Pay To Play
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Money In Gaming – Part 1
Yes part 1, This is going to be a 3 part series discussing the 3 most common ways developers make money from games. While also discussing the negatives and positives of these.
Method to the madness
Over the next few weeks I am going to delve in to a topic that has raged across the internet for some time now. It is a topic that effects main stream gaming even more then audio gaming but it is here in our community as well.
So what are the 3 money making methods?
Micro-transactions and loot boxes:
Pay to Win:
Pay to play:
Honestly I could make this 1 article. But it would be long. I could make it 2 but I don’t want to.
So I will be talking about each of these in turn. There is some over lap between them so sit back and enjoy.
Pay to Play
This is the easiest 1 to start with. Few issues exist because of this and they are mostly because of communities around gaming then because of anything wrong with pay to play.
Pay to play put simply is a game that requires You to pay money to play the full version of the game.
Some games may offer a free demo or in some cases such as online games you maybe able to play a version offline but until you pay you can’t go online.
Expansions are also considered pay to play. Additional content usually in Online Games that cost money to add to the existing game.
I should note here that games wear you start with 1 level and if you want more you can buy more levels. While this is a form of pay to play, it also comes under the category of Micro Transactions.
Positives
Pay to play is a developer asking for money for his or her hard work. Because of this the affects from a pay to play game can come from a developer having the money to work on more projects.
Either they have more time to work on future up dates, expansions or even new games. Paying for the game can often help not only the developer but the community out.
Cheaters are more likely to give up from online games that cost money. This is a super simple concept. If you cheat and get banned you are far more likely to give up if it cost you money every time you get banned.
The down sides
I mentioned main stream gaming before and while this point certainly can apply there, it is far more noticeable in the audio games community.
Paid games usually have smaller player bases. Maybe not always but a down side to needing to pay for a game is that not every one wants to. not every one has the money. And some people just feel it isn’t worth it.
The other down side can be the sense of entitlement paying for a game gives some people. It is understandable developers not wanting to deal with the people that once they pay for a game think it is a right to be able to ask for everything and anything under the fucking sun!
Conclusion
In the end if you are for or against paid games it really doesn’t matter. Not every game can be free and expecting that is just fucking stupid.
Join me next week as I try and work through a much more messy topic, Pay to win.
Well it never kept me out. 😀
One thing I’ve found in pay to play online games is the steep falloff of the most annoying personality types. Of course you still get them in all games, but the numbers seem much smaller in games with payment as an entry barrier. Whether this is good or not, well for the annoying ones it is ungood, but for the rest of the normal people out there it is a very good thing.