Are free games worth the price?

Date:
Fri, 12 Aug 2022 18:00:13 +0000

Description:
Everything comes with a price, even free games. Is it worth it?

FULL STORY ======================================================================

Everyone loves a freebie, and a free game, well, its like the warm touch of a hand on your back, and a voice in your ear, saying, Go on. You deserve it.

But is that voice a devil or an angel? Are free games all theyre cracked up
to be? Why might you complain about something that costs you nothing?

Sometimes free, though, provokes Thanks, but no thanks, and heres why. Free, but bad

Scenario: You download and install a free game, only to discover its, well terrible. Well, at least it didnt cost you money. But it did cost you time, the time spent installing it, and the time finding that fact out.

But even if the game is of high quality, and many of the best free games are, they are often made less fun for the purpose of extracting money from the player. The excessive grind that many free-to-play games have is an example
of this.

Progression in a game unlocking this, which lets you unlock that, then the other can be a great way to keep you engaged in a game. And it can also be fun, just ask any Monster Hunter player. But the deliberately annoying grinding in some free-to-play games (say, Lineage II) is not put in there to help you have fun. Higher-level items are priced at many grind-hours of in-game currency so as to entice you to spend real game-of-life money.

Straightforward pay-to-win games games in which you can buy power (in the form of, say, weapons) are pretty rare these days; players dont like obvious funny-business, and are capable of kicking up a fuss, like in the case of
Star Wars Battlefront II. But even allowing players to skip the grind gives that rich or reckless player an advantage, and it does, in fact, allow them
to Pay to Win. This can create a haves-and-have-nots atmosphere in a PVE
game, and it can make PVP games, particularly unfun to play, particularly for new players getting gunned down with powerful weapons.

Then theres the pressure of endless free games. Epic, we love you, please
keep em coming; were just trying to speak up for the HDD- and SSD-challenged. What if you have no space to download them all? Do you delete one to play another? This is a small issue, but one worth mentioning. Its great to get free games, but its not always necessary. Quality over quantity. It might as well have cost money (Image credit: Epic Games)

But even if the games great, and the grind is good, what about your wallet? Free-to-play, of course, doesnt mean free.

Take League of Legends, and take it from us whove spent so much money on the game we wont tell you how much weve actually spent on it.

There is no pay-to-win in League. Everything sold through the game is cosmetic, and you can even get skins without having to do more than grind,
and get lucky with loot boxes.

Still, you wont get the new skins in a loot box, and theyll always tempt you. Well, they always look cool, dont they? AAA companies really do put a lot of time, effort, and talent into their products. Leagues skins are always heralded by mean marketing strategies featuring K-pop-inspired music videos, short films, and fiction that positively seduce you into opening your wallet for them.

And yet, in the end, you dont own any of it. When the servers are down, you cant play it, everything you spent money on is gone. Poof.

Still, many would argue theyre happy to spend money on ephemeral fun, to pay for it one skin or bit of DLC at a time. Yes, when they ponder the total
money spent they get the shivers, but wouldnt you if you totalled the money youve given to McDonalds?

Ultimately, its down to each person whether or not they choose to purchase
any in-game items or currency, but some games make it almost impossible not
to and eventually cause players to leave the game altogether.

One odd property of free-to-play games is that even while the games still around, you can never truly complete it. In regular games, you can finish the game on all modes, and find all the Easter eggs and bugs. You could never, though, access every part of League of Legends, not without spending thousands, anyway.

It ends up feeling like the free part of free-to-play is a set-up.

Shout out to free games that are actually free though. Platforms like itch.io always have a wide variety of them, many of which are very strange.

There are also free open source games, for example, 0 A.D., a great example
of a truly free game that is as good as a pay-to-play one. There arent, in truth, many really great open-source games. Development tends to be, compared to that of a commercial game, slow. On the other hand, so long as a games source code exists on the Internet, development doesnt have to end. The game doesnt go, poof, though the players might. Addictiveness (Image credit: Respawn)

Some of the most addictive games in the world are free-to-play. The number of hours weve clocked up in League of Legends, Warframe, and Starcraft II, for example, is, well, alarming, and probably way higher than what weve clocked
up in all of our lonely-and-weeping for-money Steam games combined.

This is because free-to-play games are constantly updated. They constantly pull you back into orbit, with new seasons, skins, character updates, and patches.

And its a bit sad because there are many, many other games available to play. Many of us will probably be familiar with this situation: A new game has been released, and were excited, but then were suddenly playing MechWarrior Online again.

Because we want novelty, yes, but new stuff in games were familiar with is a novelty, too. And in any case, we have so many skins, and were about to rank up Our free game did not cost us a penny to begin with but now weve spent loads of money and time.

Send help.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/are-free-games-worth-the-price/


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