Spiral Knights

[Don]

I played this game for about an hour, thought it was actually kind of cool, and then read about its pricing structure (which has no indication anywhere in the game whatsoever) and it's quite possibly the stupidest F2P structure I know of. This game looks like some kind of overhead 2D Diablo platformer. You got this energy meter that starts at 100, and when it hits 0 you cannot play the game. You regen roughly 100 energy per day, and it's about enough to get you to do roughly equivalent of dailys in a MMORPG, and after that you got to pay them money or you can use the in game currency to buy the energy from the guys who paid $ for it.

Now a bunch of people claim they can make enough in game currency to buy the energy currency, but this is clearly a Ponzi theme, because it takes energy to earn currency. When your energy hits 0 you cannot even do anything. We're not talking about reduced effectiveness or 'bash your brain repetitive' here. You simply can't get to the dungeon you need to get anything. This means your currency earning rate is fixed, and since enemies don't respawn per level you don't even have an option like 'I'm just going to camp this spot for 20 hours earning more gold'. It goes without saying anything that is actually awesome requires a boatload of energy to buy. So I guess currently there are people who bought energy and sold them relatively for cheap that's sustaining this economy, or maybe people are just lying about their ability to play the game without spending money. Yes if you limit yourself to play the game an hour a day repeatedly and build up a lot of normal currency I guess you can eventually buy a lot of energy currency, but I think you'd have a better time being a gold farmer where at least they won't limit the time you have to play the game. I'd rather get an 8 or 16 hour shift one time instead of logging on for 10 days in a row for an hour to meet some quota. It's said that MMORPG is like a job, but usually that only refers to those who are super dedicated to succeeding at the high level. Well now you can play a MMORPG like a job for just being a medicore player.

I guess this could be a good game if you don't mind blowing a ridiculous amount of money just so you can play the game, or that you know some suckers selling you energy currency for cheap. However my experience is that there really aren't that many suckers in the world. For every "I made money from MMORPG" story you can find 100 of them where your return is about 1/100th of minimum wage labor. And in Spiral Knights, you can't even work extended hours at minimum wage, as the game will not allow you to do that!

[Shellie]

Sounds like a lot of Facebook RPG games.

[Don]

I later found out this appears to be a prevalent model in Facebook games, but I was under the impression Facebook games probably aren't full fledged games so it's assumed you wouldn't be playing it the whole time anyway. I don't like this model because it seems to be saying either you think your game is so bad no one is ever going to play more than an hour a day anyway, or that you're hoping people just going to spend a ton of money over a rate that'd make MMORPGs look cheap. MMORPGs are probably the most comprehensive and biggest games out there, so if you're going to charge a rate that's comparable if not more than a MMORPG's $15/month I expect to have a complete package too, and of course a Facebook game can't possibly come close to the size of say, WoW. Yes gameplay matters too but it's not like MMORPGs is lacking in those either.

[Kupek]

I don't like this model because it seems to be saying either you think your game is so bad no one is ever going to play more than an hour a day anyway

I think that an hour a day for videogames is typical among adults with jobs. I average much less than 7 hours a week. It's rare that I play more than 3 hours a week, and it's frequently 0. An hour a day for any game sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps they're going after more casual players.

[Don]

I don't like this model because it seems to be saying either you think your game is so bad no one is ever going to play more than an hour a day anyway

I think that an hour a day for videogames is typical among adults with jobs. I average much less than 7 hours a week. It's rare that I play more than 3 hours a week, and it's frequently 0. An hour a day for any game sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps they're going after more casual players.

I tend to think of casual games as 'games you can play in small amounts per day', not 'games you can ONLY play in small amounts per day'. The concept of an 'hour of power' goes way back at the dawn of the MMORPG era, and there's nothing wrong with the idea of having say an hour per day of playtime that yields drastically increased results, such that a casual guy who plays an hour a day is only behind a hardcore 8/hour day guy by say a factor of two. However Spiral Knights (and sounds like a lot of other similar stuff on Facebook) charges you an exoribtant amount of money for going over your daily limit, an amount that'd easily exceed any monthly fee for MMORPG for going over your limit. I don't see how that's at all 'casual friendly' unless the point is that nobody would ever want to play more than an hour a day.

After all, the game's only source of revenue is via selling the 'energy' currency (essentially playing time). There is no other source of revenue for this game. I just don't see how the game can even have a workable financial model if the goal isn't to ripoff the guys who happen to go over their daily limit.

While having a cash shop that is based off of stupidity of buyers is nothing new, in most cash shops I can see how the stuff you buy could be considered as valuable investment depending on what you value in a game. For example EQ2X charges well below market price for the game it offers, and it's subsidized by a cash shop that caters to guys who really like to build virtual homes and decorate them. Therefore you can get a great deal for the money you paid (possibly none) because the homebuilders subsidize the entire game. I have a hard time supporting a game where cash shop is based solely on player's stupidity, as selling game time can only be viable if you assume players will stupidly end up paying way more than they thought to play the game!

[Kupek]

I said casual players, not casual games. I just finished Mass Effect 2, which is very much not a casual game. But I played it in, mostly, single hour chunks over the course of four months.