Is Free to Play games the future?

Who exactly is going to spend the money, time and energy into making a video game, and then not make a profit? How will they stay in business and pay the employees who developed the game? The whole reason a company make a game is because their is money to be made. It is a business after all, and businesses need to make profits in order to remain in business and be successful. Without the goal of making profits companies would not make games to begin with.

Read what I posted carefully. I didn't say studios wouldn't profit, I didn't say they wouldn't charge for their product. I said they wouldn't charge YOU, the gamer. They will charge the companies giving YOU that game for free (or for a very small, general subscription fee). Miramax doesn't charge you for their movies in Netflix, Netflix merely charges you for the service they are providing you. You don't have to pay a dime for a specific movie, just a service. When cloud gaming comes around, ideally you'll pay your internet, and a service to bring you a very broad set of games to your system (or hell, your TV). You may need a generic device to stream it, but other than that, you don't pay a dime, even if its the new summer blockbuster in gaming.

To suggest that all the gaming companies that are not "Free to Play" are hurting and dying besides CoD is ridiculous

Its not. They are not dying, but they ARE hurting. The era of small rockstar studios died with Ion Storm's demise. You constantly need bigger budgets to produce AAA games, and bigger teams. There are dozens of small game studios, most of which the general public has never heard of, that die every year because they can't keep up. I mean the kinds of studios that make licensed games for movies, for children's games, etc. Your examples are of the extremely few HUGE studios, all of them publishing their own content. These includes Ubisoft, Activision, EA, Zenimax/ Bethesda, Blizzard, Valve. They are the big rockstars of the industry, but everyone else is hurting, and bad. Its an extremely high risk industry.

The Free to Play model has to do with changing the business model, so that people stop feeling like they are wasting 60 bucks. Some companies, EA included, are even experimenting with partially payed demos that last a certain amount of gameplay. If you like it, pay for the rest, if you don't, well... you can't play more.

Here's a small list of studios that died in 2011, some relatively well known, some not so much: http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/12/01/12-game-studios-that-died-in-2011

Since people believe I am talking out of my ass, here is a list of beloved companies that have died, not because their games sucked (well, some did), but because the general business model and industry evolution ate them:

-Atari (THE original one)
-Sega (asa console producer)
-Squaresoft (bad investment, merged with Enix to create Square-Enix)
-Acclaim
-Midway
-Bullfrog Productions
-Eidos Interactive (Again, the old classic one)
-Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires...)
-Factor 5 (Rogue Squadron!!!)
-Fox Interactive (AvP)
-Big Huge Games
-Westwood Studios
-Black Isle Studios (VERY recently revived, apparently)
-Sierra Entertainment

Ah, fuck it. Here's another link: Vancouver is Hurting

Its the big reason why small independent studios are making a comeback. They are making cheaper games with a focus on clever design. Hence Minecraft's success. The reality is, AAA games as they currently exist, rarely offer anything new. Most are either sequels with rehashed gameplay (All of the games you cited, which are not bad BTW, but they aren't new either).

I challenge anyone to beat my wall of text without copy/paste techniques.

Read what I posted carefully. I didn't say studios wouldn't profit, I didn't say they wouldn't charge for their product. I said they wouldn't charge YOU, the gamer. They will charge the companies giving YOU that game for free

What retailer would pay royalties and then give away the product for free?

What if I told you I would cut your grass for free, but I would still be making money because some random person would pay me to do your yard work?

Read what I posted carefully. I didn't say studios wouldn't profit, I didn't say they wouldn't charge for their product. I said they wouldn't charge YOU, the gamer. They will charge the companies giving YOU that game for free (or for a very small, general subscription fee).

Soooo, that is how stuff works... interesting

What retailer would pay royalties and then give away the product for free?

What if I told you I would cut your grass for free, but I would still be making money because some random person would pay me to do your yard work?

Eh, isn't that how the world usually works? You work for a (e.g.) gardening company that has a distict area to take care for. Many times these companies can get paid by the government or such public entity, and obviously you wouldn't get paid by the man whose lawn you mowed. The man propably doesn't even pay for the service straight to the company itself, but does it indirectly by paying taxes. I'm not saying this model is entirely interchangeable with the game industry model, but when the community gets bigger, it might get feasible to start using middlemen (not implying it's the best model for the customer/work force obviously).

Free-to-play is a good business model for certain types of games, especially not-all-that-competitive multiplayer games. It is, however, not a model that will work on any kind of game, and there already exist some very good examples on how NOT to handle that business model.

What retailer would pay royalties and then give away the product for free?

What if I told you I would cut your grass for free, but I would still be making money because some random person would pay me to do your yard work?

It sounds like that at first glance, but try to twist it:

What if I told you, you will get paid for a product, people don't even have to play anymore. Look at games such as BFME, Neverwinter Nights, AvP. Legacy games, they call them: The master servers for those games have been taken down, because it is too expensive to maintain them. However, with licensing/royalties, they don't need to take them down, because they pretty much self sustain.

That is the main idea. Not only that, in many countries, including mine, intellectual property law dictates that people who aided in the development of the product, even if its not his idea, but who helped that idea develop into a working product, get royalties.

That could actually protect the people working hard within the industry, all the way up until the time they die, hell even secure a future for their children!

Free to play is like gambling , Once you try it ,you would want more of it .

I no longer enjoy WoT , But i still play it - Dont know why ? , It might be because i don't want to waste all the time / money that has gone into the game , or because i just want to grind to get something new . Either-way its not healthy ...

Thus would be apprehensive of any free to play titles .

The era of small rockstar studios died with Ion Storm's demise. You constantly need bigger budgets to produce AAA games, and bigger teams. There are dozens of small game studios, most of which the general public has never heard of, that die every year because they can't keep up. I mean the kinds of studios that make licensed games for movies, for children's games, etc. Your examples are of the extremely few HUGE studios, all of them publishing their own content. These includes Ubisoft, Activision, EA, Zenimax/ Bethesda, Blizzard, Valve. They are the big rockstars of the industry, but everyone else is hurting, and bad. Its an extremely high risk industry.

I couldn't disagree with you more. Small game studios are actually becoming successful, mainly because they offer better value. Why pay $60 for a AAA title that only offers 8-10 hours of a single player experience? That $60 price tag is on just about every AAA game release, and unfortunately paying that price doesn't guarantee a good game, as evidence in the horrible reviews of the newly released Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Here is a quote from an interesting article talking about why AAA studios are hurting, and why the smaller indie and mid tier developers are thriving.

AAA development is in dire straits, if publishers are asking such huge numbers to continue smaller series. Publishers are looking at advertisements, DLC and other monetization as a way of improving profits. It's hard to tell from the outside at what point greed is taking over necessity.

As more studios are closed and publishers are reporting losses, something has to change. AAA studios are still operating the same way as they did in the last decade. But with the rise of cheaper, more accessible titles and the move to digital, the marketplace has changed.

It has become very difficult to justify spending $60 on any game these days, but that is still the standard retail price publishers are asking. And with the rise of monetization, gamers are getting less for the same amount of money.

With the next wave of consoles fast approaching, it can only mean further raising the cost of AAA development. This is not good for the publishers who have to invest the money and the gamers who are still feeling the effects of the economy.

We need to ask how much longer large studios can sustain the costs and development under a publisher-developer relationship. Further complicating matters is the rise of Kickstarter this year, allowing developers to fund a game of their choosing without a publisher's intervention.

My prediction is that either publishers will have to find a way to cut costs and hopefully lower the price barrier of games, or they will have to switch focus to smaller budget titles. The last decade could be summed up with the description "the rise of the digital market", if publishers aren't careful this decade could become “the crash of AAA development."

Read the whole article here. Are AAA Studios DOA?

Hope not, I HATE FREE TO PLAY.

Read the whole article here. Are AAA Studios DOA?

Don't get me wrong, the article is fine. I simply want the ideal gaming method. The closer to free while developers earning their pay is ideal to me. There's two sides to every coin though: Small studios have regained strength, like I mentioned, through mobile games mostly. The other niche has been indie games, where gameplay has trumped graphics (they are following the formula that made games successful in the first place).

The real issue with AAA games, is that they've started to pump them out like Candy, once every year. Most of the big hits follow the good old formula: 3 years of development. Bethesda does this, Bungie does this, Epic Games, Infinity Ward used to do this, DICE used to do this. Not even going to talk about Valve and Blizzard because they are special cases, but they sort of follow that mentality.

Of course, there's also the big shots that develop for gazillions of years and their games suck. Some people aren't as good developing as others. Such is life.