Crytek Kiev’s Peter Holzapfel, who’s currently a part of the team working on Warface, has spent some time talking about the free to play games model and its future. He says that in the future, there will be no more mediocre F2P games, and that right now, a lot of devs take the model for granted since people go out to get their games in droves and release half-baked games.
“From our perspective, in the future there won’t be any mediocrity in free-to-play because those [mediocre] games will just not be successful” Holzapfel told VG247. “There will be so much variation, but right now you would rather spend $60 on a retail title because the quality is higher, than waste time with a mediocre free-to-play title.
“Since there’s no real barrier to free-to-play – people don’t have to go to the store to buy their game, pay $60 up front – then there’s no risk attached to it, and what we like about it is that it’s very much the full product, there’s no need to try and convince gamers through trailers, marketing or anything else on that side.”
“With traditional games you can kind of ‘trick’ players into buying the game,” he continued. “But then after an hour they might say, ‘OK this is actually not that cool’, after having spent $60. But with free-to-play it’s like ‘OK, this product has to be good’ or no one will play. So to us, we’re making a cool game for a bigger audience.”
Do you agree with what he says? It is true that a lot of developers just take the model for granted. Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
