Free-to-played out
Cliff Bleszinski's next project is free-to-play. The lead designer of StarCraft's next project is free-to-play. Two of Blizzard's big new games are free-to-play. Obsidian (y'know, the RPG people) are making a free-to-play tank game. Every other paid subscription MMO is converting to free-to-play. You get the picture; game creators and executives are flocking to free-to-play like it's some kind of religious revival.
They're harder to pirate
Free-to-play games can be hacked, exploited, and linked to illegitimate servers, but it's a lot more difficult to pirate them to the same extent as paid-up-front games. Their marketplace subsistence means they're built to live online. They become as much of a service as they are a product, and it's a lot harder to steal cable than it is to pirate an episode of Game of Thrones.
You can't sell them to GameStop
Of course, all those developers that hedged their bets on consoles in part to avoid the specter of piracy ran into a new problem. Unlike PC games, which had used CD keys as a security standard for years, most console games could be played by anybody with the disc. Enter the online pass, season pass, and Xbox One's since-abandoned game-locking DRM schemes, each one the source of endless irritation.
Players are their content
The other players in a multiplayer game can often be classified as: a) assholes, b) racist assholes, c) racist sexist assholes, and d) so high right now. They feed the enemy team, shoot you in the back, spam the chat, play terrible music so loud it gets beamed into voice chat, and in general make you wish you were dead. They're not worth the pixels they take up on your screen except, they actually are.
They're easier to share
Back in the day, we had these things called "demos." It was short for "demonstration", but it was also fun to pretend it stood for "delineated moment" or maybe "definitive monster (battle)". They would come on discs inside magazines or slowly download to your computer from websites with "Planet" somewhere in the URL. Then you'd play for half an hour and try to extrapolate whether the rest of the game was worth a trip to the mall (probably in the sleet, it was always sleeting back then).
They're more accessible
But forget the whales. The free-to-play publishers would prefer we didn't, but forget them, too. Lowering the barrier to entry by eliminating up-front cost doesn't just mean more people can play, it means more kinds of people can play: the kind of people for whom $60 will keep them from paying rent this month; the people who can't justify buying a home computer but can put enough cash together for a few hours at an internet cafe here and there; the kind of people that our expensive hobby typically overlooks.
They can get in your head
Buying a $60 game is such a simple decision (we're living in a perfect little world with no DLC for the moment, just entertain the thought). You can do some research on the product, read some reviews, consider your prior history with the series or the developer. If you still want to buy the game after all that consideration, you can bring it home and feel confident about getting your money's worth.
