At end of the day people play what they enjoy, not what technically is a better game. Hearthstone is 100x bigger than godslayer ever will be, because for the masses it is more fun to play. Who are you to say others are not enjoying it more than niche games? At end of the day, the amount of money AND TIME people are willing to spend on games is what make great games great. TA reviewers can talk JRPG all they want, they are outperformed by brave frontier because that is what is fun for the majority in 2015.
The very meaning of Avant Garde means the people at the front of the march. They're a minority compared to the brunt of the army, but they reach a point first where the rest will one day arrive. It's happened time and time again that the visionaries of yesteryear have blazed a trail, have followed personal artistic visions, which were reviled at the time, written off as the piddling actions of fringe groups, only for time to prove them right. Art isn't a numbers game. There are those who watch movies, read books, play games and the like to lose themselves, to switch off from a hard day's work, and there are those who do the same to find themselves, to spark ideas they didn't know were inside them, to enter worlds they could only dream of. Some works leave such a deep mark on their fans that they'll remain affected for their entire lives. Some merely pass the time. Again, art isn't a numbers game.
Why on Earth am I getting dragged into this? I like JRPGs *and* I like Brave Frontier. I like Candy Crush and I like Ghost Blade. I write about what I want to write about, not what is going to perform the best or be the most fun for the majority. What I'm seeing in this thread is a whole lot of people talking past each other and too many people acting like elitist jerks. Life is really short, you guys. Too short to worry about what some person you'll never meet thinks about the toys you play with. Too short to worry about whether or not the things you like are popular. Just play what you want to play, live and let live, and stop looking down on other people for having different tastes from you. You'll be a lot happier.
All this rant about mmo-style infinitely long experiences reminds me about how great a short/mid sized game can be. Enjoy, complete and move on to another world, a new experience. How great is that? Another developer, another point of view, opening your mind. New ideas and trends come from underground currents. Defending a mainstream trend in the name of evolution while discarding smaller trends is a contradiction.
Dude, it's ok to like popcorn. Just don't pretend it's the same as caviar. I personally don't like caviar and love popcorn, but I recognize the quality difference in the two. One takes more effort and care to produce and has a more multifaceted taste. When it comes to games I tend more towards caviar in this analogy but also enjoy popcorn games. It's just silly to say "game X designed to make as much money as possible is clearly better than game Y that was designed to be an interesting experience because game X makes a lot more money" TA is also not the only site that extols the virtues of JRPGs on the App Store. But I'm not even a huge JRPG maniac, I just play them occasionally. It's just silly to write them off. Also, if the games that make the most money are the best, you really ought to consider over seas markets for this analysis. The Chinese spend significantly more than westerners on freemium games, so whatever they are playing must be the best games in the world, by your logic.
Freemium games are like mmo such as WOW with a different pay mode, instead of monthly subscription you pay as you like, and you play it everyday. Premium games are like pc/console games, you pay once and play through once. I play both type.
Same for you, who are you to say 'The best freemium mobile games are simply better than best paid mobile games' as well ? The games/records/films which sell the most arent always the best, the masses often go for a pop song, or a free throwaway game like Candy Crush. Doesnt matter its the best. At Touch Arcade i think the majority like paid games, for many people they have an iphone as its the 'in thing' and rarely download many games. The only ones they will are the 'famous' ones they might see on tv via adverts. Doesnt mean they're the best
I think most people whether casual, core, pro-premium or pro-freemium, none of them think timers and limited lives are always a positive. Certainly, there are aspects of timers that might help structure the game session and are useful from a player or game design perspective but I can't imagine there's any player who plays these games who hasn't at least thought a few times "I wish I had more energy" or "I wish that timer would hurry up". Certainly, I've also felt this way playing certain premium games before, but of course, with much less prevalence. The better question is whether anyone would accept paying simply for that privilege. I'd say the vast majority say no. The difference between playing a game for a few bucks vs a game for free and having to deal with inconveniences is seemingly preferable... and I might be inclined to agree in some cases. It's kind of like... say I'm playing a new console game. If I paid $60 and there's a timer to prevent me playing more than 2 online matches an hour OR no timer, I'd almost certainly say "the timer is BS". Reduce the price of the game to free and I'd find the timer still BS, but kind of a bearable BS. It's free after all and it's hard to beat the value of free.
Because in the eyes of the elitist OP, profit > quality. He has no clue what he's talking about so now he is reaching and trying to further fuel/troll the fire.
This. A million times this. And there's room for both. People can enjoy both. But those who prefer to have their minds blown over just being entertained will lament if they start having a hard time finding movies that blow their minds simply because it's not profitable enough. Imagine your favorite writers, directors, artists compromising on their visions because it's just more profitable to make an action movie with cars falling out of a plane than to make people think deeply about something. This is what's happening with F2P -- it's not leaving premium games much room to breathe, and they're becoming less and less common.
Wow, and I don't mean the game... Just wow. In wow, you pay the sub, and both parties have the same chance to get items in game, it has a shop for additional vanity items, but you can't pay your way to the top of pvp or pve. If person A buys a $15 mount and person B does not, it doesn't effect gameplay. In CoC, both parties, if they pay the same amount, say the 14.99 sub fee of wow, then person A decides to purchase an additional $15 gem bundle while person B does not, who has the advantage? That isn't skill, that's pay to win, however you slice it.
You wish there were just two sides. This thread is a mess. F2P vs paid. Gameplay hours vs gameplay experience. Casual vs non-casual. Competitive vs playing for fun. Measuring how great a game is based on it's player base/hours spent/longevity/memory of the experience/income etc. I can't keep track of this. And the OP pops up every now and then just to stir the pot with his bizzare remarks.
You already paid So you are considered one of the pay to win players!(joking) If you don't pay for the expansions, you will be lower level than other players too! Anyway, you are right some freemium games are pay to win, but the best freemium games do require some skills(not as demanding as wow or starcraft of course). Bad freemium: you pay, you will be top 1, you don't pay, you will lose forever. After a while nobody plays the game. Good freemium: you pay, you still need skills to be top 1, you don't pay, you "feel" you have a chance to be top players. wow: everyone pays, everyone is equal. I am a bad player, why would I want to pay and get owned by others? Subscription is not as good as freemium(from developer's view) because bad players won't be paying where in freemium, bad players pay a lot more! Let's say wow is a freemium, everyone starts at level 1. If you pay, you level up 3 times faster than others, and you can purchase weapon and equipments with real money. You will own others because you are higher level, regardless you are a bad player or not. If you don't pay, eventually you will reach lvl 90 after 3 mth? Grind the best items after 6 mth? Then you can punish the "pay to win" players. So as a freemium wow developer, I will push out contents faster than you can catch up, by the time you reach lvl 90, I have already raised the level cap to 120. This thread is about Freemium vs Paid, I think it can be rephrased as mmo vs single player games.
There are more than enough third party sources to buy character/gear/gold from and skip the grind completely, or even services to grind your character for you and you get to stand in front of iron forge and look cool all day long. Blizzard just chooses to not offer a first party solution. I sold my first WOW account for almost $2000 although translated into hours it was pennies per hour. Had there been a first party solution I would have definitely paid $$$ to skip some of the grinds. I would have made way more money if I was even working in McDonald's with these hours. It is funny, in every RPG be it WOW or Final Fantasy or Skyrim, there are contents you can not clear until you grind past areas to level up your characters. Yet in freemium games it is considered a "pay wall" because players who don't feel like killing 1000 skeletons has an option to skip this. I still expect WOW to go freemium at some point, like most of its MMORPG competitors. The latest expansion delays the inevitable, but Blizzard would easily make more money going freemium AND provide players like myself a chance to return to the game, if I can skip some of the grind. I don't care whether someone spends 20000 hours or $2000 to get an advantage, in either case it is an luxury I choose to not indulge in, why does it matter if another player chooses to do so?
This, is what sets the bar for this entire ridiculous argument. It is what separates the generation gaps IMO. Call it nostalgia, call it a dying breed, call it whatever you wish, but your opinion that it is better to skip through these daunting quests to reach the same result as someone who grinds through these quests is where the FREEMIUM/premium line is drawn. I find it more rewarding to complete the game fully, you want to skip the boring stuff to do the fun stuff, I get that, my son is the same way. We will never agree on this topic, you feel my opinion is outdated, I feel your opinion misses the point of experiencing a game fully. Take it for what it is, the point I want you to understand is, chart topping games like CoC or candy crush, even though a niche and profitable game, are not better quality and more lasting than premium games that I enjoy. Profit is not subjective, you are correct there, but quality is very subjective.
To hitmantb: The last Final Fantasy that required grinding of any sort came out when Bush Sr was president. The last Dragon Quest that required grinding was Dragon Quest 1. Both series are well-known for letting clever players finish the games at absurdly low levels. Which is to say, you can spend your time grinding, or if that doesn't appeal to you, you can use your brain. The problem I run into with a lot of F2P games (but not all of them) is there is no way to circumvent the wall by being clever. You either put in the time or you put in the money. That's my issue with MMOs as well. It sounds to me like you know a lot about the stuff you like and not much about the stuff you don't. That's pretty normal and it wouldn't be a problem if you weren't trying to speak authoritatively about the stuff you don't know much about. This is why live and let live is usually a good policy.
I don't think anyone expects to be able to beat any dungeon in skyrim right off the bat, the difference between skyrim and a game with In App Purchases is that in Skyrim you can be sure that Bethesda didn't balance the game in a way to incentivise buying IAP (because there isn't any) and if you don't like grinding you can always use cheats and/or mods which are included/available for free in the PC version.
This is simply not true. I've beaten Final Fantasy VII a few times, and it was easier each time to play through simply because I knew what needed to be done. No grinding was ever needed, just do the annoying random battles no more than needed to get through the game. I've gotten all the elite enemies and final boss beaten with character levels in the 30s or 40s. I'm pretty sure Sepiroth's HP scales with level because the battle was much easier with lower levels than with everyone on 99, doing the same maximum 9999 damage. Some RPGs will scale the enemy stats to line up with my character levels. If done right, no grinding would ever be necessary to make it to the end fighting only the minimum needed to get through. Eternal Eden on the PC was an oldie I picked up several years ago. That game has a fixed number of battles that can ever be played. No random battles, and once an enemy group is beaten, they are forever gone, never to respawn. It's still a good game, despite using very little assets not from RPG Maker. I liked how the limited battles worked here, and everyone could have maximum stats and top items when the game nears its end.
Single player games generally have less depth and competition than multiplayer games, and less grinding as well. I agree we are starting to get into multiplayer (top freemium games) vs single player (top premium games) here, freemium's sustained revenue is what keeps multiplayer games running with fresh new contents. The problem with enemies that scale with you is you never feel your characters became more powerful and you feel less satisfied as a result. It is a doubled edged sword in game design, that is why most of the big hits don't go this route. On FF: FF7 had "low" grinding because you could not walk five tiles without triggering an annoying "land mine" (random battle) which IS the grind. Again, one of the greatest games 20 years ago, completely outdated today. There is a reason the premium FF series are all non-factor games today, even Square itself has fully embraced the freemium model and their freemium games make most of their profit today to keep the company alive. Taste of the general population has evolved as we have less patience for the crap we had to put up with 20 years ago. You look at a game like Brave Frontier, it captures everything that made FF games addictive to a huge amount of the population, and eliminated all the fat. Storyline? There is Game of Thrones for that, I don't need to watch a B-grade animated movie when I just want to kill things, progress my character and get loot. Exploration? I don't want to spend my time walking around, doing fetch quests and figuring out where to go next (and trigger all the annoying random battles in the process). Brave Frontier tells me exactly what the next area is one click and I am there in one click. It is much faster in pacing, you accomplish way more in less time. Same combat style, same character progression, same party building, all in 2015 format, that is why Brave Frontier is more successful than any of the recent Final Fantasy "premium" games (and I don't mean the mobile ports, I am sure Brave Frontier is more successful than any of FF's recent console releases!), because it keeps the fun and trims the fat. How many people actually played FF for story line and exploration, not party building, combat and loot? Looking at Brave Frontier's success vs modern FF games, you guys are the minority. Success/profit = better quality, because financial resource gap is so overwhelming, the little guy has zero chance of keeping up with production value, contents and updates.
