Article on NS2 and Free to play
YMICrazy
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165986Members
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165986Members
http://www.destructoid.com/natural-selection-team-on-the-pressure-to-go-free-to-play-245905.phtml
It is not implying they are going to do it. Still interesting in that there was pressure for them to do it. The next update will also influence their business model. I hope it gets the sales they are looking for.
There was also this on sales:
http://www.destructoid.com/natural-selection-ii-has-sold-well-over-200-000-copies-245895.phtml
It is not implying they are going to do it. Still interesting in that there was pressure for them to do it. The next update will also influence their business model. I hope it gets the sales they are looking for.
There was also this on sales:
http://www.destructoid.com/natural-selection-ii-has-sold-well-over-200-000-copies-245895.phtml
Comments
The only F2P game money cow I know is TF2 and that's no "game" anymore. You can buy and customize nearly everything, and you can sell it too. I don't play any other F2P games but they're generally kind of money demanding - when you really want to enjoy the game, you have to pay for everything (maps, goodies, and so on) or at least the pressure to buy and not to earn is really high.
I really want UWE to be successful with their way of work. I wish them to make money with NS2, I wish them to finalize their product so it's stable for everyone and they can be satisfied with their product and I wish them to be able - money and time wise - to move on to other projects when they feel to be done with NS2. I don't think NS2 will "die" when UWE moved on to other games and doesn't "service" the game anymore (with content updates and stuff like that) because there are so many community mods and maps and stuff already on the workshop and I think that this will continue until NS3 is released.
Is there any way to support community made maps, models, anything? The only good think about TF2 is that you can buy stamps for maps which support the mapper. Something like that would be awesome for NS2 and easy to do imo (webpage) with Flattr or any other "Donate" service.
One question: who is pressuring UWE to go F2P? The article says "everyone" so I'm just wondering who exactly.
TL;DR: uwe fanboy wants them to be successful with NS2 as it is and asks for a way to support community made content
I would drop a few bucks on customization options in NS2 so long as they were purely cosmetic to support the developers...If they started charging for new weapons or gear (or worse, Maps & abilities) I'd have to find a new game to get hooked on, it's a disgusting business practice to milk as much as you can from the fans of your game.
Tripwire Interactive's 'Killing Floor' had a model of releasing new player models as DLC which has allowed them to continue supporting that game to the present day and it doesn't alienate those who can't afford or don't wish to purchase those DLC's.
http://seagaia.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/anodyne-pirate-bay-promo-post-mortem/
You would need to see their conversion ratio to know if they actually got it right.
Remember, the point isn't to make a completely fair gaming experience for everyone, its to make money. If their F2P model isn't generating respectable income from those players who didn't pay to play, then it isn't working.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/01/top-tf2-item-makers-making-500k-a-year-we-cannot-compete-with-our-customers/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0
Secondly, I was actually talking about it from the perspective of the consumer (gamers). They're not forced to pay for anything to get ahead in the game as they can gain most items through play and they're side-grades opposed to upgrades. Anything they can't acquire without paying is purely cosmetic or records your stats with that weapon.
You could argue TF2 is the same, however, it was P2P for a number of years before it switched to F2P whereas Tribes is relatively young
I might be way off the mark with this opinion though, as I only played a few hours of Tribes: Ascend and it wasn't for me so i've not kept up to date with news regarding it
I played tribes ascend during the first few days of its release. The purchasable weapons were vastly superior to the default ones (and I mean vastly), while unlocking the same weapon would typically take up to a week or two. If you wanted to fully kit out a class with every superior upgrade, it would take ages.
Pay to win.
This happened with TF2 and it blows over pretty fast. Heroes of Newerth (DotA clone) also transitioned from one-time buy to a F2P model with cosmetics and I don't think it's adversely affected them that much.
I still don't see Tribes becoming massively popular. If people like your game, they will pay. If you have F2P it simply gives an opportunity for addicts to pay you a boat load more and offset the freeloaders, and lets the freeloaders to advertise for you. Going F2P might help boost some games but the increase will be proportional to the original player count.
The way NS2 is built, it gets really really awkward. The game is built both around the visual ability to see the target to track them efficiently and also built around the consistent visuals of a scifi alien game. Any kind of itemization gets least to say tricky with the RTS model.
UWE seems to also talk about NS2 as an esport, but they really need to stand up big time on that section if they're to have long term benefit out of it.
I think the map packs and maybe a bigger expansion pack are the way to go for NS2.
The decision was made because a lot of people just wanted to experience the full game without having to grind for hundreds of hours or paying the rediculous accumulated price for every single item in the shop. Hirez already slashed the xp requirements in half for all the weapon unlocks, and redesigned the way upgrades are unlocked as well. Now they basically just said:"If you want it all, you can get it all, for a reasonable price." And those who spent money before get a discount for the complete package. Which makes them awesome. And Tribes:A used to be one of the most grindy F2P games out there.
Anyway, this is really how all F2P games should be imo. You hand it out for free, so you can immidiately introduce it to a large audience. You show them what more is in store for them by letting them unlock new stuff over time. When they like it, you'll make sure they can buy the entire game at a normal price, while still offering the standard in game shop for people who only want to pay for certain items.
I won't dispute the reason for the change to a payment option, as i said, my knowledge is pretty limited on it, so I'll take your word for it.
I also agree that it's a reasonable way of doing it, however, F2P players are still at a disadvantage and not getting the same experience as those who pay to play (maybe that's fair), whereas in TF2, the experience is largely equal regardless of how much or little you pay. It's unavoidable in a game with reward unlocks that grant upgrades over default weapons...A double edge sword. People like to be rewarded for playing but they don't like having to grind in order to be competitive.
My only major issue is the timing behind the decision. The game hasn't been around long enough to justify it to existing customers imo, but if it had been the case from the start it'd have been great. It's also worth pointing out, that cosmetics arn't included in the purchase price... so it's really not massively very different from TF2 in it's current form, just all weapons are unlocked (unlike TF2) but this is far more important in Tribes given that most are upgrades over defaults.
Being able to purchase all items in a F2P game is good for the customer and bad for the business. The whole idea of F2P is to have the carrot on the stick and offset your loss from free players by repeatedly selling items to the ones who will pay.
I still think the biggest element is how good the game is. IMO Tribes just isn't that good, so even if it was completely free I doubt you would see many more people playing it. They probably have more players now than a few weeks ago mostly due to the advertising they got from the announcement that they changed something, not because everyone was waiting to use all the new guns.
Nah, I disagree here. Player A buys all items in F2P game, and plays for free from that point onward. Is it bad for business? Well considering that he probably paid the amount of money that would bought him probably like 4-5 copies of the game if it followed an ordinary sale model and that he almost certainly wouldn't buy 4-5 copies of the game in that case...Not really.
And you can always just create some new items, and not only will Player A give you more money, he will probably be ecstatic to do so.
F2P is becoming dominant model for primarily multi-player games for a reason. It allows players to sink more money into the game than they would if they simply had to buy a copy to play it, sometimes by order of magnitude. That more than counter-acts all the other players who play (or try to play) for free, or spend only small amount of money.
What I don't understand is the kickstarter mentality I read in http://www.destructoid.com/natural-selection-ii-has-sold-well-over-200-000-copies-245895.phtml "We will support new platforms if we sell $number copies." That does not make sense. You want to support more platforms to increase sales. Not the other way round.
Yes, but as an independent developer, they don't have the money or resources to target multiple platforms. It's expensive, and in the case of consoles would require major changes to the code just to get it to run (and i'm not convinced it'd ever work well with a controller). Sales bring in the money to fund development on other platforms as well as give an indicator of how successful it'd be.
As far as i know, Natural Selection 2 wasn't funded by kickstarter, so i've no idea where that comment came from.
TF2/Dota2 is perfectly fine, nothing that actually impacts the game, the "best" weapons in TF2 are acquired by achievements, random drops or it's the stock weapon for x class, not to mention you can also craft every weapon in the game, in dota2 there are only cosmetic stuff.
LoL's ftp model is really abusive, you need to buy heroes (that, in itself, is ridiculous) and they cost about $10 each, it takes a lot of games (like 25-50) to buy the most expensive ones with the game's currency.
Anything weapon related would unbalance it. Cosmetics would be a bit silly. You want your skulks to have hair styles? I'd like a ridgeback skulk in that case.
I think it works in TF2 because all weapons are more side grades than upgrades. There are few that are a 100% upgrade over the stock weapon. Even then, the weapons can be crafted, unlocked, random drops, traded before they need to be bought.
From what I heard about Tribes ascend, the pattern was release new OP weapon for $, a whole pile of people buy it, weapon removed from competitive matches due to being OP, weapon unbalances matches too much. Said weapon is then hit with nerf bat. Then along comes a new weapon, rinse repeat... Stuff that, I really hate games that either get you to grind or pay to unlock better stuff. I'll only ever pay for games where the players are on an equal field.
For instance, marines only get to tech up to w1/a1, no prototype lab, arc limit, no AA. Kharaa only get up to lerks and 2 hive tech. Free full experience weekend once a month.
That would be like inviting people to try out chess, but without rooks and queens and on a five-by-five board. It wouldn't be the same game at all, playing it wouldn't give you any idea what the full game is like, it wouldn't be any fun, and it wouldn't tempt you to buy the full version.
That's a good idea, though.
I agree with this and would gladly buy a Black Armor DLC for a few bucks to support the developers.
I'm annoyed with the new edition that unlocks everything not because I feel betrayed that new players will get things for less money (games get cheaper over time after all), but because I've been having so much fun unlocking things. The new edition is too cheap not to buy, but I think it's less fun to receive everything in one big lump like this.
Event with boosters and VIP bonus the game was still a massive grind, especially once they transitioned to their loadout system and scrapped the previous tech-tree-like unlocking. That was the point where the game just got massively grindy. Before that, you had a somewhat fair cash-to-gold ratio and would get VIP and early access and so on, but after that update did it feel like your gold and boosters were barely worth anything anymore. It took them ages to implement a system where you would get randomly up to 75% off an individual item once every 24 hours and only with those 75% would the prices seem somewhat fair for your gold - but tough luck if you spent your money earlier already.
In the end they reduced the XP prices again or introduced the system that you level your weapons as you play with them, not by investing your hard-earned XP into damn expensive upgrades for weapons, perks, armor, new classes and loadout slots. Of course you didn't get any XP refunds for everything that you invested already.
It's fair to say that Tribes made so many changes to it's business model over the course of it's life already that their initial customers are so massively screwed over compared to anyone who joins the game now that you can hardly believe it. I have probably played the game for hundred hours without ever getting close to any new equipment that would add variety to gameplay, because the new OP stuff was of course massively overpriced and implied a grind of several weeks for one piece of equipment. I have probably about 400 hours logged since the start of the beta, invested $40-60 into the game already and still only have about 70% of all available equipment unlocked. And now they tell me I could easily get all without grinding for 15 bucks?!
They even abandoned their game for quite a while and the population was dying. This GOTY edition is part of their effort over the last two months to get it back to life again. They literally changed their entire community management once they realized that people were jumping off the sinking ship already (fearing that it might suffer the same fate as Global Agenda) and that Smite could not bring them the financial salvation either. They barely talked to their community at all after the end of the beta - now they made a total 180 turn and keep the forum updated on a daily base with new exciting features and take every feedback they can get.
The case that always stuck out in my mind was that scout class, cant remember its name but knowing their originality, it was probably just the scout. Its starting weapon is some crappy pistol that does no damage but is hit scan at least. I thought that that made good sense. It was meant to be a fast class that did more running than shooting. Then you can buy the jackal (notice how I can't remember much about the game, but I remember this retarded gun's name). God that thing was more powerful than almost any other weapon in the game, and required a ton of XP to unlock, but all the people who just bought it straight up had fun capping flags at light speed and instantly destroying anyone that came near them.
Pay to win.