Free to Play Starcraft II - Page 14
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Zenbrez
Canada5973 Posts
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Areaz
Denmark27 Posts
Multiplayer Low graphics settings Ladder account basically. Paid version would contain what we have now: Singleplayer Multiplayer Arcade Full graphics settings so on | ||
Asturas
Finland587 Posts
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FlilFlam
Canada109 Posts
Once SC2 streams and tournaments start getting bigger numbers, tournaments will make more money through advertisements. Blizzard makes money off any tournament with a prize pool larger than 5000 dollars, so as long as the tournament benefits in addition to the paid content, like the single player campaign, outweigh the loss of an initial sales price for all players it should be a good move. If player numbers grow, in-game advertising becomes more lucrative along with the tournaments. So you have to ask yourself, Blizzard, if the initial 50 million or so in gross sales (wild guess) is better to have than a highly improved long term investment through creating a larger community. I personally believe that such a hit to Blizzards business model in terms of releasing games is a bad idea given the current growth of esports. We're not there yet. I think E-sports (sc2 streams in specific) events would need get consistently more than 100k viewers in order to make tournaments profitable enough that Blizzard could decide to stop asking for a purchase price and instead give away multiplayer in the hopes of making them even more profitable. In reality i don't really have much info or data to go by so there are just my impressions and feelings, so we'll see. | ||
DonKey_
Liechtenstein1356 Posts
On September 24 2012 05:47 blackone wrote: More hackers, more assholes, more cheaters, more spammers. Advertisements, having to pay for bazillions of little things, having the full game cost thousands of dollars instead of ~120. Maybe. At least that's why I'd stop playing if it happened. So all the things you've listed are symptoms of being a more popular game. Well minus hackers and cheaters(same thing), which has nothing to do with F2P and every thing to do with sc2 having client side data storage and not server side data storage. If you want a bigger game you are going to have to except an increase in assholes and spammers(same thing);Its a byproduct of growth that will be left. It doesn't mean you couldn't then take measure to curb the behavior of them after they join though. Tbh you come off as a guy who is irrationally resistant to change in fear of losing what he has. SC2 however needs change it's not growing the rate it was in beta/early years, it's dropped off a lot of it's original player base to other games including F2P ones. If it went F2P it would have a much higher potential of attracting casuals; before you say you hate casuals look at the current foreigner BW community that is void of casuals. Of course the entire premise of my argument is based on player base growth, so if you do not want growth it would probably be a good idea to stay non-F2P. | ||
Tao367
United Kingdom324 Posts
Wings being free won't affect most of the people who are serious about the game as they'll all be buying hots and the people who play f2p wings will look at hots and think "wow I want me some of that". Done. | ||
Godwrath
Spain10126 Posts
Truth is, so get better and more solid as an esport, starcraft multiplayer MUST go f2p. | ||
toastus
Germany22 Posts
Enter a ladder game. Of course you can choose if its 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 or FFA and you can add friends (both using the f2p client and the normal old one) and play together. Edit: Well thinking about it maybe a certain amount of custom play should be possible, too to play against friends or the KI, but still you want people too spend money so maybe not. For everyone of us who bought the game nothing would have to change. And if there are too many new cheaters maybe there could just be a "paying player ladder" installed in addition. So everyone who really likes the game would still buy it for single player, arcade, replays (!!!) and so on, but Blizzard could attract all those who want to play but don't want to spend money. Let's face it, i would've never paid money for LoL, but it was free to download so I tried, and from time to time when I'm not in the mood for SC2 i play one ore two rounds of LoL what I wouldn't do even if it only cost 1 Dollar. Edit 2: New additional things like LAN or clan tags or any other cool stuff for the paying customers to increase the difference of possibilities between paying and f2p players would of course be very much appreciated, too. And my idea can also be combined with the idea of selling little things like skins or profile pictures to the f2p players while the paying players just get them so the f2p players see them in ladder and want them, too. | ||
Thrasymachus725
Canada527 Posts
And no, it wouldn't be pay-to-win, blizz isn't that dumb. | ||
stille_nacht
United States34 Posts
maybe release mission packs or something later | ||
zhurai
United States5660 Posts
unless it's something stupid that screws up the balance like locking units or something I don't see why anything else will change (other than there be possibly more lower leagued players...which doesn't exactly matter) ? | ||
MVega
763 Posts
On September 24 2012 07:39 Godwrath wrote: Truth is, so get better and more solid as an esport, starcraft multiplayer MUST go f2p. No. To get better and more solid as an eSport blizzard needs to advertise the eSport side of StarCraft 2 more and reduce the price somewhat now that the game is older. People think there is no consequence to cheating _now_, if SC2 accounts were free there would be even less of a consequence to cheating. Blizz banned you? No need to buy another account, just start a new free account! Blizz banned your IP? That's easy to fix too. If Blizzard found a fix to that and found a way to monetize the game that didn't turn it into P2W, didn't have obnoxious adverts, and just generally didn't do anything really irritating I'd be alright with it, but it's still not preferable. I'd rather they just reduce the cost of an SC2 account to $20 or some such. | ||
Talin
Montenegro10532 Posts
This is pretty much the only way I see SC2 surviving long term as an active game, by at least making the expansion multiplayer free. Otherwise the expansions may very well kill it with the stacking cost, especially when the last one comes out. Obviously there's no way that a game like SC2 will have gameplay-related microtransactions. | ||
pallad
Poland1958 Posts
On September 24 2012 07:32 Areaz wrote: Free to play version would contain this: Multiplayer Low graphics settings Ladder account basically. Paid version would contain what we have now: Singleplayer Multiplayer Arcade Full graphics settings so on I think you lost your mind.. its 2012 , and you have idea that people , need to pay money for better graphics ? | ||
emythrel
United Kingdom2599 Posts
On September 24 2012 09:12 Talin wrote: There's just no way that cheating would be more of a problem than it already is. This is pretty much the only way I see SC2 surviving long term as an active game, by at least making the expansion multiplayer free. Otherwise the expansions may very well kill it with the stacking cost, especially when the last one comes out. Obviously there's no way that a game like SC2 will have gameplay-related microtransactions. generally with blizz expansions they drop the price of the original and previous expansions so in total you don't pay that much more. Like you can buy WoW with everything up to WotLK for slightly more than WoW vanilla cost at release. WoL will drop in price with release of HotS, so you will probably be paying about 30-50% more for both than you would have spent just for WoL. atm sc2 is $60 it will go down to $40 and HotS will be $30-40 if people are willing to drop $60 on the latest CoD game every 18 months, they should be willing to drop an extra $40 every 3 years for SC2 | ||
6BiT
513 Posts
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Tosster
Poland299 Posts
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Oerbaa
Scotland184 Posts
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Moochlol
United States456 Posts
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hkf
Australia354 Posts
that is all would pay $10 to 2gate someone with santa hat zealots. | ||
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