ShindoDragon - Opinion - Paid Games Should Not Become Free-To-Play

Hey all, Dragon here.

I want to start off by saying the following piece is an opinion piece and just my thoughts on the subject. You're entitled to your own opinion, naturally. I'm always willing to discuss both sides of a coin but I thought I'd just write a few things about such a transition.

With that out of the way, I'm going to start off by naming the culprit as to why this opinion piece is being written. Rocket League.

Credit: Psyonix Twitter

Rocket League released on PC in 2015 and has been a monumental success on not just PC, but Xbox and PlayStation as well. The eSports scene is huge and has come a massive way from its humble beginnings in Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (SARPBC for short.)

On the 21st of July 2020, Psyonix posted that their flagship title is going free-to-play in the Summer. I'm all for the move to bring in the fresh players that didn't previously purchase the game, but there's also something not right about this business decision that has angered a lot of players: the fact they paid for the title in the first place.

It's very clear why Epic Games, Psyonix's parent studio made this move: Financial. But this comes with a lot of caveats.

The game, even before this move, had microtransactions and a crate system that gave players rewards if they purchased currency using real money, similar to their Rocket Pass system. The difference here is that the Rocket Pass shows you what you'll get for your time and money. Crates didn't, although they showed the possible contents of the RNG system. Crates have been an added feature since its launch and were unlocked with "Keys". They weren't necessary purchases, like most cosmetics but there were some things like car shells, which make slight changes to the way you can hit the ball, included. It didn't necessarily break the gameplay but there is always a chance that a car shell locked behind a crate suited your playstyle a bit more. This system almost did microtransactions right.

Decryptor/Key and Crate System

The game currently has a premium credits system now, probably a sign of its now announced transition to a free-to-play title. Crates were replaced with blueprints. Blueprints can give you the item listed for a credit purchase that you're then free to use at your leisure. The prices for credits and keys haven't changed but the value of what you have now is not as good as it was. Crates were key restricted and chance but you always had a fair chance of getting something good for your cold, hard cash. 

Credits currently work out at around one "Rare" item for £3. Not an "Exotic", even an "Import", but a "Rare" item. Imports and Exotics could set you back more like £6 or even £10 to get the number of credits you want for that item. £10 back in the day when the crate system was used, you got something like 15 keys to open 15 crates. You got 15 chance items for the same price as one or maybe two items that you can now selectively purchase. These purchases went in a small part to funding official eSports tournaments.

Keep in mind, all of this was introduced in a £15 title at the time. A paid game, to spend more money, optionally.

Now, to get anything at all, cosmetically from a blueprint, you need to spend money, be it the Rocket Pass or direct currency purchases for the store or blueprint.

That's not the worst part of this though.

Psyonix announced that the FTP model will include all the previously custom-made DLC for the game with the game, that again, full-price purchasers had to pay for. This excludes licensed content, like the Fast & Furious and Hot Wheels packs. The game had paid DLC, microtransactions and was a paid purchase at the time of writing this in late July, and had been like this for about three years as it dropped onto Xbox (the platform I joined the game on) in 2017. 

Along with this transition, the Rocket League developers are also pulling the Steam version from purchase to be exclusively sold on the Epic Games Store, although will be kept up to date with the EGS version. Naturally, this has angered Steam users, along with a lot of "Legacy" players making their disapproval vocal. They're also dropping the macOS and Linux support, despite saying they wouldn't, further pouring the salt into the wounds of the PC player base. 

I think the majority of people saw this move coming at some point when Epic Games announced their acquisition of Psyonix.

However, Epic Games are not the only ones who have pulled such a move. Bungie did the same thing with Destiny 2 and got a similar backlash after severing ties to Activision. Destiny still has story DLC that you can pay for, nearly at a full retail priced title per expansion, a similar approach to what Elder Scrolls Online does. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled also added microtransactions post-launch, which was made worse by the critical acclaim the game received from critics and fans. 

It's not good to stab your loyal players in the back by taking their money, then wringing them dry. It's a current trend of game development support at the minute to help finance better games. We're in a generational transition from the PS2 style of games, full and complete, no update releases, to a game as a service style that's becoming ever so more commonplace.

Fun Fact About the Game - Rocket League was developed for a total of under $2 million, the game has sold over 10 million units, which alone translates to $19.9 million in sales, along with over $1 million in DLC sales, meaning the game has grossed nearly ten times what it cost to develop.

- ShindoDragon