http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Tactics "A spinoff title, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, was released for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2003 and a sequel to that title, Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, was released in 2007 for the Nintendo DS." I don't know if you can call these sequels to FFT with a straight face . . . The franchises you named are all niche franchises in 2015. Yes there is room for them from players who followed the series. If they ever made a Jagged Alliance 3 I will probably play it too, with full understanding it is only interest to me and I will never pretend it is a top/proper game for 2015. I will give it that RTS is not doing all that hot either, even Starcraft is fading away with games like Clash of Clans being the current generation strategy poster child for kids born after 2000. Can you blame them for not being interested in Civilization (the best game I could never get into even during its prime years) and Heroes of Might Magic series? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CBsk5kJ2nc Honestly COC is very very hard to play and anti-big spender to a degree (as in you will not dominate with money alone, you will only speed up the process to obtain a high level base). You really have to be good at reading enemy defense, bait for their traps, cast your spells perfectly. You can see when played at championship league level it is ultra competitive. It is also the only mobile game with a significant twitch following (you will be surprised how many "serious" games it beat).
I 100% agree with you. In my opinion: Freemuim done right =Gamelof ex.Asphalt 8 Freemuim done wrong = EA ex. Real Racing 3
By the logic you are using GTA is a niche game, although San Andreas has been ported to iOS and android and remastered on XBOX 360 and is still getting plenty of sales after a decade.
Yes, you can call them sequels with a straight face. The development teams were essentially the same as FFT, and the director himself, Yasumi Matsuno, considered them proper sequels in the series. And again, you're speaking authoritatively on topics you don't know about. Fire Emblem's latest installment is its highest-selling installment by a good measure. Heroes Of Might & Magic 6 was one of the higher-selling Heroes games, Civ 5 has sold more copies than most games ever will, Total War is one of the two things keeping SEGA alive, and Super Robot Wars continues to sell extremely well in Japan in spite of it being mediocre crap for the last 20 or so years. These are relevant franchises that are reaching a wider audience today than ever, which means they're selling to more than just existing fans. Are they selling tens of millions? No, and they never will. You can count the number of games that sell tens of millions each generation on one hand. But they are reaching a bigger audience than ever before, and they are making good money for their publishers. So again, I question your correlation between success and speed of play. Another example: Pokemon is the biggest-selling RPG of them all, and it moves like molasses. You're jumping around all over the place, which makes it hard to have a conversation with you, but if I were to create one over-arching response to you, I think it would be something like this. The quality (or fun) of a game is a subjective thing that could be determined by any criteria a person desires. For you, that is popularity and success. For someone else, it's the number of ducks they can dress up in pantyhose. It's a nebulous thing, and it's nearly impossible to speak authoritatively about as a result. Keeping in mind that tastes vary wildly, it's good business to have as diverse a portfolio as possible. You never know when one genre or type of game is going to cede to another, and it behooves the wise content provider to be prepared for such eventualities. In addition, small investments towards niche markets can yield a decent, reliable return on investment which helps add to a healthy bottom line. That is why Nintendo makes Pokemon *and* Fire Emblem *and* Wii Party *and* Zelda *and* Mario instead of simply focusing on only the titles that sell best. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is extremely risky, as Zynga (on the free-to-play side) and SEGA (on the premium side) are finding out right now. A diverse company is a healthy one so long as it doesn't overextend itself, while a specialized one is highly vulnerable. That extends to the game industry itself. A diverse spread of games covering a diverse spread of genres with a diverse set of payment models aimed at diverse demographics is extremely healthy. The alternative, simply focusing on exactly what sells and nothing else, is what nearly killed the American comic book industry in the late 90s. I think people unfairly crap on the free-to-play model a lot. You seem to be annoyed by that, but you are demonstrating the exact same ignorance and lack of fairness in your arguments. If you're trying to deliberately provide an unpleasant boogeyman for the free-to-play haters to point at in support of their fears, congratulations, you're doing a great job. If you're trying to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you, you're doing an awful job, because you're even managing to push away people who share *some* of your views, let alone people who completely disagree with you. Thanks again for the interesting discussions, but I'm going to exit stage right here. Some interesting points have been made but I have more constructive things to be working on. I'll see you at the reunion in ten years!
And he's actually encouraging them to do so... Encouraging developers to make blatant ripoffs? What's next? *sigh* I've had enough of this thread.
If I may add on the ways a freemium experience is fundamentally different than a premium experience: A one-time purchase definitely provokes less anxiety than not quite knowing what you're diving in. Once you spent a good amount of time in a game, it can be heart breaking to have to chose between leaving it aside or having to spend who-knows how much more in it. In a way, people can be taken as captives since they're reluctant to lose their time investment. Of course the paidmium model isn't new. You can think for instance about the options when you buy a car. But at least you have a clear idea of the spending possibilities when you shop, something which is really hard to provide for apps with IAP. A their root, because there's so many fundamental differences between the provided player experiences, the premium genre is never going to disappear. It just fills different needs. And where is needs is a market.
Freemium games have the psychological equivalence of a digital keychain pet from the 90's. It's the same old Pepsi, just a new way of presenting it (usually nostalgics are heavily involved). You watch it grow over time, with small spurts of attention. I honestly feel sorry for anyone that thinks that the Freemium model is a breakthrough in gaming excitement. It's different and new for some people, and "new" can be a powerful distraction from actual substance. That won't be the case in the next few years.
There are many legendary paid games too, for example, Monument Valley is a very good puzzle game in my mind. Also, people prefer to play free game, after they try the game and feel good, they will play more in game. Pay first is always harder than pay later. I paid several bucks in League of Angels: Fire Raiders to collect more heroes because I feel the necessary in PVE. But it is difficult for me to pay few bucks for a game that I never try.
And that game involves way more grinding than necessary unless you play it every day to max out the reward multiplier.
Arrrgh some of the posts from hitmanb are so depressing Again CoC and other Freemium games make billions, lots of people play them. Doesnt mean they're the best games. If you like freemuim fair enough, if you like premium fair enough. But to say stuff like 'if i wanted to play a WoW clone i wouldnt bother with Order & Chaos', the difference is i can play Order and Chaos on my phone whenever i want, i cant be so flexible with World of Warcraft. But its utterly stupid to think that all because Clash of Clans is #1 in a lot of countries that its the best game of all time. It does appeal to the more casual user but its not going to go down in history as one of the best most iconic games etc. Freemium is basically set up so the user gets drawn in and has to spend more and more to get past timers and other levels etc. I prefer premium myself but each to their own. But to say the best freemium games (eg Clash of Clans) are better than the best premium games is an absolute joke
COC will go down as the most iconic game for the current generation of mobile gamers, the game they grew up with. I doubt you have ever played a high level 50vs50 clan war, no paid game on mobile comes anywhere near its skill, depth and competitiveness. COC is the only mobile game with a large twitch following. People watch twitch to see high level players fight each other and it is certainly not who spends most money. The only thing money does for you in COC is to obtain the entire toolbox sooner which also exposes you to higher level opponents. Everyone is on even level from match-making stand point. Mobile games that try to emulate PC/console experiences all have failed miserably. Order and Chaos is one of them. Because mobile games require a completely different design and pace. A watered down WOW wannabe is not as appealing as Heroes Charge which was completely optimized for mobile DOTA/WOW players.
As He spaketh So it came to pass For His word was truth He is Hitmantb And He really, really likes Clash of Clans
People who have no clue about what they're writing about probably shouldn't. I have managed a top 200-300 troop in Battle Camp for about 18 months. The balancing factor for the non-spending tiers we place in is the limited energy system. Yes, you can pay to break the limited resource, and there are plenty of ePeen challenged people who fund the game for the rest of us doing so by spending tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars in a single event to partially to outright totally break the competitive aspect (they are basically throwing their wallets at one another at the very top and I say let them). However, the rest of us, which is 99.9% of all the people playing the game, are engaged in a team competition where there is a finite amount of real time with 6 energy recharging per hour to a cap of 5 energy. With that, plus whatever prize energy you earn in previous events, we have to coordinate and play more skillfully than the other troops. Likewise, we must function within this same resource limited framework for leveling and evolving our teams between events. Remove the limited energy and, poof, game is broken for everyone inside of 30 days as much as it for the few thousand whales who, for whatever reason, enjoy pummeling one another with their credit lines and bank accounts. The idea that limited energy is any different than limited ore / coins / redstone / etc. that exist in premium games is an artificial delusion clung to by people too small minded to realize they aren't different at all. But keep on claiming they are if it helps you sleep at night or fluff your own ePeen for board cred among the mob.
I think COC will become just as iconic as Aiden Pearce's iconic cap®™ from ubisoft's 2014 open world game Watch_Dogs. It won't. Similar to the cap pictured above there are way too many games like Clash of Clans that are also played by masses of people meaning that COC doesn't really stand out. There is nothing really iconic about it. Here are screenshots from 7 of the top 10 top grossing games on the google play store (in no particular order): While scrolling through this list, did you suddenly stop at the fifth picture and think "Holy shit, man, that was such a good game, I don't know how they managed to do literally everything so much better than the others on this list"? I doubt it. COC currently has ~700 viewers on twitch, making it the third most watched game available on mobile after Hearthstone (~46500 viewers) and XCOM Enemy Within (~800 viewers). If you call that a large twitch following you need to seriously rethink your definition of a "large following". I also find it funny how XCOM, a game you slammed earlier appears to be more popular. (And I'm not even counting other franchises that are more popular and also available on mobile in cluding Minecraft and World of Tanks). There are almost 15 times as many people watching other people play RuneScape, a 14 year old browser game, than people watching COC.
There is a corollary to this: the freemium model actually lets you pay for entertainment already received and validated and can be less bothersome than premium. While my per title expenditure for premium games is generally lower than some of my freemium favorites. For example, the biggest premium spending is on Junk Jack X (over $30) because I understand that it's the fluff IAP in the many updates that keep the updates coming, and on Warhammer Quest ($33) because, well, Games Workshop , I have still wasted dozens of times more money on premium games than I ever have on freemium ones. My cap for an unproven freemium game is the same as my general cap for an unproven premium game, $5-$10. Then, if I find I'm still playing the game a month or two down the road, I will pay when I see there is something I want, even if it's as pedestrian as storage because I have *already* received value. Dropping $5-$10 a month for a game you're playing every single day is NOT being ripped off, and NOT being held hostage. It's always odd hearing how the most anti-freemium people frame the relationship. Yes, there are varying degrees of intentional frustration and/or power limits built into these games that you too can overcome with the power of C.A.S.H., but if you never spend more than you feel you're getting out of the game to begin with, what risk is there if the game suddenly takes a nosedive and goes in the crapper? The most I've "lost" from a freemium title is $20 on a single title because I broke my own $5-$10 limit before I'd seen just how shallow the long game was. Meanwhile I waste hundreds of dollars every year for premium offerings because the games turn out to not be good enough to hold my attention for more than a handful of play sessions before I move on.
