I mean, yeah, why still pretend? This game going F2P is the only way for it to become financially viable in the long run, because all of their bend-aiding with small fixes had almost no impact on getting folks back into the game. Yeah, we are not dipping below 2k players at the lowest, now it’s below 3k players - and it’s only a matter of time until we are back at the 2k mark. The game going on sale only three months after release and VT2 getting a F2P weekend YET AGAIN shows how desperate the situation really is.
I think we will be seeing a switch to a F2P model after they “fixed” (lol as if) the biggest issues, so maybe around summer.
Probably never, they never did it to VT so I don’t se why they would do it here. VT2 also had a cosmetics shop (a much better one) but I see no reason to switch this to F2P.
I’m not sure a F2P weekend is an act of desperation…
to me the crafting is what needs a complete overhaul. The current system is awful.
… but yeah, I don’t know, I’m a bit disillusioned. I’ll see how we do with this. I’m currently playing with friends because the gameplay is stellar, I find it far superior to Vermintide since the mix of ranged and melee at higher difficulties really works well.
Oh well, rambling, I’m just sad to see things work out this way.
AFAIK they shut down several of their previous games in about 2 years without bothering with f2p. I presume it also has to do with renting servers based on performance - a large influx of non-paying customers might technically make them lose more money than they get. Not as much of an issue with Vermintide and the peer-to-peer system, but I think it’s not an option here.
With all the grind and premium cosmetics it sure feels like F2P just with a fifth the content. If they made the crafting more reasonable for the grind and didn’t silo characters, I would predict a lot more people would be playing (especially if the hardest difficulty was very challenging with max gear).
The issue is they just can’t make content fast enough nor do they have enough content backed to get away with going for a F2P live service model.
Destiny 2 was able to get away with it due to basically having the entire original game as free content as well as being able to promise content on a fairly consistent release schedule.
Warframe is kind of the extreme of pretty much the entire game being free while also selling skip the grind and cosmetic premiums but it’s very much the exception to the rule. Even then people get really uppity when there are long content droughts or they get to crazy with rng. On top of that every month or other month has some event or something going on.
FS doesn’t have a good history of releasing content on a schedule or quickly. It took 3 months to release crafting and in those 3 months there were:
-No new weapons
-No new classes
-No new cosmetics (benefit of the doubt it might just have been a “we are pausing this to not make people upset” kind of thing)
-No new tile sets or missions in existing tile sets
-There are still some major bugs present that were even in the beta (that box before the airlock dropdown in the hour glass still glitches out pretty regularly)
-I can’t stress enough the basic parts of the game just not working like some blessings just not triggering, some skills having broken interactions, some skills / perks just not working at all, etc
This would be considered pretty unacceptable with the amount of content in the game plus the speed of updating.
Making it free to play isn’t a magical band aid fix since F2P Live Service games comes with new expectations and would risk completely alienating the community they have left. A sale is one thing or even just a free weekend but people would be really pissed off if they just decided out of the blue to make it F2P. On top of that the induction of a wave of new players wouldn’t do much if they don’t add consistent content drops and might even have the knock on effect of stressing the servers out (noticed after recent updates the servers were a lot more jittery the day after the crafting update for example)
TL;DR: Making the game F2P would likely be impossible due to the speed content is released, current game infrastructure, and risk of driving off the remaining players while not having much benefit besides MAYBE someone buying some cosmetics.
When it was revealed that DT would be a live service game it was a huge red flag to me for this reason. Content droughts during VT were abysmal and and a big reason why I pretty much stopped playing for a while until Chaos Wastes dropped. You’d think that would be the first thing they’d want to change about their dev process and improve on if they were planning on switching to more of a GaaS model but I guess not. Said it before and I’ll say it again, last time I make the mistake of pre ordering a FS game.