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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. There are ways to do it in which it's obvious where the business model is, and it isn't too forceful or gambling.

The World of Tanks/Battleships/Warplanes series, are free to play, with progression through experience ( you unlock higher level machines based on xp points you accumulate through playing and success at it), or through paying to go up the ladder faster or unlock special machines. You can play the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?

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The problem I have with these games is they are almost universally tuned to make them very time consuming and grindy if you don't pay.

That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay.

Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.

That is just certain games that rightfully have a bad reputation, not all F2P games. As others said, in rocket League or Fortnite you don't get advantages from buying things. You can buy levels in Fortnite, but they only unlock cosmetics.

It depends on the game. If cosmetics are the only (or primary) reward a game offers, then I still feel that it matters. If cosmetics are a purely orthogonal thing, then I agree that its not an issue.

Fortnite only has cosmetics as rewards if you buy the battle pass, which costs less than 10$ for a season that usually lasts about 3 months. That is less than for example World of Warcraft used to cost, which was more like 15$/month (iirc).

It is an ongoing massively multiplayer game which also incurs server costs, so I don't think asking for a voluntary subscription is too much.

Without having tried it myself, that does sound pretty reasonable in Fortnite's case.

Isn’t WoT the game where you can pay to get slightly better bullets? Even if that’s just a small bonus, that makes it P2W instantly.

Yes, and they used to be premium, real money shells only. But years ago they made them simply purchaseable with ingame money. But to have any of that spare, you need to play with "premium" time (which is fairly easy to get for free) or be really good at the game.

Ah, I guess that makes it a more complex thing to argue about. I only played it many years ago for a short time and remembered the golden bullets that were real money only.

Those games absolutely nickel and dime you. Get a new tank? Want to use your old, well trained crew? Pay up premium currency. Garage slots cost money, crew quarters cost money, they have that weird experience system that costs money, etc. Not to mention that the grind gets insane at high tiers, you certainly _can_ play exclusively f2p but there are a shit ton of hooks to get you to pay up.

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