| Title | Sony and Microsoft 'going heavily' into free-to-play and in-app DLC |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | May 9, 2013 |
Good news everybody! Epic's Mark Rein told the audience of a roundtable discussion at the Game Horizon conference that Sony and Microsoft are investing in the kinds of gaming business models that core gamers rail against..
Read the full articleIn-game purchases have their place, and I'm even okay with F2P games that eventually require paying up.
But if I have to pay you to make your game less annoying, then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with your game design.
Makes total sense. You either adapt to a changing market or you die. Of course this does not mean that traditional games with traditional payment models will be going anywhere. We will still have the traditional $60 boxed products.
This makes sense for ipads and whatnot, but for consoles / PCs, they are heavily missing the point. Console gaming will die with this. PC gaming will only survive due to the insane amount of creative work being done by indie developers.
As console development turns its greedy eye towards IAP and FtP games (presumably requiring either credit card information or larger balances of points to be stored), will they also put any kind of care into security for consumer accounts? Nothing they have done yet would lead me to think so.
Yeah, what else is new?
Here's to DLC piracy.
oh well, we had fun for decades. these new models care more about ripping people off than they do about making good games.
I've already kind of lost interest in consoles just on their own merits - there just isn't that much I'm missing anymore by sticking to PC - and I was already feeling like it wasn't likely I'd bother to buy into the next console generation. But the more I hear about upcoming consoles, the more solid and intentional that decision becomes for me.
I barely play AAA big budget games anymore (the Total Wars and Bethesda's epic RPGs aside), spending WAY more time on indies and niche titles but it's seriously over-estimating consumers to think that F2P won't fly everywhere. It works on iPad, it works on PC (spectacularly in some cases - LoL), it just works because most people are fine with it.
And consoles today aren't what consoles were ten years ago.Then they were to play games, either alone or brushing elbows with a friend. Now the console is an even more commoditized PC than the PC is. For years the most-played game on PC was Solitaire. Hands down. Solitaire. Probably still is, or whatever the variant is called these days. Virtually everyone is a potential casual gamer and that's the market consoles are now after.
I'm glad that these days I'm mainly playing Gnomoria or Don't Starve or whatever little Indie art project catches my attention for half an hour.
I will miss the Elder Scrolls games if they go this way though.