I like the irony that the quoted teamfortress2, was long a vaporware title (anyone old enough to remember the half-life screenshots), and turned free 2 play after it was out four years. Also that you are seriously comparing that title, run by valve software, the owner of the steam platform, the company that makes money by every transaction done through steam, to a project by a small developer studio & niche product publisher, is only tipped off by the credibility that 5000 hours of playing said game gives you on development and marketing
No, I was replying to someone who was (and is) completely ignorant about how "Free 2 play" games typically work in PC gaming (his limited knowledge being with mobile games) with 2 examples of games for him to go and make himself less ignorant if he wishes.
That said, Valve is a small developer. Don't accept this "we're only small" excuse. That might be reasonable for why they've released a game that doesn't have many of the features that race 07 had, but this is about their website they are using to sell the game and the business decisions they took, not about difficult to implement game features.
I think 5000 hours of TF2 - a free to play title means that when someone tells me I don't know what a free to play title is, he looks like a buffoon. I wasn't suggesting it made me good at development or marketing. It makes me pretty good at playing TF2 though
However, it's a nonsense to suggest that Valve's other activities somehow explain Team fortress 2's success as a free to play title. The game is profitable in and of itself - it isn't being shored up by any revenue valve get from other Steam sales and they don't have thousands of employees working on TF2. Yet go and have a look at their update frequency.
They just hire **** hot staff.
It's a huge success and any developer of a supposed "free to play" title that doesn't look at what they do and study it would be a fool. That's not to say there aren't other ideas that Valve haven't thought of, but sector 3 really have had no free 2 play ideas at all.
TF2 is profitable - more profitable than it was when it was sold as a game. Get this in spite of giving every map and every weapon to players for free.
Put simply there is no need to buy any items to play the full game of Team fortress 2.
BUT - there are lots of cheap items and lots of ideas they've implemented to make buying them attractive (and not just hats)
Lots of ways of spending a little bit of cash (and of making a little bit of cash) Lots of small transactions, I'm arguing, would increase sector 3's sales, rather than just trying to get people to buy in bulk. Which really, as some of you have said - although I already knew this - was just a few knee jerk reaction changes they did to the ridiculous overpriced vrp nonsense they launched with.
Giving away all the content is what Simbin/Sector 3 should have done if and only if they wanted a free to play title. That's really what F2P is about, it's about making the people that don't pay part of the product you're selling.
So how do they make money if they give away all the cars and tracks? Well that's where some of their staff would have earned their bonus. But as I say there are games out there, like the ones I mentioned, already successful to see what they do.
But that seems by the by now, it's probably too late for them to have good ideas. They went with the obvious instead and that's what they sell - cars and tracks. I would argue if they want to sell them they need to make it really attractive to buy just a car or a track for someone who wants to dip their toe into RRRE beyond the (let's face it, pretty crappy) developer made track.
as brandon mentioned, when r3e originally came out, the purchase system indeed was not optimal, and imo it indeed felt a bit overpriced, but since they have all those packs now and the much better shop system, it's quite fair.
Not really. It was crap and still is crap, although I've commented on that above. They made it less crap for sure as a knee jerk response.
It's especially crap, as I suggested, in the sense that it (A) it has a ridiculous and convoluted interface that doesn't clearly display pricing and (B) It doesn't encourage gamers to buy a couple of items. They perhaps listened too much to people who will probably just buy everything and then go "whaa! you've charged me twice for this track" - now you think you're getting a "discount" when sometimes that just means they are simply not charging you twice for the same thing. Heh, who said you can't fool all of people. They are hoping to.
Anyone that buys one item will probably buy more.
Though it's still arguable whether a AC/pcars model of pre-financing would not have been better during a "beta phase".
TBH I don't think it is arguable. I think it's pretty self-evident that of the 3 different "this is the way games are developed de jour" ideas that developers all started to jump on the bandwagon : which are nominally, "free 2 play" games, "early access" games and "kickstarter type funded" games that the 2 companies developing sim racing titles who picked "early access" (AC) and "a kickstarter type thing" (pcars) have done better than the one that sort of picked f2p but chickened out when it actually came down to implementing f2p (and created a mess instead)
Yeah? I mean AC has regularly been at the top of sales charts on steam, not just the racing section, but outselling everything. pcars obviously collected plenty of cash, enough to fund the game development perhaps (not sure how much money SMS and other investors have thrown at it, but a substantial amount came from the community) - and it'd be difficult to imagine that they won't sell a bunch of copies on Steam, even if the bulk of that is only during sales (and of course they've potential in the console market too) A huge part of that was paid for by just positing the idea to a bunch of people.
Now the idea of "F2P" was put to those Pcars people and they said "Nope" - Perhaps Ian Bell et al had a big influence on that decision? I'm not sure, but clearly they rejected the idea of a F2P game. To me that says that sim racing fans that would happily pay for a game that doesn't exist when given a choice they don't want F2P.
some people have the feeling it's the duty by others to entertain them for almost free
Right now they are doing that. If they want my money they have to change what they are doing. But I've played over hundred hours with, as far as I can tell, no benefit at all to sector 3. That's their decision. If they wanted to exploit my playtime they would have needed to make different decisions. If they wanted me to pay them money, they'd have to make it clear they are financially sound - that the content won't disappear.
They can decide, as some of you have, that I'm wrong - and maybe I am - if they are making millions of vrps, euros, dollars or whatever and think everything is going fine and according to plan then no problem. I will probably eventually get either pcars or AC depending which looks the best when they are both available.
But, they won't debate me into buying their content. I'm "right" in the sense that I have the money and I'm not spending it in their store for the reasons I've given at length in this and other posts.
I know from other posters and forums I'm certainly not the only one reticent to buy content in this title - and there are plenty of people in this thread who don't seem very confident about being online to play offline and what might happen to the stuff they bought. But, perhaps we're a tiny minority and they're all busy finding houses near Notch with candy rooms in Beverly Hills riding on the huge success and overwhelming sales of R3E packs
It's up to sector 3 to decide whether they think the points and posters are worth listening too.
