Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
clickerheroes2.com
Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
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Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#2I love this essay. Thinking about people who've damaged their lives on addictive gaming.... those people behind the four-figure numbers on the spreadsheet of Whales. That's sad as hell.
But... it's a clicker game. A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#3it concerns me how many of my friends in free to play game dev are okay with exploting whales for profit.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#4> Also, we like games with mods and we want mods. Real-money shops make little sense with mods, when you can just download a mod to quadruple the number of rubies you get. Also, it is simply too easy to cheat.
I think this touches on an important aspect of microtransactions that to my knowledge remains largely unexamined (but maybe I'm just not reading the right critics). Specifically, games are traditionally built as tools that players use to have fun. From house rules in tabletop games to Game Genie/Action Replay to Automatic Mario rom hacks to Minecraft texture packs, players changing games is something that's been part of gaming culture for a long time. When publishers turn a game into a marketing venue for microtransactions, however, they're essentially laying claim to that entire space, turning it into a dictated, manufactured product rather than a self-directed process in the player community.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#5Awesome, good on them! Another studio who dipped their toe in the F2P model then ran away screaming (in their case, to great success) is Butterscotch Shenanigans--three brothers in Saint Louis who released the game Crashlands for mobile and Steam which I've probably sunk 300 hours into (but I'm weird like that). I really hope this works well for the Clicker Heroes 2 developers. I've enjoyed Clicker Heroes and I'm really looking forward to everything they've layed out for CH2.
Of course dropping $30 for what had been a free game is a bit of a shock on first hearing the price (price anchoring can be a major hurdle), but after reading this (and reflecting for a moment: most games that I spend any real time playing are easily worth $100 or more to me even if it's rare that I end up having to spend that much on them) I'll definitely be pre-ordering.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#6I love this essay. Thinking about people who've damaged their lives on addictive gaming.... those people behind the four-figure numbers on the spreadsheet of Whales. That's sad as hell. But... it's a clicker game. A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
This announcement has gotten my hopes up about it. My thinking is, there must be enough to it that it's not just a clicker game (which is why I stopped playing the first one; I got bored of it).
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#7I love this essay. Thinking about people who've damaged their lives on addictive gaming.... those people behind the four-figure numbers on the spreadsheet of Whales. That's sad as hell. But... it's a clicker game. A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
Clicker Heroes 1 was very good before they went with Rubies.
I threw some money in the form of Rubies into the game, when it became pay-to-win (to some degree). But really, I was way better than my clicker-guild-mates because I personally had optimized a better strategy than them. So even when others spent Rubies, I personally was able to keep up with them through simply better tactics.
Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth to pay for some in-game benefit. And I knew that if I dumped $100+ more dollars in, my superior tactics + money injection would lead me to higher clicks.
At that point, I just became disgusted with the F2P model and quit Clicker Heroes.
It was a very well programmed game, and I think getting rid of the F2P format will help this game a LOT.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#8A cute story about whales.
Jeremy Lin, the NBA player, talked about getting his teammates to play Clash Royale with him. He was shocked that everyone had better troops than him after two days. Apparently they all dropped thousands.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#9I wonder if you could still have free to play, but just had a limit to how many different things to buy. Say, you could buy everything for $60. That way, you don’t have to worry about someone spending thousands because they wouldn’t get any more than if they spent $60.
Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
#10> Also, we like games with mods and we want mods. Real-money shops make little sense with mods, when you can just download a mod to quadruple the number of rubies you get. Also, it is simply too easy to cheat. I think this touches on an important aspect of microtransactions that to my knowledge remains largely unexamined (but maybe I'm just not reading the right critics). Specifically, games are traditionally built a…
Very true, especially since some games (cough cough besethda) benefit greatly from modding, fixing bugs in the main game as well as expanding upon it.