Post by Dan @ 12:42pm 11/02/13 | 19 Comments
"We decided five or six years ago that we want to marry the quality of triple-A games with the business model of free-to-play," Yerli told GamesBeat. "And at that time, we decided some other games, in some of our other studios, would head in this direction. But we kept pushing the quality bar higher on our console business, which is the main dominating business for the Western world, but we are observing, plainly - and we see this already with Warface - that the free-to-play market is on the rise. I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface."Crytek has been testing the free-to-play waters with Warface, which has already found success in Eastern Europe, and plans to build on the GFace technology and license it to third parties for use in their own free-to-play titles.
Crytek's current efforts are in the PC market, but Yerli said that the company is looking to bring the same ethic to consoles.
"We're looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans," said Yerli. "So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles. But our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that."
"As a company, [we will] transition from a developer to a service company, and we're going to offer a platform, with G-Face, to any other [developer that needs it]," he said. "If we could launch our games on a platform that already exists today, and we could get the same results, then we wouldn't build our own platform. But we're convinced that our platform does some particularly new things that makes our games behave better. That's why we plan to offer this service to third parties."Crytek's Crysis 3 is due to launch on February 22nd for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, under the traditional pay-once publishing model via Electronic Arts.
"This doesn't mean our main business will be driven by our platform business. We are just going to open it up and see how it works. We are always going to be a games-first company. We will always have our own development because we are all about making games. We provide technology, but technology is not our main driver. We make technology to make great games," added Yerli.
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Posted 01:18pm 11/2/13
It clearly can't just be downloading a game for free and it's like Black Ops 2 but didn't cost me anything.
Is it a base game that's free, but you have to pay for unlocks and equipment? So essentially pay to win? As you'd only buy things if it'd make you do better in the game.
Is it ad supported?
Or what?
The only free to play games I play are generally ad supported ones on face book or my phone. They are worlds apart from a game which cost 10s millions to produce. Which are the ones i buy.
As a big PC FPS fan, I don't want this. I am fine buying games. I am unsure what this is, but I can't necessarily see how it'll be good. Especially in Australia. Even a lot of big FPS games don't last too long with hugely populated servers. However one thing that often keeps people coming back is the fact they bought the game, they're going to give the MP more than a once off shot.
If it's all free to play, when you jump on and a bunch of people have a bunch of paid for weapons and you're on an uneven playing field. Why would you come back to the game again? Didn't cost you anything, there's no attempt to get some value out of it.
In fact most games when you first jump on there's a learning curve. However having just paid 80 bucks for a game is a good motivator to give it a shot and push through that barrier. It'll be so easy to excuse not being good if you suspect or know it's possible those people killing you have paid for better weapons.
As I said above the whole notion that it's not pay to win completely removes any need to buy to unlock stuff. So it has to be that way, doesn't it?
Then the other big thing about free to play is where does it leave single player campaigns? We all know of the dreaded scenario happening where you're playing a game and then have to pay to finish it.
As I said, I find the whole thing vague and ambiguous as to what such free to play models actually are about.
Posted 02:07pm 11/2/13
Path of Exile is another game that's doing a similar thing with cosmetics. So we could see that happen. But these are multiplayer games where you can show off your swag to other players. I don't know how that would transfer to single player games, or if it even could.
Posted 02:13pm 11/2/13
Dota2 has indeed done an excellent job, I do hope they are profiting from their model.
Posted 02:15pm 11/2/13
What crytek need to worry about is getting their MP down pat first.
Posted 02:17pm 11/2/13
Hardly feels like pay to win.
Posted 02:31pm 11/2/13
Posted 03:12pm 11/2/13
Take for example League of Legends, a game that is free-to-play with anyone able to make an account and start playing straight away. You are given access to I think seven free champions that are rotated weekly/bi-weekly with all champions on offer for additional unlock payments. These can be done via in-game points called IP, or Riot Points which are actual dollars spent to gain. The balance here is that everyone can eventually own all heroes just by playing the game, however a shortcut method is introduced for those with cash.
Then you have several other varying free-to-play niches, like the pay-to-win which offers substantially better items to those who fess up the cash. However the majority of the free-to-play genre offers the base game for free, with additional payments on offer that can enhance/speed up a process.
I can definitely see why Crytek are transitioning to this new payment method, namely the idea that your game will be accessible to anyone and hopefully draw in paying customers through various methods. It is also a nod to the change in the gaming industry with regards to subscription models. Really the only strong subscription model still going is World of Warcraft, and that might be purely due to the large playerbase.
Posted 03:15pm 11/2/13
same deal as drug dealers & cookie shops.
Posted 05:01pm 11/2/13
Crytek have shown they can't make 'AAA' (dunno why anyone would be proud of making less engaging experiences for multiple times the money spent than many indie developers) multiplayer games. They struggle to make strong single player games - hitting and missing in equal amounts what their players actually like about their games.
So it sounds like they know they can make the technology to support free2play developers and farming the development out (and continuing to do what they do well - engineering) isn't a bad idea. It would be cool if they made the tools free and then acted as publisher for games made on their tech but I cant see that happening. Cutting out EA would be the best outcome from a move like this.
of course, they probably just want in on the kind of money some free2play games make and will continue to waste time making games instead of making technology.
I disagree fundamentally with what they do but I cannot deny that they are extremely successful. They charge for champions which fractures the balance unless you are willing to buy all the champions, plus their RPG backend further screws with balance.
Posted 05:06pm 11/2/13
Though that is the thing, a free-to-play title needs that balance in order to succeed, else it is just a pure money grab.
Posted 05:13pm 11/2/13
I think that a few F2P games is good, especially in competitive settings where people lock into one game that they want to get good at, and people can come in to compete for free, opening the game to many players. But there's obviously other kinds of games like third person action/adventure style (story driven) games where I'm never going to spend a cent outside of playing as much of the story as im enjoying and then dropping it when i find something new and exciting.
Posted 05:13pm 11/2/13
if not, they're making plenty from tf2. gabe recently said that a community contributor has made $500k from getting their models in game. and that's after valve took their cut.
Posted 06:14pm 11/2/13
And how many hours do you need to play in order to unlock all the heroes? Given that it's a competitive game, they should be unlocked from the get go.
Posted 08:14pm 11/2/13
Its bizzare how well it just works. I started playing Planetside 2 a month or 2 ago and its a great game (even though it has its bugs) but its not a pay to win game even though you can pay for in game weapons and items. They just have balanced everything so well so people that don´t pay anything still do well, the main influence micro-transactions in the game make is the amount of time you have to wait to unlock something you want.
It also helps that the player can choose how much they want to spend, for example from $8 to $100
Its the only game in YEARS ive spent money on other than TF2 and Bf3 when they came out.
According to Sony Online Entertainment Planetside 2 has been their best revenue raising game they have ever released.
Posted 09:21pm 11/2/13
Counter-picking isn't as important and most roles can be filled by multiple different champs because you can carry with virtually everyone - you still shop items to boost AP right? so support isn't really a role defined by hero as much as it is in dota, where casters become less powerful as the game goes on because they don't have items that boost their dmg beyond a few debuffing active items)
tl;dr dota2 would be a nightmare if you had to purchase heroes but it seems to work ok in LoL - which just means that as long as you understand how your game works there are multiple free2play models that could be applied but probably one which is best.
Posted 12:05am 12/2/13
Shooters for example don't work with it because there is only so much cosmetic s*** you can do with it before ruining the game. Letting people buy weapons/vehicles/upgrades with real money defeats the purpose of any note worthy competitive shooter regardless of whether they can be earned in game.
F2P also allows for cheaters to simply recreate accounts - As per TF2. I loved that game before they brought all that useless s*** out and made it Free 2 play. Its horrible now. F*** you valve... But I still love you.
Posted 10:17am 12/2/13
Posted 10:33am 12/2/13
Posted 11:27am 12/2/13
You don't *Have* to buy heroes in LoL there's a short period where only RP's can buy them but if you've saved IP (earned from normal, free, game play) then you'd be able to buy it the instant it's released.
Skins etc are paid though, and you can pay some money to earn IP faster but it's not really imbalanced that someone who buys IP is going to get more characters faster than someone else, when most of the characters are balanced well enough anyway.
Cheating could be done in all the old model games and shouldn't be felt like it's unique to F2P. Cheating players might at worst get IP Banned off a server, but then wander to another. Besides it's hardly like cheaters don't exist in places like blizzard games which require paid bnet logins that get banned. It could be a bit bigger in F2P games, but often with systems like PSR etc you can't come up against a cheater if you're high enough up. Simply because a cheater who gets high PSR will be quickly banned and will have to start again.