Comments on: Pay to Play

By: Dr_Do-Little

Dr_Do-Little — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 21:36:44 +0000

I first logged on home right after the “blac out/shutdown” If you remember the stores we’re not available for about a month.
If it was’nt for Hellfire’s Novus-Prime freemium model I would never had stayed for more than a few days.
I was able to level up, up to then top rank of Captain. Play with the “big guys”. Of course my ship was slow as hell and other perks were/are available to “spender”. But I was THERE!

The different boards (day/week/month/all time) as well as the friendship build gave me a “purpose” to keep playing.
Among all problems listed with Mercia I think the lack (or absence) of “replay value” is the most under-estimated. I could say the same for many other games. Give me a reason to stay and eventually, the $5.00 perk wich seemed pointless first sudenly look interresting.

By: Gary160974

Gary160974 — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 06:39:43 +0000

The reason why most home games fail is because they are poor or broken or worse both. Games on home should be simple and easy to play, bit like the facebook does it. Facebook knows that it cant compete with the games outside of its platform so it doesnt. Its also clever in the way unless you pay to play you are restricted to how much you can play on one day. Worse than that though is when developers dont back up they work and repair it. There was an incident when one developer was tweeting sorry they are working on resolving issues on they game, when at a meet and greet a week earlier the same person said we have no one working on that game and there will be no updates due to its poor uptake. Another incident of a game being released after all the beta testers said its has issues and none of them were fixed before its released. If its broken and a developer isnt going to fix it fully they should be forced to refund any money spent on it and remove it from home. Granzella removed several spaces from home in Japan for months to get them working better. Any broken or neglected game is a blight on homes already poor reputation for being poorly maintained.

By: Burbie52

Burbie52 — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 13:04:30 +0000

I agree with you Kass. I played through Mercia three times and never paid a cent. All of the games we have like this should be structured to play free and perhaps give one or two decent rewards for free as incentive to continue and pay for the rest. The other side product of doing what they have in the past is that when people get everything for nothing they develop an attitude toward the rest of the games that everything should always be free and complain. This totally free gaming environment is self defeating.

By: Estim20

Estim20 — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 15:23:56 +0000

Home has this three-pronged problem when it comes to games.

As a social MMO first and foremost, Home hasn’t earned a reputation (until recently) as a gaming outlet from its audience. It’s sort of like Facebook in that games have the issue of supporting the social angle -- Home hasn’t been about the games themselves, unlike MMORPGs. It thus has comparisons more to Second Life at best; MMOs on consoles tend to be the likes of DCUO, Free Realms, and Final Fantasy XIV. As such, console gamers have slim pickings when it comes to drawing comparison and almost inevitably we wind up comparing it to games -- and saying ‘Home is no game.’

This is on top of the fact that Home’s infrastructure wasn’t designed from the ground-up to be a gaming platform. Sure, it is a gaming platform, but again, similar to how Facebook is -- neither were intended be about the games, so the programming and engine limit what’s permissible. When game developers must design games around the social aspects (as opposed to the other way around) and the limitations of a digital realm’s architecture, one cannot approach it the same way one would approach making a game for the PS3 itself.

And this still hasn’t touched on what was said here -- have they given away too much for free? It has certainly been a mistake for multiple games on Home, whether we discuss Mercia or Cutthroats. Sony shot itself in the foot with some pricing strategies and third-party developers oddly followed suit in certain ways. When you offer the experience largely for free, without any major incentive to purchase upgrades (let alone anything else), profits become a bit like fairy tales. At its worst, you heard of ‘profit’ but only the crazy dude in the tin-foil hat swears it’s real.