SO RIGHT. League of Legends, Tribes: Ascend, Super Monday Night Combat, Lord of the Rings Online, Team Fortress 2, and Heroes of Newerth aren't awesome games at all. AT ALL. No, sir. Not a bit. It absolutely sucks that I get to play whatever I want, whenever I want, at no charge. The people I hear who are against F2P seem to have just been scarred by the hypermonetized version of F2P of 2009. The F2P business of 2012 boasts incredible quality, and unintrusive stores. The bottomline is that it's a great model for online competitive games like TF2 and MMOs. No one is suggesting it take over the whole business and infiltrate Single-Player games. High priced AAA games push the medium forward, very true. But not nearly as much as an industry that is flourishes with multiple business models.

I've played all of those games, they're awesome. But don't act like they're the not the minority. Even the F2P system of 2011 and 2012 is full of issues. There are some great F2P games, sure, but there are also plenty released that are full of problems that can be blamed entirely on the F2P system it employs.

Go look at the shelves at GameStop sometime and tell me the games you'd be willing to pay full price for aren't the minority. When I look at those shelves I see *at best* 1% of games I'd be willing to pay $60 for. The problem with those games isn't that they are meritless. It's that they're not worth full price. Is that a flaw in the monetization of console games? Poor-quality games are a flaw in the $60 standard, but we don't call for the downfall of that business model because of it. Of course, there are terrible F2P games that try to abuse the system. Which of them are popular? I can't think of one. The F2P system relies on word-of-mouth. If anything, those F2P games are easily identifiable before the consumer pays out any money. With full price console games that's much more difficult.

I'm not saying that F2P is bad, I'm just saying that it can be, if done poorly, and that there are more examples of it being done poorly than it being done well. Not all are successful (though some are), but it's a shame when a cool idea is outright ruined by the F2P system.

I can count 3 games I have payed $60 for, the rest were much less, and were all high quality... I think that point is moot.

Every system needs time to sort itself out and decide where it eventually wants to go, even if it takes more than a few years. The games industry itself needed a considerable amount of time when it first started, from the Oddyssey, Atari, Colecovision, etc., til the NES came around.. Also, arcades have been a monetized system since it began, charging people endless quarters to keep the experience going. Several cabinets where simply designed to be brutally difficult just to empty your pockets. Hasn't changed drastically, but eventually got itself mostly worked out. It's not impossible to think that over time the F2P market will become something better that will sit comfortably side-by-side with the traditional model.

While decent games, you do have to admit that some of them (League, Tribes, SMNC) REALLY make it hard to not spend and succeed. Especially in League's case - If you are going to play your role in the stagnant meta, you have to spend X many hours grinding for runes, more than $100 on champions and rune-pages, ect. (I know, I played it until Dota came around.) Tribes does a similar thing for character classes, which is pretty painful. SMNC is the one I hardly touched after the first few rounds - The predecessor was so much better in almost every way. Charging for classes? That's nearly obscene. Skins and taunts and such are great ways to make money, but charging for CORE parts of gameplay? No sir, you can keep those over there away from me.

This. This all the way, especially with your comment about SMNC. SMNC was so full of promise, but they ruined it with the F2P system.

Everyone knows LoL is P2W, if you go look online for the calculations on the game it shows that the metagame is designed in such a way that it would take realistically days to improve it for free.

Free-to-play games, if allowed to continue, will destroy everything good in gaming. If games are to ever develop and become respected as an art form, we cannot allow developers to sacrifice their works on the altar of monetization. I agree with everything Cooper said.

I like the idea of the article, definitely interesting. I agree and disagree with both of you. I'm going to try and keep it short and simple. The idea behind any free to play game is idealistic (and that sucks to say). High quality--->low price just doesn't exist (in most cases). Personally, I can't think of one Free to play game that has held my interest longer than a week, DC universe included. As much as we like to argue it, the amount of money and work that goes into the game reflects in the final product (obviously the amount that goes into the game must be received through the consumers). I see free to play only encompassing a few genres... And those genres don't really apply to me, just like they don't apply to many others. I dunno, in the end, I see the whole free to play idea as a "make due with what we can" idea... It sucks, sure. But it is, what it is. As more money goes into producing quality loved games, more money will be asked to buy said games. Now, as technology progresses, maybe the quality of Free to play games will increase, but until then, it is only an ideal... And even then, the free to play games will fall behind the newly developed titles. Not an easy debate haha

I love LoL as much as the next guy but I consider it a very rare exception to the rule. I think F2P is a curse and I hope it doesn't overtake the industry. Plus, I really like my single player games (not that I buy them for $60 on launch day as mentioned in the article but a year or two later for much less justifies the 10 hour experience.) And F2P doesn't fit into that framework.

It's not really an exception -- Tribes: Ascend, Super Monday Night Combat, Lord of the Rings Online, Team Fortress 2, Firefall and Heroes of Newerth.

I, personally, think that the best F2P system isn't starting as F2P at all. HoN, LOTRO, and TF2 all began as paid products and then transitioned to F2P, and I think that's the best of both worlds.