Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

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Path of Exile, which is mentioned in the article, stands out as one of the only, and from my viewpoint the best way to do free-to-play. The only things that affect gameplay are specific stash tabs which offer additional storage, with the rest of the microtransactions being cosmetics. Even the lootboxes are time-exclusive, with all of the items moving to the store individually a few months after the box comes out.

People look at POE and see the $30 wings and complain about the prices, but they ignore the fact that Chris Wilson and GGG have consistently put out excellent content (with a few exceptions) every 3 months since the game came out in ~2011. This is the way to do F2P correctly.

Warframe is pretty guilty of the many resources trade off, and starting out the game you're basically forced to pay for more warframe slots because you don't really have good enough loot to grind the good loot that people will trade plat for. It's a strange design decision because one of the main draws is how fun/different the different frames and weapons are. I'm hopeful they will address that in the future new player experience rework because I believe they make the majority of their money from the primes and cosmetics.

They support the hell out of their game though. I just started playing again and there's so much new stuff to do.

Asymmetric's Kingdom of Loathing is free-to-play, with paid premiums. The pay-premium items generally translate into being the first to access new game content, and obviate any need to collect the in-game currency to access it.

The developers explicitly set a goal that all game content would be accessible by spending only in-game currency, which is usually accomplished by those players who paid real money selling their unlock items for in-game currency via the trade/market/mall system. For instance, when visiting "That 70s Volcano" via a permanent pass, the paid player can collect "volcoino" tokens, trade some of them for a single-day ticket to the zone, and sell that in the mall for meat. The unpaid player buys the ticket with meat, uses it (consuming the item), and can visit "That 70s Volcano" for one day.

There are no timers. Every day, at a specific time, everyone gets a quantum of "adventures", which are kept if not spent, up to a cap of 200. Certain actions in the game can add additional adventures. You spend your adventures, at any time you please, and then you're done until the next day.

This system has been the best free-to-play game setup I have ever experienced. The devs actively try to avoid pay-to-win. It's mainly pay-for-convenience and pay-for-prestige/fashion. Everything you can buy for real-world cash can be bought for meat, and a lot of the items that were attainable for real-world cash in the past can still be bought for [more] meat. It intentionally avoids all three of the three trade-offs in the article.

I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.