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Comment by wavesounds | Hacker News Reader

The console and pc video game industry makes plenty of money just by charging for their software. I think App developers need to stop this race to the bottom thats killing everyone. I guess its fueled by this idea that on the internet the number of users is paramount to everything. Which I think is a silicon valley culture thing that seems like its going to cause or has caused a bubble.

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I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you mention the gaming industry; I thought I'd point out the biggest new development there is giving away the games for free and charging for items, aka. F2P (Valve/TF2 is one example. They increased their revenue 12x[1]).

Is this just not another form of freemium?

[1]https://www.google.com.au/search?q=tf2+f2p+revenue

Anecdotal but from what I recall, the freemium model was an import from Korean MMOs which then got cross pollinated to other systems.

As I remember it Western MMOs/games focused on the subscription model, aside from WoW were suffering but were aware of the Free 2 play model in Asia.

That got imported over and soon after it was shown to be viable, the idea propogated through the system

So the original model is pretty old, and that is also the first place I heard about a freemium model before it began being heard in non-gaming enterprises.

Valve is not a good example for anything. They do things other companies can't, or won't, and at any rate, don't. They are the exception that proves the rule, in most things. In the TF2 case, they went to that model as an experiment, after TF2 had already been paid software for a long time and had made a lot of money for Valve. So, you don't see much of the annoying 'monetization' bullshit that you see with other titles, because there wasn't any pressure to put it in. Instead, they sold things that people wanted without impacting core gameplay which is something that no other freemium developer seems able to pull off.

I haven't encountered other examples of freemium games of that type, that weren't utter garbage.

We are making one with that goal: http://www.pathofexile.com

Like Valve, we also have a policy of not selling any items that would impact the core gameplay.

Check out the new Tribes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribes:_Ascend

Hi Rez are selling power. The expensive paid guns are a definite upgrade rather than a side grade on TF2. And their player base is dying compared to TF2 http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&appid=17080...

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