If you are like me and almost everyone else here you would rather pay to play a premium title with a retail price. The huge problem is we are the problem. We want to only pay $1-5 for a game when the dev could easily make the game f2p and get so much more revenue from the game. If the developer charged $15-20 then to make it a premium game to make money most would complain it's too much so why would the developer want to sell for $3 when it could just make f2p and get more downloads and more revenue. The average mobile gamer that plays games plays titles like clash of clans and candy crush. They always end up spending a couple dollars a day at the least just to play for ten minutes. Could you imagine if clash of the clans was a premium title... It would have been dead along time ago with no one playing it. There is an addictive model in f2p with buying items , game time , ect. I just don't know what it is.
There is something premium game should take from freemium- A donation button ( like the flow of IAP )for updates every major iOS revision
Surely Jay you been around long enough to remember the RACE for the bottom when premium games was all the range, people knew if they wanted long enough the premium price game would either go on sell a lot cheaper then when its launched in sometimes little then under a week or go free altogether which then piss off those that went and brought it to start with.
Hardcore gamers are a special breed of people. Most would not bother with F2P games at all. Different market, different target groups.
Ahh, I like this. I don't like the F2P model, but I accept that not only is it not going away, it will be the backbone of the gaming market from now on, and only grow. The hope for those who prefer the premium games is that they can form enough of a market to make it worthwhile to cater for them. A strong core of players who grew up in the premium era - and developers - should be able to maintain an interesting minority market for a while yet, especially if mobile can keep piggybacking off steam. Within a generation though, I suspect, everyone will be inured to F2P and expect nothing else.
You are probably right. However, I feel there's always gonna have place for premium games, even as a niche. The problem is that dev costs skyrocket. So, in that case, the scope of premium games is going to be reduced, probably.
Once today's children grow up, I think you will see freemium the norm on all platforms, not just mobile. Unlike most of us (children of the 80's and 90's), this generation is being raised on mobile freemium games. It's normal and acceptable to them, and I expect we will see freemium creep into console/PC more as the skyrocketing costs of AAA development become unsustainable outside of the biggest publishers/console manufacturers.
I said I think this will be the norm on all platforms in 10-20 years for several reasons. 1.) Today's children are growing up with freemium being the norm and acceptable. Moving outside of the bubble that gamer communities like TA, Neogaf, Reddit and others shows that freemium isn't hated as much as we like to believe. That only gets worse as the kids who grew up with this stuff become adults. 2.) The costs of AAA development on console has to reach a breaking point soon. Now, you need 5+ million in sales just to break even. That's why you see DLC, Season passes and moves towards games as service on console. Just getting $60 up front one time isn't enough anymore. 3.) Freemium is going to provide another option for games as service, which I think most big publishers are moving towards. The days of one up front purchase are numbered.
Well, this a pretty depressing prediction. For the sake of my future self as a gamer I hope it never comes true lol.
That's the thing... I don't think premium ever stood a chance, as the majority of gamers do appear to be of the casual lot. They have little to no interest in AAA titles, or even going into "real games" for console/PC. Dev studios just want to get a piece of that enormous pie is all. Priorities have shifted. AFAIK, it's why the Wii did so well... it got people who weren't into video games into video games, which says alot there.
what I don't understand is why people are unwilling to pay more then two bucks for a premium game. You don't see people griping about buying the newest titles for PC or console. I also don't get why people think two bucks is too much for a full game but turn around and throw hundreds into micro transactions. I don't play f2p with the exception of a few ad supported games like Crossy road the day premium dies is the day I give up mobile gaming altogether
I think the biggest issue is that "hardcore" gamers as a whole despise mobile. Go read Neogaf and you'll find that 99% of that audience hates this platform. Mobile needed that audience for premium games to stand a chance. Now with f2p taking over, hardcore gamers have more of a reason to hate mobile, so the cycle continues. Hardcore gamers refuse to support mobile and the rest of the mobile gaming audience are casual who aren't willing to spend more than a buck or two up front, if anything at all.
One of the most attractive aspects of gaming is the idea of being INSIDE a story. It makes the things that happen to your character just that bit more intense than if you were just watching a film. No horror movies feel as scary as a bout of Silent Hill with the lights off. For a second when your character dies, you feel like it was you! You're dead for a split second. And a game like Transistor might seem kinda odd and disjointed as a book, but you become uniquely invested in the relationship between Red and her living sword when the way you control her could see them separated forever (well, until you load your last save). The very mechanics of F2P just don't work for this form of game storytelling. If the developers fund such games with advert systems, paywalls, or grinding, it throws the pacing completely out of whack. You're suddenly wrenched from the game to watch some car advert, or to spend three hours scouring the game-world for those elusive golden skulls, so you can reach the next scene. For a lot of types of games, F2P can work fine, but it does seem that it may be a sign of the death-knell for one of gaming's best features: being the main character in a world of endless possibilities.
It's going to happen way faster than 10-20 years. I've already heard of several large console publishers in very serious talks about adapting the game as a service strategy in a more serious manner. When you look at a game like Madden, what's the point of selling a $60 disc every year when people are more than happy to buy loads of Ultimate Team coins? You eventually reach a point where that $60 up-front price for the disc itself is irrelevant, particularly when you can drive engagement with all sorts of events that keep people coming back more and more. When you can sell Destiny expansions seemingly infinitely, why bother getting $60 from someone to get them hooked? The cost of the disc itself largely still exists exclusively due to retail channels. Effectively, when the giant publishers of the world don't care about Game Stop anymore, console games will be going free to play in a big way. Plans are already in motion, this isn't some kind of "what if" scenario anymore. Free to play makes more money while making your games more accessible, it's a win/win for everyone outside of tiny niche bubbles on the internet who have already proven themselves to be increasingly irrelevant as gaming becomes more mainstream. I'm really looking forward to this, as it's going to save me a ton of money.
I wouldn't write off the fringes so easily. Time was a tiny group of beatniks who hated the square, sanitized world of the '50s were calling things they liked "cool", and now most of us drop that word several times a day. The counter-culture has a way of slowly imparting its personality on the future in a way the flash-in-the-pans of the present never can. There's a difference between just playing a game and getting lost in one. The people who do the latter find themselves returning a slightly different person. Even if only a small number of people find themselves drawn to deep, story-driven games, they'll remember those experiences for a long time to come, and they won't keep silent about them. Relevance isn't something solely propelled by numbers.
I'm not saying all console games will be free to play, there will obviously always be pay-once experiences just like we have here on mobile. The fact remains, there's a ton of games that we're currently buying year after year for $60 a pop that'd simply make more sense reframed as a free to play title that's maintained as a game as a service type setup.
I'm not surprised by your excitement. A subscription based world is the ultimate corporate goal. Owning anything is out now. Apple doesn't want to sell songs anymore, they want you tethered to the Apple Music milking machine. Notice the subtle shift in language on the App Store, it's no longer 'buy', it's 'pay once'. Same with cable tv and other subscription services of dubious value. You pay for the privilege of having a glut of crap you don't really need or want. I'm not big on paying for things I might use because, most often, the cost/benefit ratio is skewed in their favor. Also, I have to say the "We grew up with it, so we're fine with F2P" sentiment is pretty gross. I can imagine kids in the future saying "We grew up without trees, so no biggie". Finally, this: it's a win/win for everyone outside of tiny niche bubbles on the internet who have already proven themselves to be increasingly irrelevant as gaming becomes more mainstream, is bullsh*t. I've noticed whenever site owners or admins don't like the majority message of their posters, they denigrate them as an irrelevant "vocal fringe". Insulting and false.
