Intro
Free To Play games as we know them now have been around for a long time now. Since 1999 in fact when Nexon, a Korean company created QuizQuiz.
One of the early successful games using this very model was RuneScape in 2001. Since then this model has been very successful and has dominated the gaming market on the PC in form of games like League of Legends, Team Fortress and most recently Fortnite.
Why are Free To Play games so successful, even though a majority of gamers you talk to will tell you that the Free To Play model is the worst financial model a game can have? Here are the Pros and Cons of Free To Play games.
Pros
- It's Free
I know quite obvious. A huge obstacle of gaming has always been the price. Games, and even the hardware required to run them is very expensive. F2P games tend to be easier on the hardware so they even reduce hardware costs. - When you do spend money, you know what you get
If you decide that spending some money for whatever reason is worth it, you know exactly what you will get. The whole game basically acts as a beta to try out the game before deciding to spend money. - Easier to get your friends to play with you.
Most of the time, even your friends don't trust you enough to pay upwards of 30 dollars for a game just because you told them to do so. They are much more likely to try a game that is free.
Cons
- Most of the time, spending money is almost a necessity
While there are some outstanding and fair Free To Play games out there, Warframe and LoL for example, for every fair model, there are hundreds of Pay To Win games. - Cosmetics almost always cost money.
Don't get me wrong I would prefer a game where every cosmetic Item costs money if that means that it's not a P2W game. But the question of "Where did you get that armor set?", turns into "How much did you pay for that armor set?" I just don't like that. - You will never "finish" the game
Unless you are willing to spend hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars on in-game items, you will never be able to own everything. If you tend to be completionist, this could be a deal breaker.
Thank you for reading!