I don’t think this is as controversial now as it was maybe five, eight years ago. There are plenty of online games on up-front fees.
What the behind the scenes numbers need to be to support online costs indefinitely will change game-to-game. It’ll probably be easier to make it sustainable if you have this decision made out of the gate, so that probably helped them. We’ll see how they do, the game does seem fun. If anything, Rocket League-but-actual-football seems like a thing that should have happened by now.
More importantly: don’t make games that rely on runaway success.
If your game is fun even if only a dozen people buy it, great! If it requires ten thousand global players right out the gate, and will cease to function once that number drops, you are fucked, by design.
There are so many multiplayer games competiting for players’ attention today. The biggest risk associated with a multiplayer game is the lack of a playerbase. F2P is the obvious way to mitigate that risk. Of course it’s not impossible for premium titles to succeed, but it will be very difficult to overcome players who might look at it and think “I’m not sure if anyone else is going to spend $30 on this, and if they don’t then I won’t either.”
By the looks of this game, I’m skeptical that it has enough of a hook to succeed. The market for sports games is dominated by licensed titles, can they really hope to compete with FIFA?
To be pedantic, FIFA as a game doesn’t exist anymore so they’d have no trouble competing against it :D
It’s now called EA Sports FC
Free-to-play is just a ploy for future value extraction.
I typically go out of my way to avoid F2P games. I’d rather pay once for a game, rather than be stuck with a live service that constantly nags about subscriptions or microtransactions.
