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Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

It sounds to me like what you are saying is that developers have discovered it is best to offer an amazing free product to the whole world in order to get them involved in the game, and then this attracts rich people, who then go ahead and pay for the whole things themselves. But if you don't attract the little guy with free stuff, you don't get a great game, and so you don't attract the rich people.

Seems like a good system that everyone happy with. If they weren't happy they would go play other games that aren't free.

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Hardly. The whales are not always rich: often they’re just addict-type personalities who are extremely irresponsible with their money.

It’s not a healthy business model for consumers, but ever since I saw the start of this industry trend I’ve come to view consumers of it (in aggregate) as being of poor judgement if not outright stupid. So they kind of reap what they sew, and the rest of us must work harder to find quality. Just like in everything else really.

They don’t attract rich people, they attract gamblers. And they are incentivized to convert more people into becoming gamblers.

Some games are starting to remove the gambling. The article's author is outdated on Rocket League which has since removed the lootboxes. Valorant never had any.

Gambling addicts are financing these games. Most of them are not rich at all.

Reminds me again of "when you don't have to pay for it, you're the product, not the customer". Here, all the free players are opponents necessary to attract the whales.

But that applies even to paid games. It's very hard to attract players to games if it's mainly multiplayer and there's no one to play against. Both players and developers do want an active playerbase, and free to play significantly lowers the barrier of entry for potential players.

So maybe free-to-play simply has to be the future of multiplayer games?

And yet they put me off because you're constantly confronted with mechanisms designed to make you pay. I don't mind paying for a game, but once I'm playing, I want to focus on the game, not the payment.

It's not attracting rich people, it's attracting addicts.

In all fairness, Rocket League may be the only "free to play" game that warrants the term "amazing". I'm glad it keeps something like RL around, but let's be real: this game model tends to rake in the cash even with the most generic games.

Frankly I'm torn: people can buy digital stickerbomb skins if they want, but it's obviously a bit of a "cheat code" to a profitable game and probably takes a lot of developers/money away from more interesting parts of the industry.

It'd also be more forgivable if it didn't seem popularity creates nearly immortal games that too often become stagnant and overrun with toxic players despite still being profitable enough to "keep alive", i.e. payday 2, planetside 2

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