WHAT?! I calculated that I’d need to spend $120 to get the tracks and cars I want in addition to cutting all that service/delivery wait time nonsense to zero. Ended up spending $0 and uninstalling that piece of garbage for an actual game I can reasonably purchase. This must be wishful thinking on EA’s part.
Uh… if you have a number of permanent purchase items that are available through real-money purchase, the difference between F2P and “buying the full game” is more a matter of scale and convenience than anything else.
Consider the following: What if they’d released the original PvZ as free, and had locked the minigames behind a $10 paywall for folks who really enjoyed the game? What’s the effective difference?
I can live with games giving me a functional base model for the game for free and essentially DLCing the depth into the game. Particularly if it’s not particularly money-grubbing.
The business model in such cases is presumably: I bet we can maximize return by not setting monolithic hurdles on folks buying into the game, but instead breaking them up into discrete chunks.
It seems like a reasonable supposition, frankly. Get the fence-sitters into the game along with the enthusiasts, drop the barrier for purchase by breaking it up, and suddenly the folks who didn’t play PvZ until they could get it for $5 have paid $15 instead because they didn’t spend two years “resisting the hype”.
I don’t think anyone would have a problem with having the fifty basic levels for free, pay for the mini games, pay for the new modes, pay for the garden.
The reason these F2P games are money machines and the reason EA wants it F2P are not that way of dividing it up. The money machine way is annoying to most of us.
I think we all would trust the Popcap guys to do us right, it’s just that every indication is that those guys aren’t in charge of these decisions. Additionally, none of us trust EA to do anything but screw us over.
[facepalm]
as an aside, isn’t it time to drop the [facepalm] meme? I find it quite irritating as it suggests a degree of arrogance and condescension of the fella doing the facepalming.
Instead of taking the trouble to craft a coherent argument, yeah, let’s just [facepalm]. (Though it helps that I imagine them moisturizing their hands on dog poo poo before facepalming or whatever).
I think you should do a checkup on your sarcasm detector?
rezaf
Slantz is a developer at the studio. So he has more info, but he’s not allowed to talk about it. In fact, talking about Popcap games in the past here at the forum has gotten him in trouble. So in this case, he actually is not allowed to make a coherent argument and instead just facepalm.
So, if I keep throwing out random combinations of features and F2P cost structures we can let him make more onomatopoeic sounds to indicate warmer/colder?
This might be fun. Maybe more fun for six weeks than the actual game will be after EA gets done with it. :-D
I think you have the right idea here.
Maybe this is “In Soviet rusia” version of PvZ where you plant Undead familiars ( grandparent, ex-girlfriend, and so on), and the zombies protect the house from The Invasion of the Trifids.. While EA pay you money for playing the game, that include a Bitcoins mining bot.
Great. Now, instead of sending MMO’s out to die in the marketplace because they assumed WoW-like success in their budgeting, we will see the big studios throwing assets at the FTP/OCD exploitation market.
There are only so many whales out there to harvest.
I’d say an educated guess, given EA’s track record with studio acquisitions. : P
So this is now out in New Zealand and Australia. Over on Pocket Tactics: Here’s how EA has rammed free-to-play into Plants vs Zombies 2
More details about the F2P model in the link. Highlights: some levels can only be unlocked by rare in-game drops, or naturally you can pay to unlock them immediately. And some plants are only available for purchase. Yeah, it’s as bad as we all thought it would be.
The main problem I have with this model is that EA can change it any time based on feedback / revenues.
Therefore $5 I spent today for “tower of awesome” might make me look like a total sucker if it goes “free” 3 weeks later.
Or I might deck myself out with “energy” and then EA drops the “demand” for energy massively in the next patch.
I want to play a friggin’ game and not worry about budget / money once I paid for the game.
That’s my issue too. Or as the PT article so nicely sums it up:
There’s a reason you don’t go hang around with salespeople when you want to relax.
Moreover, there’s no permanence to anything you buy. You’re constantly having to purchase a Tower of Awesome to get past the last wave of some world. Most of these look like temporary buffs and that they’ll be weighted into the game. They’ll be required to get past some levels.
Even the permanent items you can buy are only available if you pay reals money for them. $4+ for a Torchwood? Seriously?
Now I basically can’t let my kid play lest he be too tempted to buy all this crap…
EG seems to have a more positive take on the F2P implementation: How Plants vs. Zombies 2 works as a free-to-play game so far | Eurogamer.net
… It’s hard not to wonder what George Fan, the creator of the original game, would have done with a sequel, just as it’s almost inevitable when a beloved series goes free-to-play that you find yourself questioning things a bit more than usual - whether a certain level is now artificially difficult, or whether a power-up is a little too effective. When balancing in a free-to-play game goes wrong, as with Real Racing 3, there’s a definite sense that the developers are working to two masters. They’re trying to entertain you, the player, but they’re also trying to infuriate you towards buying the bits and pieces that will ultimately allow the game to be profitable. At its worst, this kind of thing can take the relationship between player and designer and make it rather oppositional.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 doesn’t feel like that at the moment. You could wish for a few more new ideas, perhaps, but New Zealand and Australia are currently enjoying an entertaining and generous sequel with a nice weighting to its economy. Hopefully it will still have all of that when it launches globally.
We’ll see. It doesn’t sound too bad… But I’m wondering which opinion I’ll feel closer to. Not that I have an iOS device to enjoy it at launch. So I’ll be relying on you guys to tell us more.
Wendelius
Last month I saw a PvZ slot machine in Vegas. On a five minute passby, i lost more money on it than i ever spent on the first game.
It’s funny how you associate a value with an item/service and you feel wonderfully pissed off if something steps out of line within that association. However, if you take a step back, a lot of lines are really really blurred.
For instance, we’d be outraged at a $2 tower of awesome that only lasted a month, yet perfectly satisfied with a $2 starbucks coffee that lasted 15 minutes…
And all that said, i still won’t ‘buy’ the new PVZ…probably.
I won’t mind buying permanent things like unlocks, but paying for more charges of the magic win spell? No, they can suck my butt.
I was searching around for release dates today, and while I didn’t find any for the english version, it seems the chinese have some pretty unfavorable impressions of the game:
“Everybody is equal. So why is this game then not equal?” Zheng asked. “Everyone can see the Chinese edition is a slave treatment system, like a leech sucking hard-earned cash.”
The english version isn’t out yet, so I’m not sure how these comments are being made. I hope the english version is not a slave treatment system - but since I’ve been playing a lot of puzzles and dragons, I may be ready if it is.
Nationalism meets DRM. They could destroy each other, and the world would be better for it. I say somebody warn higher officials about this, EA is giving worse treatment to China. Its like the opium war all again, but this time with videogames.