regardless how it’s implemented.

Big fan of the original but have little interest in this one according to the information. I don’t own an IOS device anyway so I’m forced to pass on this.

Anybody knows if there will be any involvement from Laura Shigihara in the music department? Her compositions for the original were at least half the appeal of the game for me. If I’m not mistaken she was sentimental partner of the original game creator, who was laid off not long ago, so I don’t have
high hopes that she will be involved at all.

It’s been a while since I played this, so perhaps it’s a good moment to replay it. Do you know if there are any decent mods that add content to the game?

I think free to play works/worked for a game such as League of Legends. The F2P model usually gives way for tons of other issues such as games filled with kids. (WOT, LOL). Pay2Win and the harrowing fact that most of the time, to actually “unlock” the entire game would cost you 10x more than that of a traditional retail game.

Why would they go F2P if they didn’t except to make more money that way? Then you have to ask yourself, are you the target consumer? Do they expect you to shell out more than you normally would?

Also this; I bought Faster Than Light for $10 and have put over 200 hours into it. That’s cheap entertainment. Can I put $50 into PVZ2 and expect a 1000 hours of entertainment? No? How about $20 for 400 hours? What about an option to pay $20 for the entire game even if I only play it for 5 hours? No?
How is the F2P model being applied to this game an advantage for me then? Uhm… if the game is total crap I get to find out for free… but the game might be total crap because of a bad implementation of the F2P model.

More Always online wallet gardens ?
Zombification is a metaphor for zombification.

What I am tryiing to say, is that I don’t feel like PvZ is the type of game that could support a f2p-ification easy. But I hope its a success!

I understand peoples’ fear & trepidation, but I’m going to be a radical here and wait until I see what the game is like before I throw it in the trash bin for being F2P (I also own and use an iOS device, so that’s not an issue for me, but I can see how it would be - but don’t you think the iOS exclusivity is going to be a timed sort of thing, and after a short while wouldn’t you think it’d be available for most platforms?).

It’ll be iOS exclusive for a very short time. This is just so Apple can announce it as exclusive at their big show next week. It’ll be everywhere in a month or two.

Some references to the F2P model in this preview.

Relax: it’s not that kind of free-to-play. There’s no energy system, no limit on lives – you can play through the entire game in a single sitting, if you’ve got about 15 hours to spare. There are no paywalls, no Candy Crush-style insistence that you either badger Facebook friends or pay a nominal fee to get to the next level. There are a handful of premium items – permanent boosts that increase your starting amount of sun, for instance – available through real money in-app purchase, and a handful of plants, too. But as lead producer Allan Murray explains, PopCap is determined to prove to the sceptical that free-to-play doesn’t have to be evil. “Frankly, it’s been something the team has really struggled with: how do we do it right? We’re just trying to find a really good balance. We want people to play and enjoy the game, and not feel like they’re being bilked all the time.”

“Frankly, it’s been something the team has really struggled with:"

But apparently they have to just struggle, because letting us simply buy the game is unimaginable right?
sigh…

Presumably, judging by developer quote, their struggle is about getting free to play to be minimally onerous to bellyachers while meeting business needs set forth by corporate overlords. A burden that Popcap team is apparently shouldering so that free to play detractors, like those in this thread, do not have to deal with any, or much, of unpleasantness talked to death here.

If simply buying game is what some want, using game’s microtransactions system to pay whatever seems fair will solve that problem. Elsewise, game will apparently be available completely free of charge, and absent any kind of mandatory retinal scan or blood/DNA sample hidden in EULA fine print, completely free of any other commitment as well, free to cast $0 game aside at any moment and complain as loudly and bitterly as any would wish to.

My take on that quote is that it’s a struggle for PopCap because they just want to make a good game, but EA are the ones who have demanded that they work microtransactions in somehow. Purely a hypothesis on my part, of course.

The problem is that the microtransactions affect the underlying free game experience, usually in a negative way. Perhaps it seems needlessly pessimistic to assume that this will be the case for a game that isn’t out yet, but I personally have become frustrated with pretty much every free-to-play game I’ve tried, even those with the most minimal of microtransactions. And PopCap’s statements on the matter don’t really reassure me - no company comes out and says ‘it’s definitely going to lock plenty of content behind paywalls’ or what have you, but obviously plenty of times that is the case.

Furthermore I don’t really think that the gameplay of PvZ is a good fit for a free-to-play model anyway. For example, the article references being able to boost the level of sun with a purchase - will the game be too hard for those who don’t buy that? If it’s not, won’t it get too easy (and thus boring) for those who buy the sun? And I just hate the idea of being able to purchase certain plants. If you can buy them with in-game currency that you ‘earn’ as you play (which I’m guessing will be the model used), is that actually a viable option for getting those plants without needing to repetitively ‘grind’ through levels with the existing set of free plants?

Maybe they pull it off and it’s really just completely ancillary (although then that raises the question of why anybody would bother to pay, thus potentially crippling the business model), but it’s extremely hard to do, and seems like a needlessly difficult task when we already know that you could simply sell the full experience for say, 15 or 20 dollars, make plenty of money and not even have to worry about compromising the core experience. I’ll certainly check it out once it comes out on PC regardless though, since the first game was so great.

Lastly, there’s no need to be so confrontational. It’s okay to disagree.

A collectible card game is a really good example. I think games where free-to-play is a benefit have a few distinct qualities: They have a significant persistent element, either in a character or space that can be built on indefinitely or player stat tracking and competition. They have highly repeatable gameplay, with space in the mechanics for purchasable bonuses. And the good ones benefit from a large player base, rather than exploiting that player base (League of Legends does this–the expert players wouldn’t have a rich ecosystem of victi–teammates and opponents if there weren’t all those non-paying players coming in and out of the game.) Maybe a way to summarize all these is that free-to-play can really work for games that are run as a service for their players over time.

There are a lot of games out there that try to be free-to-play and fail because they don’t really work within this formula. But a number of games do or can. Besides card games, I think there are match-based shooters that make it work well (Tribes sounds like they’ve done it relatively well). I think it can work for MMORPGs (in the case of retrofitted free-to-play I think it works less often, and usually at the expense of a chunk of the existing audience).

I’m not usually in the audience for free-to-play, like a lot of people around here. And developers/publishers have to shake the idea that free-to-play is the best way to make every game. They often try to convince themselves of that because they are thinking about the one great financial benefit of free-to-play: the fact that there isn’t a limit to what some people can and will pay.

No, I saw a tweet recently from George Fan (the designer) who said neither he nor Laura Shigihara had anything to do with the sequel.

In the case of Fan: Shouldn’t be too surprising given the fact that he apparently was let go during the bloodshed of August. PvZ2 was announced the day before the lay-offs hit PopCap.

You can probably make a good tower defense game free to play, if you sell:

  • New campaings. This is more DLC’s than F2P, but it may kinda work.
  • New sets of towers that feel different than others, but are not op. If the base game don’t have a varied number of towers, the base game sucks. Extra sets of powers must expand a already rich collection of towers.
  • Fluff items, like pets, decoration, skins, hats, … that are not essential to the game, and don’t turn the game into pay to win. If this fluff items give a ingame advantage, there must be other way to collect them, that is not a credit card.

Other elements may benefict the “synergy” with free to play:

  • Some type of persistent/grindy element. This could be a “permadead” mode, or some very hard mode. Wellcome to Hell Mode.
  • Some type of character persistence/progression. Like “shockets” to modify the powers of the towers, or maybe unique items. #YOLO #SWAG
  • Collectibles. Building a collection is the classic way to create replayability. People can collect “Pets”. People love pets. Give them pets, damnit!.
  • Coop / PvP. Create extra replayability, may make a boring game fun, because you play it with friends, drunk.

A “card” system represent both “collection of towers” and “collectible”,so is a good idea to deliver both things. It may make less sense the moment you allow shockets… [insert PennyArcade comic here]

Dungeon Defenders already have all of the above, and is a pretty great game (but is not free 2 play).

…so basically, there are ways to make a fun game based on turret defense, that is free to play and is fair to the gamers.