Money matters a lot to the kids that don’t have jobs and parents wont buy them a £20 game.
Or the people who have friends that play that don’t want to spend an outlay to try a game.
Or they see a game that 6 friends can play together, this is now a no cost rather than £120 for your little stack to get involved.
F2P opens all these up and many more scenarios. Plus you get the press coverage of “ooo look our game is now F2P” and it turns heads.
yeah and i bet they don’t have consoles or pc’s too.
these people don’t stick around because they chose not to play the game in the first place.
oh great a free game = no money to blizzard.
like really, f2p just conveys to me the desperation and bad faith in it.
“we can’t make people even buy our game, despite running free weekends and making it really cheap so has to resort to going free”
it’s like selling disgusting food on sale because they can’t get rid of it before it rots otherwise but even worse, it’s come one or come all, it’s a free buffét.
you have to see where i’m going with this right?
like cutting costs isn’t something people should be worried about if they have a good product.
F2P never means no money to the devs. It usually means more money.
For every player that just downloads and plays for free, there will be hundreds that spend random amounts of different pieces of nonsense.
You can sell XP boost, skins, emotes, sprays, extra skin customisation options. Sell “battle pass” style events that unlock a whole bunch of times based on number of games you win. It is technically endless.
I understand people won’t like change. And some will actively stop playing because of it. But companies won’t make this decision with out research and focus groups and so on. They will have the analytics that will tell them the chances of hitting the targets they’ve set are far higher going F2P so it is happening.
I think what F2P conveys to you is fine. But it shows that maybe the understanding of the economics of the industry isn’t great.
In 2018 F2P games made around $88billion. The whole gaming market was around $110billion. So F2P games account for around 80% of the money the industry makes.
61% of that 110 is from mobile though.
But looking at PC only…
So F2P makes more than double the money on PC that “traditional” games make.
(console is a different story, but the idea of digital gaming on console has only been a relatively new idea. Physical still rules, for now)
Is it the future? Personally I think it is in the short term (till someone comes up with the next money spinner). And that is why companies want to jump on it, got to milk that cow while you can.
first off f2p was first created as a way to extort money out of people and basically make people into suckers.
looking at all the f2p pay to win games, now they are doing it because it made a lot of money through it.
but the thing is.
there’s a huge divide between a game that lives off of “whales” basically people that spend over 1000$ on it or even possibly more, and why they are spending that much money.
so instead of charging each and every person a small amount, there’s only a land of whales they are after who they have to appeal to which makes it a lot more risky and prone to disaster because if they don’t appeal to those people they are not gonna get these insane amounts of money they were banking on.
idk if you know how candy crush makes their money but basically they let you play for free but there’s a stop where you have to put in money if you want to continue playing past a point and after you’ve become addicted they are basically making money off of you.
it’s honestly as disgusting as arcade games back in the day where they were specifically made to force more quarters out of you because they made the game too hard to beat without basically throwing money at it.
so yeah that tradition comes from a very dishonest and disgusting place.
and activision is known for this, so yeah…
i’m not surprised, just worried about the future of overwatch and blizzard games.
You are against F2P because you seem to think that means pay to win. That isn’t the case for OW as there are no mechanic in the game to even enable that. So pay to win can’t be a thing.
And you are right, it was made to make more money (extort would be implying they are using unfair means, which they are not). And it works. So more companies will do it.
After all… They are a publicly traded business… Revenue is objective number 1.
When it goes F2P, no one is making you pay extra. If you want something, you pay for it. If you have moral obligations, don’t buy the skins. No one is making you do anything.
I wouldn’t be worried for their future. They have had record profits for the last 2 years, and this will probably increase that. And given the plans for future games, content and media, I doubt they will be having any issues.
(that being said, if it goes pay to win, I will instantly uninstall. but it won’t as the game just doesn’t work that way).
i’m more so afraid for other people that are exploitable that don’t know how to handle money.
or people that blizzard has to appease that are willing to give them the most amount of money.
it’s gonna be basically like americas democracy, bought by special interest groups.
“Marks” have always been targeted. Be it circus performance, wrestling show, TV adverts or clever in store labelling.
It i very much doubt they will have so much content you’ll bankrupt anyone one who’s dumb enough to go buy it all.
while it’s not uncommon to favour different focus groups,
but that’s not what this is unless you qualify “money” as a focus group.
and you might doubt the foolhardy, but there is things that are completely unnecessary that you can buy wether it be in-game or out of game.
for example Wow has subscription but they have an in-game storefront with about 17 mounts and each mount costs 25$ and probably have other stuff aswell.
and i mean if you look at the brand at large there’s clothes, statues, funkopops and much much more.
still, that’s not what worries me, it’s these whales they are trying to get, what that means is that they’ll try and appease them very aggressively, and balance changes might happen for it or something equally as insane.
Everyone please leave this game
Blizzard just don’t care about it.
The rank game is only decided by luck.
You queued 10-15 mins into a gold game, and wiped by master genji smurf in 10-15 mins, you wasted 25-30 minutes in your life.
If the enemy team has smurf, you lost
If the enemy team has a smurf better than your team smurf, you lost.
If your team has a t500 smurf, this game is boring because you wont be able to contribute anything for the victory.
JUST LEAVE THIS GAME, DONT WASTE YOUR TIME.
I am confused. Your most played hero this season is Ana and you have a 77% win rate. Not sure these external factors are costing you that much.
The number of smurfs I come across is absolutely disgusting; more-so how Blizzard are clearly happy enough they exist as they get to double or in some cases triple dip on customer purchases. All it’s doing is ruining the game for 90% of the player-base who aren’t masters at the game.
Then Blizzard wonders why so many people are unhappy with competitive… No hard MMR/SR resets every season, no hero banning for competitive, smurf accounts allowed and healthy.
Honestly competitive is one massive joke, besides implementing role queue (which was a great move), they’ve done absolutely nothing to address these cancerous issues eating away at the already pretty small player-base.
Hard MMR/SR resets would just cause more chaos… you wouldn’t get a few Diamonds on alt accounts in plat/gold… or the less like case of actual smurf accounts…
You would just have weeks of randomly matched games. And it would be awful.
As for comp being a “massive joke” that is an opinion.
Most issues players have are in their own heads.
Coming from the smurf himself <3
Yeah. Because playing the game normally is smurfing… lol
Like I said, the issue is in your head, where I live rent free.
Why do you have problem with so called smurfs?
If people wanna have more than 1 account then let them.
For starters it’s very sad. There’s literally no need to get another account. People do it to delete all the hours they’ve played on their previous account, and climb to make themselves look like they’re pros.
No one in your games looks like a pro lol.
Again, it is a scenario you’ve made up in your head.
Wasn’t talking to you, ohhh were you triggered? Cute
Lol. I am just here to laugh.
Your way of looking at the game, and probably life in general, is hilarious.
Awww little Nightwing is triggered. Coming from the guy pretending to be someone else, cutie. xx