I downloaded Mobius Final Fantasy and as far as I can tell this is the first major English available freemium RPG. There's a serious effort to actually have some kind of story and it'd basically be like if you play Final Fantasy 7 and after 3 battles in the Mako Reactor you got to insert a dollar to have enough stamina to continue or come back tomorrow. Now I don't like Mobius Final Fantasy and haven't finished chapter 1, but after thinking about it, the idea of a freemium RPG is not as crazy as it sounds. Mobius Final Fantasy doesn't work because it's trying to put a lot of complicated stuff in a system where you can barely read the description of what the items do and you control is roughly the equivalent of an imprecise one button mouse, but obviously on a more traditional gaming gaming platform you wouldn't have such problems. Now I'm not suggesting an energy-based game on PC or console, as there's no way it'll work, but energy is just a gating mechanism. You have unlimited time to play in grind heavy games like Diablo or most MMORPGs and this doesn't somehow prevent these games from being successful. I'd argue that a lot of RPGs you can almost just beeline from beginning to finish which makes the game feel not like an accomplishment at all. While I don't think you should be forced to go around in a circle to level stuff up, it's also weird to never be remotely challenged as a function of pure numbers.
Obviously such a game would have to be always online just to prevent people from duping infinite premium currency. The difficulty of such a game would likely be very high, perhaps similar to Diablo 3's Inferno mode where you usually walked 3 steps out of town and then died when something hits you. Instead of being energy gated you could have the equivalent of daily quests that gives significantly better chance for loot/xp and then rest of the time you can still try to see if you make more than 3 steps out of the town on content that's presumably tuned at a P2W level (but eventually beatable). You can always spend money to bypass the difficulty. I imagine such a game would have a cost comparable to B2P (~$20) and then you'd probably be expected to spend another $20-$40 for extras or to beat the game without excessive grinding or waiting 2 years. DLCs can be provided as per usual and can probably use the Street Fighter 5/Hearthstone model where it's all in theory earnable in game but unless you got nothing better to do than doing your daily every day for an year you might want to spend money instead on something that's genuinely cool. I think the final product would look something like a Paradox game where you have the base game for relatively cheap and then 3 pages of DLCs that cost $500 if you somehow bought them all. There will probably still be ripoffs but as long as you're not the one getting ripped off it'll be okay.
Obviously such a game would have to be always online just to prevent people from duping infinite premium currency. The difficulty of such a game would likely be very high, perhaps similar to Diablo 3's Inferno mode where you usually walked 3 steps out of town and then died when something hits you. Instead of being energy gated you could have the equivalent of daily quests that gives significantly better chance for loot/xp and then rest of the time you can still try to see if you make more than 3 steps out of the town on content that's presumably tuned at a P2W level (but eventually beatable). You can always spend money to bypass the difficulty. I imagine such a game would have a cost comparable to B2P (~$20) and then you'd probably be expected to spend another $20-$40 for extras or to beat the game without excessive grinding or waiting 2 years. DLCs can be provided as per usual and can probably use the Street Fighter 5/Hearthstone model where it's all in theory earnable in game but unless you got nothing better to do than doing your daily every day for an year you might want to spend money instead on something that's genuinely cool. I think the final product would look something like a Paradox game where you have the base game for relatively cheap and then 3 pages of DLCs that cost $500 if you somehow bought them all. There will probably still be ripoffs but as long as you're not the one getting ripped off it'll be okay.
