The comics are by Dorkly, but the watermarks have been removed. Please credit the authors.
Meh. None of these were born like that. DLC was born because after the game was successful devs thought “cool let’s develop some more content and sell that as well”.
Early access was born because “shit we literally starve while we develop our game because we have no money, because our game isn’t done yet to sell it”.
Free to play was born… Well, pretty much like that probably.
But the other two were made greedy after the fact, they’re not inherently an evil system. Even free to play can work when only selling cosmetics, where everyone has the same gameplay.
You just have to check and see how the developers of a game behave, how each system is implemented.
Free to play was born… Well, pretty much like that probably.
I’m no gaming historian, but I think F2P was first proved as a concept with the hats in Team Fortress 2.
The TF2 hats definitely proved the profitability of a cosmetic cash shop, but free-to-play or freemium games are older than that. Both RuneScape and MapleStory were early 00s and Turbine were also an early adopter of transitioning their MMOs from subscription based to freemium with both SWTOR and Dungeons and Dragons Online which at least initially massively increased their profit and sort of proved the viability of the model.
You can blame corporate all you want, but in the end it’s the fuckers who end up buying this shit that enables it and makes it an industry standard.
This comic was created by a gamer, sitting on the real pile of trash, consisting of the countless untouched games, bought during sales.
Stupid Horse armor….
Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all.
70 bucks too
