News Starcraft 2 considers F2P model

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/09/25/starcraft-2-considers-f2p-model/1

 

I really look forward to this free to play crap dying down.

MMOs had the perfect situation: players pay a subscriptions, devs get a constant revenue stream and can high people for the long term to create a great mmo.
F2P encourages people to jump around to different games, encouraging the ritalin crowd to plague more than one MMO at a time.

If you want to train in a game, pay the small fee of 15 dollars or euros a month and sit down and immerse yourself!

Yours in 0.0 Risk and Reward Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

How about just allow it to be sold through Steam and pick up more players that way. F2P might be dandy for the devs but it's crap for actual gamers.

 

MMO subs arent good value if you wan't to play casually .... and wtf has that got to do with an RTS?

 

Cant say i love free to play tend to stay away from all games that head this route as they suffer in quality compared to a paid game or mmo.

Rift is a prime example of an mmo that has survived as pay to play, It has 1mil + subs and has been around that level for its lifespan now.

Too many companies are thinking free to play is a way to con more cash outta people. Of the f2p games i have played i have never personally paid for anything from it.

 

Make the singleplayer campaign free to play instead and I'm there. Couldn't give a crap about the "OMGIdidntclicktwicepersecondforthelasttwominutesandnowivelost" multiplayer.

 

Oh Blizzard, where did you go wrong? Was there not a stable parental figure for you to look up to and tell you they were proud of you? Was the adoration of your legion of fans insufficient confirmation of your success? Is that why you've let Activision turn you into JustAnotherAAA Studios?

 

The entire concept of F2P wont work with SC2 as mentioned in the article , it would turn it into a `who pays , wins

 

Or they could reduce the price. Seems to be the same price as it was at launch.

 

Its not really that much of a problem. League of Legends has managed it, and I would probably at least try SC2 if it was free to play.

 

Might as well have been titled "Starcraft 2 considers P2W model"

 

FU Activision/Blizzard.

 

I just want them to finally release all three parts of the game. I was worried that the excitement for SC2 would die down after Wings of Liberty and that seems to have come true. Most people probably haven't realized but it's been just over two years since Wings of Liberty was released and we're still looking at a couple/few more months for Heart of the Swarm (expect a sudden boost in hype followed by release just as Mist of Pandaria loses its sparkle). Add another two years for Legacy of the Void and you're looking at over four years just to finally finish the story.

 

The Tribes Ascend is the only F2P game I found decent enough to play for more than 20 minutes. And, after all, they aren't that free, as you very quickly get to the point of needing to pay for things without which it is a pain/impossible to progress :-(

 

I think F2P should be for the arcade SC2 part. So I can play some fun games with some friends that dont really play RTS games much. There are hundreds of fun maps in SC2 created by the community. Some great maps are rarely played because they dont get any hype.

 

I guess free to play means different things to different people. I always thought of it in the context of games (particularly MMOs) that charge a monthly subscription fee. Starcraft 2 only requires the initial game purchase and doesn't leech off the user from month to month like its older brother the cartoony looking MMO known as WOW. Other than rankings and achievements, SC2 is a far cry from being anything like a traditional MMO. Diablo 3 would be a closer fit to that mold, but even D3 doesn't charge month to month either, or really resemble the environment of an MMO.

fdbh96 mentioned League of Legends... I'm thinking Blizzard is looking to claw back some of the popularity lost to LOL. Why else make SC2 free to play? I havent played League of Legends yet (keep meaning to get around to it), but I did play a lot of SC2 for months. It's extremely competitive and you always feel like a noob. If your APM count wasnt well into the hundreds, it felt like you were nothing more than a casual gamer.

 

I have no problem waiting a long time for the finished product, as long as the wait doesn't end up like the wait for Episode 3 or the likes. I trust Blizzard to not to release a semi-finished product and would rather have tree good instalments over five years than five OK instalments over five years.

Not sure about the F2P model, depends very much on how it is implemented but if it is going to require me to pay to be able to play properly I will have to stop playing.

 

F2P works fine as long as it is kept to cosmetics only or other things that don't affect the gameplay. TF2 and Dota 2 are good examples. I think the League of Legends setup works well too.

 

I'm fine waiting for a good product that needs it, but in the case of SC2 I question whether it's needed. It's been my complaint since they decided to split it into three parts: why is it needed? All aspects of the game, the engine, the network interactions, the majority of units (assuming some are added in future instalments), the UI, everything related to the actual game is complete. And if Wings of Liberty is released surely the story for the next two campaigns is already fleshed out (else they're just making it up as they go) so what's really left to do? Where's the two years of work? That's almost as much time as it took to make the first game, and this is effectively just an expansion.

But I should also say that I don't like the episodic release setup in the first place, it's not just SC2 or Blizzard. Just as Episode 3 has shown us it's counting chickens before they've hatched. If you know what game you're trying to make and already have enough content in mind to make episodes then just take your time and release it as one game.

Bit odd that you suggest TF2 as a good example of a game where items don't affect the gameplay, it's hugely impacted by items. Love the game, but that's what killed it for me. Dota 2, imo, is Valve's refinement of TF2's item system. All items truly are cosmetic.

LoL's system more or less accepts that it's not as fairly balanced as buying all the heroes outright. The heroes are designed to be balanced against each other, yes, but having access to more heroes allows for more options and possibilities which offer advantages. It's still successful, though, because it's understood that this will be a problem that everyone will face. There are no players who bought a boxed copy with all of the heroes, there are only F2P players, some of which may have bought all of the heroes but not for any different price than anyone else (barring sales/changes in price). SC2 is largely incompatible with such a system both because the difference in genre, and the fact that you'd have a difference between paid and F2P players.

 

You have a point in that there are little reason for the long running time, but again we are really not in a position to tell them how to do it, and considering the usual quality of the cut scenes and the likes I would not be surprised if it required quite a long time to make. XD

In the end we are technically talking expansions as you say, and I do believe that Blizzard has gone out saying they intend to price it accordingly.

One reason there may be is the competitive scene, if they released these expansions too close to the original game there would not be amble time for the competitive scene to really grow and get a solid foundation before it was mixed up. So it may end up having been a tactical decision with focus on the competitive scene, however still with the drawback of loosing hype in the general population.