The Advent of Free to Play and constant micro transactions in $60 games. end of gaming as we know it ?

[The 1 2 P]

The big deal, is that on current gen systems, to buy things, they have to take you out of the experience, and you have to go thru a process to get stuff. With the PS4 and the Infinity, the OS is going to be designed to specifically allow for in game purchases to be completely seamless and unobtrusive. Buying things with real world money will be as simple as pushing a button, with no need to leave the game itself.

But the key thing to remember is that all of these microtransactions are still going to be "optional". So if you don't want them then don't buy them. Just because the transactions will be easier to make next gen doesn't mean you have to start making them. Just keep enjoying your $60(or whatever amount you pay for it) game the same way you are now.

Then we have the whole free-to-play phenomenon. Free to play is being tried here and there on current gen, but it's going to be a much bigger part of the program on PS4 and Infinity. We already know that if you value your "time", nothing about these games is free. All kinds of various psychological tricks are used to try to get us to part with our hard earned pesos. The idea of punishing the consumer, and irritating the consumer so much, that they will be forced to cough up money, to end the annoyance, it's a strange business model. Seemingly... it works, because tons of publishers and developers are using that technique. When it arrives in full force, with the arrival of next-gen, it's going to get really interesting to see how the huge console based gaming public reacts. Sure, you can say they all have iphones right now, and they've already been exposed to this, but there's something about it happening in full force on the big gaming console that is going to be unique.

The only free to play game I've played is Happy Wars and I honestly have never even seen a pay screen. You can get extra armor and gear just by playing the game. And to me thats the right way to do free to play, when they aren't pushing the potential upgrade purchases down your throat around every single corner every five minutes. Happy Wars isn't the greatest game but it's pretty fun when played with friends and you really never feel like you are being nickel and dimed. Hopefully future free to play games follow that model but I know there are already ones out there that don't.

Of course, we can also mix in the whole "always-online" requirements, that games, and maybe even consoles themselves... will have. That's a whole nuther ball of wax... We all know what recently happened with Sim City.

Yeah this does indeed suck, not only for people with subpar online connections but also for those of us who get weird power outages when there aren't any storms in the area. As a whole, I don't know how gamers can fight back against this issue. Sure it's easy to say "just don't buy it" but it would take literally millions of people refusing to buy these games to get it thru publishers heads that this is not what we want. The good news is that Sony and Nintendo have not announced an always-online requirement for their next(current for Nintendo) systems so as long as Microsoft follows suit we should be ok on that front for another gen......atleast for now.

I don't know man... things are looking kinda of bleak for the future of gaming, at least when it comes to the normal comfort level I used to have when playing games.

As the saying goes: "adapt or die because change is inevitable". It doesn't have to be that serious though. When the day comes that video game consoles no longer satisfy your gaming needs than just simply move on from them and play stuff from your backlog. Problem solved. Or atleast thats what I'm going to do.

It used to be, that you would buy a cartridge in the store, you'd get home and plug the thing in, and it would work, and everything was cool. You might say it was...


A elegant method, for a more civilized age

Or you might say it was two generations ago