Hacker News Reader

Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how it’s free? I know two business models for free things, pay to win micro-transactions like EA and selling out user’s data like FB, and I’m not a fan of either of them.

View on HN

I am with you. Subscription services align customer and developer interests best.

That said, the second best modern model is probably theirs. They sell stash tab space (item storage) and cosmetic items only.

They do not play psychological games that many free to play games do. I imagine that when their revenue starts to slip, they may go down the more dubious road as is the normal pattern. But for now, it has my approval.

I haven’t played hots in years now, but there were loot boxes last I saw. The system also encourages you to spend in game gold to get better loot box contents, but you need that gold to avoid paying real money for new heroes. Those new heroes were usually overpowered on release, or at least, nobody knew how to counter them, so they were great for peoples mmr. I wish it had just been pay to play with optional costumes for sale.

I played hots and it wasn't bad at all. New heroes would be first ban pick in ranked when overpowered anyway, and they usually stayed like that a couple of weeks until they were balanced.

I'm completely fine with that monetization since you still can't beat better players with money and you can still do everything without spending a penny. You at most get a tiny MMR inflation for a week or two if you buy every new hero on release (which wasnt even that often) and that was nowhere near enough to jump a higher league. Hell, given that it still didn't make them enough money maybe it was too little monetization..

Interesting. I’ll give it a shot once I reach lvl60 in wow classic.

Honestly f2p to me means don't bother.

I've really come to enjoy Good old Games https://www.gog.com

They have Diablo 1 (+ Hellfire) available for 9.99 (but goes on sale)

(That said there's a huge "Do not sell my personal information" link on the diablo page)

I have enjoyed torchlight 1 and 2 quite a bit. It's been a while since I played diablo 1/2 so I can't compare in my head. I recall there was more clicking in diablo.

in diablo 1 you had to click for every single attack of your character. In diablo2 you didn't have to do it, however most of your attacks would be special attacks, meaning you would have to click all the time anyway (except maybe if you had a skill that you could use all the time while holding). I usually played the assassin and had to click nearly as much as in diablo 1. However, it was enjoyable either way to me. More relevant for the enjoyment in "feeling" would be the sound of your hits and if it really felt like you hit them visually. In my opinion e.g. Titanquest couldn't get that feeling right. However, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile could (Torchlight is okay in that regard, but not quite as good). Still, my favorites remain Diablo1+2.

They have the most genius game mechanic/ economic model.

So... You play the game to get loot. The more you play the more loot you get. So of course you wanna save the loot. So you put it in your stash( all players start with 3 stashes) , for safe keeping. The better it gets more loot you get. The moment you start getting the feel of the game (it is one deep game) you discover trading with other players. To trade with other players you discover premium stash tabs.... One tab is around 5 usd. But u need to buy game coins so u always have almost enough for one more stash.

So a premium tab is like a store front where u can display items for sale to other players. So naturally one starts buying more tabs. And more tabs. And then there are the specialty tabs that organize all the loot. Coz why do it manually when u can pay for a stash that auto sorts loot while you gather even more loot...

And suddenly you realize. You have 27 stashes for a total value of 300 usd... Most you have bought one the weekly stash sale.

And that is how PoE is financed. No walls no hidden stuff. Just loot.

yeh also cosmetics in case you wanna look good gathering all the loot.

PoE is free because of selling cosmetic items. There is no selling user data. I'm not even sure what kind of data a game would have to sell about it's users anyway.

You can see why their model is working. Almost everyone in the game sports some kind of cosmetic effect.

Of course, I’d be remiss to point out that you really need to shell out to get enough stash space to prevent frustration. One of the $60 supporter packs will get you just enough points and also give an alternate look if you need it. But for the same amount of money as a retail game you get a lot of content.

The game could just read the files on your computer or report your internet browsing. Games have all sorts of access to peoples machines. Game privacy policies often contain some invasive permissions, check them out sometime

You would be amazed by the amount of data "anti-cheat" spyware called BattleEye amasses about customers of their clients.

Game interaction creates lots and lots of data. I don't know how you'd monetize that data (selling doesn't magically monetize, the buyer still has to figure out how to profit)---but that might just be a limit of my imagination.

Path of Exile locks some player QoL behind microtransactions (not pay to win but you're going to have a less fun time without it).

Namely, stash tabs, as inventory takes up a lot of space. It's not too expensive though.

Yes you can get a good assortment of tabs for less than the price of a new release game. I never buy mtx in games but didn't feel bad about this.

Though, some players are a little sore over how they seem to be adding very specialised tabs in new leagues. There is of course a perverse incentive at play to design content to require tabs that can be sold to us.

They run on the idea that players like to customize their characters beyond what's available in game and need the additional QoL account upgrades beside what comes by default on the account. Guild Wars 2 runs on similar idea but unlike PoE it's B2P but at the same time it comes with very generous F2P version; there are of course still F2P limitations - set to keep away shady people and to convince players to purchase the game.

I'm playing both and in comparison to majority of MMOs around both offers something I'd describe as fair microtransactions.

There are quite a few games that are neither pay 2 win nor selling data. They are the middle ground of cosmetics only. All of Valve free games fall under this category.

I don't know, but can't you buy loot crates in valve games that have non cosmetic abilities?

All of their free games do have "loot crates" system, but in Dota 2 and CS:GO, it's only cosmetics. TF2, you can also get weapons and in theory all weapons are "balanced", though in practice perfect balance doesn't exist, and also having more options available + being able to switch loadout during a match can be more OP. That being said, the weapons themselves aren't very rare, and you can get most of them fairly quickly, or craft the ones you need. Hats are more rare but those are again just cosmetic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com