"Kyno;c-2160643" wrote:
I'm not saying change shouldnt happen, but what caliber of games could you play for free back in the day, without pirating it?
Until the last 20 years, games were simply buy and play, and that's it. You paid $50.00 one time and had access to all of the content. And, the games back then were complete and, in general, less buggy.
Then the MMO came. You spent $50.00 to purchase the game, and then anywhere from $10-15 as a monthly fee. Other MMO's had a free subscription and you could get 95% of the content for nothing.
Now, we are at freemium games. Sure, you can play for free, but every company knows that there are a lot of 1) really competitive gamers that have to be the best at what they do, and/or 2) people that are OCD about collecting everything and not willing to wait for the trickle down. These companies bank on this and that's how they make their money. It's ingenious, bordering on exploitation. But it works. It worked on me on this game for 2-1/2 years, and now it works on me in another game. Fortunately, I can afford to pay to play. But there are many out there that can't and they can't control their spending either. That's not the fault of the makers of the games, but just like people addicted to MMO's back in the early 2000's, the next generation is going into massive debt due to the reasons stated above.
And while I've been out of this game for almost 2 years now, I have some friends that still play. They can't not play because of the time and money invested. That's why it took me 6 months to actually quit. I was really done with the game when the Revans came out. I knew then that any semblance of creating balance in this game was done, and was never going to improve. The company would just keep releasing ridiculously overpowered toons to counter the one released prior to it. The game I'm playing now is better, but the power creep is starting to set in, and I hope I will be able to stop playing when I realize the game has "jumped the shark."
There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's also no such thing as a free game. Every F2P person I know has at least spent $$ on something at least once, even if they consider themselves F2P.
