Mike and AJ are excited by the release of League of Legends: Dominion (Mike is playing it as I type this). Mike also gets into Gears of War 3 while AJ checks out Another World on his iPad. We also look at some various beta news, talk handheld battery life, and get into the need for a new Jade Empire.
For this week’s Let’s Go Topical 2.0, we want to know if you think Star Wars: The Old Republic will be free to play within two years. Bonus points if you give us your thoughts on the free to play model as it now exists thanks to games like League of Legends and the upcoming Firefall.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:00 — 17.8MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
My theory’s been for a while now that WOW is its own genre. As such, it doesn’t seem to fall under the same rules that other free-to-play games do, so I can see it existing for a while longer. I definitely think thar be the direction that the PC winds are blowing. I’d be real surprised if there’s enough room in the pool for 2 paid subscription games to survive.
Also:
a) Mike is wrong. Jade Empire was great, kung-fu RPG needs a sequel. Stop playing LOL and go read Bridge of Birds.
b) DARK SOULS goddammit!! 2nd most anticipated game of 2011. You two are going to make me cry. Don’t make me come on the show and educate you!
Allright Minottis, you want free-to-play, I got free to play read this:
http://boingboing.net/2011/09/28/who-killed-videogames-beautifully-written-account-of-behavioral-economics-and-social-games.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=36761
[excerpt – don’t read this over the air]
“Math is funny, especially when you’re looking at numbers that represent people. People tend to be pretty different from one another. Crazy-different people are what statistics call “outliers”. Outliers skew the averages. In the case of social games, we’re dealing with a couple mammoth outliers and an abundance of zeroes. This creates, in the $1.70 user, the fluffiest of math ghosts.
“Should we let the user play for free?” the smaller man rhetorically asked the older men.
“Of course we should,” the larger man said with an amicable face, standing up, rotating slowly, shining the spotlights of his cheeks over all gathered faces, showing his palms diagonally to the ceiling.
“The question is, how much should we let them play?” the smaller man asked, pointing a pen at the ceiling so nonchalantly no one looked up. He tapped the pen on the table. He clicked his Macbook Pro’s trackpad. The slide changed with a little sideways wipe effect: this is the part in the presentation where he had decided to get fancy.
One of the older guys stopped chewing gum for an instant. It’s only when he stopped chewing the gum that the weight of my annoyance with a man who would chew gum at a business meeting comes fully crashing down on my shoulders: “He’s going to start chewing that gum again.”
If this were a film, this is where the gum-chewing man would ask, “What am I looking at?” I can see that look in his face now, clear as day: It’s true that he probably doesn’t know what he’s looking at. Maybe he gets the basic idea: he’s looking at four large, capital letters.
“We’re living in the FTP age,” the smaller man said.
“That’s free-to-play,” the larger man said, swinging his cufflinks up, then down.”
If you don’t talk about this on the next show, you lose.
Free to play in 2 years…I think so. This isnt meant to be a knock against the quality of The Old Republic, only an observation about how most of the subscription based MMORPG’s released in the past few years…are now available free to play, or soon will be free to play. Star Trek Online, DC Universe, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Gonad…even WoW itself is free to play to a degree. The landscape is changing, people seem to want to spend less on monthly subscriptions, and are more willing to purchase DLC.