What if Skyrim were ‘Free-to-Play’?

Skyrim During Night by BlackJoe23 – CC-BY Find the original here: http://fav.me/d6rsa4a

I’ve been playing video games for a very long time.  During that time, two things have not changed.

Firstly, gamers are cheap.  Games are expensive!  Even the best of us will pirate.  Yes, the more moral among us will go out and, full of guilt, slap down some money from time to time, or at the very least make a prayer to the gaming gods that we’ll give them cash when we’ve got some.  Sure, we’ll do that.  But it doesn’t change the fact that there are many great games out there, but we have only limited funds to distribute amongst them.

Secondly, because of the cheapness of gamers, developers have tried many different tricks to alleviate this.  Shareware is something that older gamers like myself would remember.  To those of you young-ins, Shareware is kind of like being able to download a large piece of DLC for free, but you’d have to pay up if you wanted to play the rest of the main campaign.  This acted like a demo – you’re free to play the first eight levels of Doom all you wanted, but the remaining sixteen (and two new weapons! Five new enemies! Buy Now!) were for paid players only.

Today’s shareware is called ‘Free-to-Play’.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s how ‘Free-to-Play’ (hereafter abbreviated to F2P) works:

1. The game itself is free to download and play.

2. Everything possible in the game is monetized – as in, making grenades, health pickups etc. cost in-game money.

3. Almost all content – but not entirely everything! – can be bought, found, scrounged or otherwise unlocked for free, though it may take a while to do so as developers want to encourage use of the part four here – I call this the ‘annoyance factor’.

4. There is a second and/or third currency that is earned in a different manner to the main in-game currency.  This can almost always be used to circumvent the annoyance factor.  If your choice in unlocking a new pistol in Dead Trigger 2 is either grinding for a few weeks of real time to buy the needed upgrades or shelling out $4.99 for “gold coins” to make it happen immediately, well, spending real money almost seems like a good choice.

This is F2P in a nutshell, but doesn’t go into the truly aggravating ways that the annoyance factor gets used.  So, to get to the point alluded to in the title, here’s an analogy – what one of my favourite games, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim would be like if it were released on an F2P model.

So, you start up your game.  It’s a big download.  “All this content is free?” you wonder aloud, as your Steam client (or Xbox, or PSwhatever) finishes saving and installing the huge file.  The main screen would look the same, except that now there are ads for purchasing sets of in-game cash and secondary currency (let’s call them “Dovah-coins”).  Oh yeah, and it’s also letting you know that if you click a button to integrate your Facebook or Twitter account and annoy your friends (who didn’t even download the game – forgot to mention that the annoyance factor is viral!), you can get free Dovah-coins.  Which would otherwise cost you money.  Real money.  That you could use to buy, you know, rent or food.

Okay, so you’ve decided you want to play the game, and that you don’t want your friends to leave you so you’ll spare them the constant Facebook updates and invitations.  Enter the race select screen.  The first on selected is, as usual, a Nord.  Very appropriate – the province of Skyrim is their homeland, after all.  However, you want to make a mage (not be be racist but Nords have a very long-standing cultural animosity towards magic users) so you scroll over to Breton, only to find out that Bretons need to be unlocked first at a cost of 30 Dovah-coins.  You almost wish you had annoyed all your friends.  You also notice that the race bonuses seem proportional to the Dovah-coin cost – the free Nords are pretty meh, while the 1000 Dovah-coin Dremora unlock comes with a complete set of Daedric equipment, and can summon Mehrunes Dagon himself!

Reluctantly, and already a bit peeved at the game, you select your Nord.  Mercifully, the game doesn’t charge you to change their name or face, with the exception of some expensive but optional tattoos.  From then until you reach Riverwood, the game is pretty familiar.  You start off as a prisoner, the Imperials try to chop off your head and you escape through the tutorial dungeon.  “Maybe this isn’t so bad?” you think.  The graphics are beautiful, for a free game, the enemies are fun to fight.  Then you try to craft something at the blacksmith.

“Why is the game making me wait fifteen real-time minutes to forge a sword?” you ask, bewildered.  Is it realism?  Sure, stuff takes time to make in real life.  But real life doesn’t let you give the smith Dovah-coins to make him finish instantly.  Then you realize that the smith only gave you enough free iron ingots to make that sword, and you try to buy more.  Turns out that each bloody ingot costs 1000 septims (in-game gold pieces, for the Elder Scrolls illiterate) plus he has to order the ingot from the East Empire Company, which will take five minutes to deliver.  Or you could pay two Dovah-coins to get them right now.

You’re not even at Bleak Falls Barrow yet and the game’s already made you wish you’d never installed it in the first place.  I won’t get into what the F2P model would to with Dragon shouts,  spell tomes, standing stones, skill points…

So my point has been made.

You may think that I utterly hate the F2P model.  Not so!  There are a handful of games that are either good or tolerable in spite of their release model.  Team Fortress 2 is a great example – it’s not less than the original version in any way, and still presumably makes Valve money.  Dead Trigger 2 for Android is of the tolerable variety.  While its unlock mechanism is lengthy and tedious without bribery, the game itself is simple and fun enough that I can’t complain too much.  League of Legends – while I hate the player base with a passion, the game itself is wonderful, charging mostly to unlock champions to add to your roster, with enough free champions in rotation to give everyone some exposure.

I guess the lesson here is that F2P is possible to do right, but in most cases it just seems like a developer said “In how many ways can we milk money out of gullible fools?” which, to be frank, makes me feel a little ill.  I’d rather they said “In how many ways can we make a great game?”.

I paid good money for Skyrim and its DLC expansions, and I guarantee that if it were F2P, Bethesda wouldn’t have seen a cent of it.