Displaying items by tag: Free to Play

The term “free to play” has often been parodied as “free to pay” by gamers that feel this new system of timers and locks is something that is just not a good business model. Fortunately it is not a model that has managed to spread through the entire market, but is one that is certainly entrenched in the mobile one. A recent ruling in the UK over EA’s advertisement of the Dungeon Keeper game for iOS and Android might be the start of a new look at this often misleading label.

Titanfall developer, Respawn is apparently looking into the world of mobile gaming and… *Gasp* Free to Play. This new information was dropped on us during an interview with Respawn COO Dusty Welch shortly after they announced Stig Asmussen was coming onboard. According to Welch Asmussen will not only be working on the future of Titanfall, but also working on where the company will be heading.

Valve's Dota 2 documentary Free to Play has finally appeared on Steam. The premiere was held in San Francisco, and was followed by a live broadcast via Twitch TV service. Free to Play follows three professional Dota 2 players, Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, Benedict "HyHy" Lim and Clinton "Fear" Loomis, their preparation, and finally participation in the first iteration of the now famous tournament The International.

While the bigger part, or rather all, of MMORPG developers eventually move to free-to-play business model, Blizzard with World of Warcraft obviously does not want to move in this direction yet.

The transition to the free-to-play payment model proved to be a big hit for the MMORPG TERA. Specifically Gameforge, under whose auspices is TERA in Europe, has discovered that they had recently had to open six new servers due to a sudden increase in the number of players. Specifically, after TERA’s transition to free-to-play they recorded more than half a million of new active players. Altogether there are more than a million new accounts.

Cevat Yerli from Crytek, in a recent interview, revealed that they intend to fully switch to free-to-play titles. Yerli is hoping that Crytek will begin to rely on the free-to-play billing model in two to five years. [This is something that many companies are considering to create a more stable revenue stream – Ed]

Large developers like Crytek and CCP believe that Sony's support for free-to-play games will ultimately lead to the PlayStation's comeback to the top of the console market. Sony has recently released a free version of SingStar, in which users pay only music and the PS3 will soon have the first big Free2Play (f2p) title from CCP - Dust 514th. “If Sony embraces free-to-play as a major way for PlayStation, that could be the key console” Crytek's Cevat Yerli said. Crytek has also seriously dedicated themselves to the free-to-play model, and are currently working on an interesting FPS named Warface.

So Madfinger games is claiming that piracy is behind a move to drop the price of a $.99 game to zero. For some reason this claim just does not make sense. It is a well-known trend that low cost games are rarely pirated in fact the biggest reason that games a pirated is due to the cost of the game so we are having a hard time believing that a $0.99 game is being pirated in large amounts. I would believe it if they said that something like Shadowrun was being pirated as it is a $4.99 game on both the iPad and Android. So, if piracy is not the cause then what is?

Today was an interesting day in gaming. Considering that it is a Saturday in the US (May 19^th 2012) which is normally not a big new day we found some of the information interesting to say the least. One of the first is a bit of news from Microsoft. Here the title in question is Halo 4, the next episode with the now famous “Master Chief” in a new “trilogy” of Halo games. The new was an interesting counter to the claim that the November 2012 launch date for Halo 4 was going to signal the launch of a new XboX.