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’d say it’s remarkably consistent how gamers will pick up on budget reductions and cost cutting in games. This isn’t the movies, we aren’t going to just spend 2 hours with a piece of media where some editing handwaving can get us to ignore or not even notice something. These are 40-120 hour games here, we’re going to notice when business stepped in to tell the creative folks to drop something.
Even Hogwarts, a game that I 100%'d, was obviously affected by that. The fucking Merlin Trials. Revelio? You can’t tell me there wasn’t some committee decision that was “We have this big open world, just throw those in every 100 feet or so to make it feel active”. The more corners are cut, the more gamers will notice. They can bank on that.
Yeah exactly. Also annoying things like “let’s change this concept that works by adding stuff that’s in fashion but doesn’t fit the game at all”. Like Battlefield 2042, the concept of Battlefield stayed relatively the same throughout years and releases and it just worked, but they just had to include heroes this time because hero shooters were popular. It doesn’t matter that it meant there were only doppelganger heroes running around instead of an actual army of soldiers.
I believe bullshit like this is exactly what made Suicide Squad such a let down.
This is implying HL was a good game, which it wasn’t. It was just a good looking game with a popular IP.
Still, your comment is mostly correct, but bad games can do well with luck or the right strategy, and sometimes good games fail because they don’t get the support they need.
Don’t be overdramatic. It’s a good game, certainly above average. Just because it’s not the game you expected it to be doesn’t make it terrible. This reminds me of the ridiculous hyperbole surrounding Cyberpunk 2077, that it was a terrible game, even “one of the worst games of all times”, because it wasn’t the second coming of Christ either, just a good RPG with teething issues.
No, it’s terrible. The combat is fine, and the Hogwarts section is alright, but everything else sucks. Doing the same thing dozens of times just because they didn’t have time or creativity to fill out the world sucks. The random loot system sucks.
I think the biggest thing (for a Hogwarts game) is how little they seem to care about the world it’s set it. Some of it seems like they care, but then they do things like having the groundskeeper tell you how to open locks and to break curfew (although there literally isn’t a curfew besides this mission). You go and break into people’s houses or into places you “aren’t allowed” only for literally no one to care or even notice. You can use dark magic, even in Hogwarts and on students, and no one cares. There’s so much that’s just hollow.
I really wanted to like the game. It’s a bad game though. It’s not just a game I don’t like. It’s a bad game. I could write so much more (and have), but I think what I’ve listed here is enough.
I’m a big fan of Indies as well and have been for far longer than the advent of the modern Indie game, but occasionally, I want to use that humongous RTX card for more than just machine learning and offline renders, indulge myself in the wasteful spectacle and grandeur of big AAA productions. Large open world games in particular are outstanding for virtual tourism. For all its faults, Hogwarts Legacy does provide this in spades.
The game itself clearly doesn’t, going by the character creator. Some of the money made from it does end up in the hands of a virulent transphobe though, that’s true.
“Good” and “bad” games are not something that the business wankers can see on a PowerPoint. They already ordered their devs to make a good game and that didn’t work. They know pay-to-win mobile trash makes money, so they’re ordering their devs to make that instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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