LOL

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 14:18 (4383 days ago) @ electricpirate

In a model driven primarily by micro-transactions, where you develop fewer titles, but ones that are better supported. You can't just sell a game on hype, you need to have players actually keep playing your game to make it work. For something like an online multiplayer game, or strategy game with lots of replayability, that's a great thing. There are issues to work through, you can slip into Pay 2 Win, or the game can become grindy and slow, but fundamentally, the economics reward developers for caring for their customers.

First of all, the money has to come from somewhere, so what you're advocating is essentially the hardcore players spending more than $60 to subsidize the casuals playing for free or cheap, and that's really really stupid. This is a leisure, luxury activity so we don't need to be spreading the wealth around so the casuals can play for free at (literally) our expense, thank you very much.

Second of all, how would you keep players playing? Certainly not by making a good game off the bat, since then people would just be playing your game and have reason to buy more shit. So, you either put in bullshit player investment systems, which I've already explained elsewhere why they always make a game worse, or you do what LoL does and keep releasing new heros and rebalancing shit so that you have to keep buying stuff to compete. Why bother learning the game deeply when Riot issues major balance patches what seems like every day?

Free to Play and Micro Transactions ruin games. Period.