Topic: What do you make of the free to play mobile games coming to switch becoming paid games?

@NEStalgia can you honestly see f2p going away though? Sadly they make more money this way which it’s why it’s such a dominant method in the mobile industry. Honestly I can see it seeping into every console eventually in one form or another, personally I’m ok with it to the extent that it’s fair and not whale oriented.

@Deathwalka F2P won't be going away explicitly, at least not soon, though I can see the lootbox type mechanic being victim to its success and fading. F2P, though.... It's probably unfair to say they make more money that way. The model works largely where the game itself cost very little money to make, but achieves a VERY large player base from which to skim small funds of many people over a long period of time, while driving most of the monetization from the whales. This is how video poker works, as well (one of THE most addictive gambling contraptions ever made.) A "Skinner box", both.

A few leaders with the largest install bases come away with substantial money. The losers vanish. But it's all a different market. The big monetizers (EA etc.) are certainly looking at how to move that model to console, but they're also working on moving the gameplay constructs to console. As such they've mostly abandoned conventional games and have moved to games that mostly mimic the mobile game loop and lifespan, only prettier, to achieve it, and are willing to defect spend to put that long term iterative release cycle to work over the long term to turn the costs to all profit with little cost over years. But that model really only works with online games, particularly MMO-esque games. But MMO has always had an attached service fee, so that replaces a pure subscription with continued transactions. For detached games, that large investment can be caught up more quickly by a smaller but more high margin market via retail pricing without having to wait for it to bear fruit over years. Fortunately the two markets really aren't all that interchangeable. It just seems more visible as EA hasn't just moved their payment model but their entire game content model to mimic mobile more, and works easily for them because of their all license-driven content. Other companies can't really manipulate the large audiences that easily in the console space.

It's fine for most games, but in cases like MUJO, where they are making people pay money for it, but still keeping all the micro transactions, then I find it disgusting.

@Scrummer oh man Mujo is a disaster piece, I wouldn’t want to play it for free!

@NEStalgia very good point, I never thought of it like that.

I despise the "free to play" style of game and have an extremely low opinion of games that began their lives as mobile phone titles. But it is not impossible to port one and improve it enough to make it a worthwhile experience on a real game system. Such a port would need significant improvements and design changes to be viable.

Another few f2p mobile games coming to eshop as per coming soon....
The worst things about this happening is the good quality games that are f2p are not coming to switch ( l9l believe it or not there are a few!) but we’re actually getting some proper bottom of the barrell mobile games that are classed trashy dime a dozen cash ins even for mobile!! One of them is a cow game that goes down a mountain which is cloned from 100s of other mobile games identical to this, the gameplay is really shallow as it’s just left and right and gets boring after 10 mins.
It’s sad but it’s starting to look like pretty much anything can get on the eshop now.

I bought Radiation Island and I'm shocked at how decent this game is. It looks great docked with nice lighting and shadow effects, but there's a noticeable difference in detail in the environment when playing handheld. Collision detection/distance is my only big gripe with the game so far. I'll post screenshots in the screenshot thread in a few.

@NEStalgia @Deathwalka
Pretty much agreed with you guys. It's interesting that technically the soul of F2P has been around as long as PC gaming has been a thing, and that's been since the very get-go of the hobby. It wasn't called F2P, of course, it was mostly known as shareware, but it hinged on hooking the player and making them want to make a full purchase just like this crud we're stuck with today. I remember getting lots of that stuff on discs that would come with magazine subscriptions - in particular I remember getting the shareware version of Luscarts' Outlaws and loving it to death. I begged my dad to buy me the full version for so long, and when he finally did... I never even beat it lol

So yea, it lacked the microtransactions that we all know and love with F2P today (sarcasm), but it was roughly the same concept.

Hey - speaking of the wonderful direction our hobby has been taking, anybody see that Metal Gear:Survive charges you for another save slot? 10 bucks, I think. Surely this is the Golden Age of gaming come again, right?

@McGruber I played and completed it on my iPad a couple of years ago and it is a very fun game, I’d recommend it to everyone for the price for sure.

@rallydefault I stopped paying attention to Metal Gear after I paid $40 for a teaser demo called Ground Zeroes.... Makes the F2P guys look like a bunch of armatures.....