Crytek and Electronic Arts have been really open to the free-to-play idea and EA’s Chief Executive, John Riccitiello, decided to explain why his company is so friendly to this particular model. Riccitiello believes that PC is the fastest growing platform for video games and that there’s a lot of power in free-to-play. Imagine that, and some people thought that PC gaming was dead due to current generation consoles. Well, PC gaming is not going anywhere guys so deal with it.
Riccitiello continued and said that free-to-play is anything but free:
“We have lots of games that are ‘free-to-play’, where paying users are giving us ten, twenty, thirty dollars a month. What happens is the first game play is free, but then when you get into the game you have to pay for things.”
Now this really worries us. A free-to-play game should not be a pay-to-win game. Plain and simple. A free-to-play title should offer every major game feature for free. If EA tries to force such things, their games will definitely suffer. In fact, that’s the main issue PC gamers have with most of those F2P games that are currently available. Pay-to-win does not equal to free-to-play, and that’s a fact.
Let’s hope that EA won’t F this up and will do their best to offer truly F2P titles in the future. And if they don’t, well… others will. PC gaming is not going anywhere and is currently evolving to something new. A new era is about to begin and we are really looking forward to it as it’s an era where filled with lots of F2P titles, while at the same time more indie devs will be able to offer their titles to more gamers (through Kickstarter campaigns).
Exciting times are ahead of us. Are you ready?
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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