It's a bussiness model that works in the real world: people buy what others think is 'worthless accessories' all the time, so I don't get why it wouldn't work in games too...

I think Free 2 Play is a quite good model and is here to stay, but definately not for all games out there. The only major problem I have with it, is that it has a high risk of turning into "Pay 2 Win", which is something I think no one supports.

I can't see a kid asking their parents once a week for a credit card to purchase in game items. Parents will catch on quick and wonder how they are spending all that money.

I think that with the introduction of casual games, this is chaning rapidly. Remember that nowadays, even those parents play games and buy ingame items, and if they don't, they have probably heard about others doing it, so they'll understand why their kids wants a new X for their Y. If all else fails they'll at the very least understand the argument 'All my friends have pirate hats, so I want one too', which has always worked on parents...

I wonder if allowing buying things by sending the money in a letter would work? It would probably go to a company which handles any currency conversions and then pass the money and some code to the game company.

So whilst on the face of it, all your points sound perfectly logical, logic often has nothing to do with it ;)
Its the emotional side that gets you to invest, time, effort and ultimately money .

That's definitely true, and if you can get people to identify with this, then they will express themselves with it. (See the Xbox Live avatars, people's initial reactions to buying accessories and people's reactions very soon after their best friend bought a lightsaber.)


See, I'll admit when I'm wrong, even when I'm also right.

See, I'll admit when I'm wrong, even when I'm also right.

Its not about being wrong or right, sorry if my comments came over like that, but trying to understand how F2P can work.

Don't get me wrong, i'm pretty much in the camp that buying in-game items is rather silly and can be a waste of money, but realised that actually for the right thing I would spend money. Once you accept that for the 'right thing' you will pay money, its easy to understand how and why such a system works in general. In addition it offers some very interesting benefits over traditional methods. Obviously its no silver bullet, its not simple to pull off and isn't necessarily suitable for every situation.

The thing with free-to-play games and pay-to-play, is that it depends on the game. Some games with in-game purchases like TF2, it is a great system. Other games, namely Facebook titles, the free-to-play is so ANNOYING. It has become so common that whenever you actually can buy a great game and play EVERYTHING the creator made for it, it is a good feeling like "Wow! I can now play what I payed for! No features cut off! This is great!"