Nintendo are about the only big publisher I would spend money on nowadays outside of indies. The enshittification is ramping up too much everywhere else.
That’s what differentiates free games from free-to-play games. A free game gets you the entire experience for free. A FTP game gets you a barebones experience unless you spend money.
Big studios typically don’t release actual free games, obviously because there’s no money to be made that way.
There’s a spectrum among F2P games as well. There are games that are designed to coax the player into constantly spending increasing amounts of money by either inconveniencing them (wait times, slow or nonexistent progress) or by providing them with massive advantages against other players. Towards the softer side, there are titles that are solely selling cosmetic items - but they can be so incessant with it that people, especially kids, feel pressured into purchasing them, sometimes even out of peer pressure (see: Fortnite). Finally, the mildest kind are games that have a free mode that is little more than a demo, but you can make one-time purchases to permanently unlock more content, which isn’t too dissimilar to expansion packs of the olden days. Prime example for this: The Battle of Polytopia, a Civilization-lite. On mobile, you can permanently unlock more tribes and thus larger maps and multiplayer with very small one-time purchases.
To your point, Warframe is a full game with a F2P model that only offers cosmetics and in-game currency for purchase, the latter of which you can earn through grinding and selling items in the in-game market. It uses the aforementioned “wait times,” but they’re not overly lengthy, given the amount of things you can do while you wait.
So with some extra effort, you can get the paid experience, but you don’t miss out on any of the actual game by skipping that part of the grind either. Plus, in the end, even paid players can’t defeat the RNG gods.
While Warframe is a perfect example of a well done FTP model, you can buy a lot of stuff with real money in Warframe, it isn’t just cosmetics. But it has limited PVP and the community is fairly friendly, so it isn’t so much Pay-To-Win as it is Pay-To-Not-Work-Hard.
I hope all the big scummy game development companies fuck off and go ruin other things. Indie games are often the only half decent games these days anyway.
It’s insane that a company can miss the point by this much…
Just make a good product, do everything you can to avoid fleecing your player base, and they will come. Then you can add microtransactions that people can buy. You gotta earn that shit through merit of a good game.
There also isn’t any guarantee that a quality game will actually sell well, especially if the dev takes a risk and creates something new instead of releasing the 14th installment in a well-established series. It sucks but this is what it looks like when you have gigantic businesses steering video game development.
A company focusing on f2p and mobile. Haven’t we already been through this like around 10 years ago? I don’t recall that working out too well the last time.
gamespot.com
Aktywne