Dear lord are we nearly at June already? Doesn't the time just zip past when you're blasting away at folks within the digital ether? Looking back at the first half of the year I feel like it's been a robust period for my ever present gaming habit. Today I reflect upon a certain category of games that have taken up a sizeable chunk of my time lately. A category of games that have been around for a while now but which I feel is only now really coming into its own. I am of course referring to free to play games. Games that want the fast track to your wallet just without the cover charge at the door. I seem to have gone all in on these games lately and boy am I going to tell you about it...
Releasing as a shadow drop during The Game Awards last December, The Finals has probably been the foremost game to get my attention this last half year. Pitched as The Matrix but as a violent gun heavy game-show, I have to say I am very on board with this game. The gun play is solid and snappy, the game looks great and the overall aesthetic is a winner. All the usual requisites of the free to play space are here with a focus on multiplayer and cosmetic microtransactions. This feels like a game that really gets the idea of cosmetic items, allowing you to mix and match outfit choices to a degree I have not seen in such games before now. Rarely do I feel so in my zone as when I'm popping off fools with a shotgun re-skinned as the classic Nintendo light gun. Numerous nods to meme culture and a knowingly self-aware sense of its own absurdity make this one a winner in my view. As people in fluffy rabbit costumes engage in shoot-outs over objectives with hackers, cowboys and people with test-pattern televisions for heads, I feel like this game was made for me.
Thing is, its not been the only free to play experience eating into my limited free time. Around the same time The Finals came out and I found myself at the forefront of a breaking new hit, I also caught up to the party on another global mega hit that has been commanding the gamer market for some years now. I am referring to Fortnite or more specifically its battle royale mode. Other modes are available of course like its Rocket League inspired racing game and its Guitar Hero inspired rhythm action game and you know what? All these modes are great with perhaps the exception of the original Save The World mode the game originally shipped with. That is a repetitive grind and I can't recommend it, the other modes though are outstanding. Fortnite's take on battle royale may indeed be the best I've seen in the gaming space. Underpinned by a solid game engine that gives everything a sense of heft and weight to it, I feel like they very much cracked the formula on how to do this game mode right! Again no entry charge, again there's the micro-transactions but again it doesn't feel like the money or the lack of it actually gets in the way of having a good time here. Naturally I only came on-board when they offered Solid Snake as a new character skin, I am only human after all.
In addition to the above I've also returned to Apex Legends after giving it a break post-pandemic. Another solid, well-designed shooter with no up-front entry charge. Apex is positively laden with those micro-transactions to the point that navigating the in-store market for character and weapon skins can feel like a chore in and of itself. The game itself though is a fluid, fast shooter with great game feel and look. Respawn Entertainment might just be the finest purveyors of first person shooters out there today. They made Titanfall 2, possibly the most outstanding game no one played at launch but which everyone has played since. That game was a regular buy this with money in a store affair and sadly, its failure to make the money day one means there is no rush to get a Titanfall 3 out of the door anytime soon. Apex Legends gets a lot of things right even if its firmly mired in the twitchy split-second reaction time mindset of the modern shooter.
All of this got me to thinking about free to play games. They are not new as such, indeed when looking into the subject I was surprised to learn that the model first formed in the late 90's and early noughties in South Korea and China. Now such games were not always this polished, I do recall various free to play games on my smartphone from over a decade ago that were a decidedly mixed bag. Oh I enjoy Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja as much as the next man but I wasn't about to confuse either of them with a proper full-fat experience offered in the console and PC space. At that point subscription based games like World of Warcraft had been out a good while and were taking their first glance at the free to play model as a replacement or compliment to their existing userbase.
It took a while to really kick off however. Perhaps in part due to the natural suspicion that accompanies anything that is 'free' and the strings that often come attached with same. With Fortnite nicking the battle royale format from PUBG late in the last decade, I suspect a corner was turned in the effort to convince gamers that free is free even as in-game marketplaces exploded in range and price. A quick jaunt around the Reddit forums of Apex Legends reveals an ever present disquiet at just how ridiculous the asking prices are for fancy shmancy character and weapon skins and that's entirely fair. Once upon a time such games might have come with such things as standard, perhaps as unlockable extras if not available at the outset. For a certain demographic its probably hard to imagine such a time ever existed, before horse armour DLC started giving game makers some ideas...
On the flip side the continued existence of these games suggests there are people out there definitely buying into its excesses even as the mind boggles about their concept of the value of money. Now here you could go into the finer points of marketing, emotional manipulation and FOMO and many do. James Stephanie Sterling and the like have long been rallying the charge against some of the more unsavoury elements of a model that sells games in fragments whilst still asking for a full RRP up-front. Even when its free of charge, its not free from charges of exploitation with the recent fracas over loot boxes in the EU. When looking at certain parts of this model under a microscope one does begin to wonder if one is looking at a re-skinned casino in all but name?
That all said, what do we do about the minor point here that the games are actually, pretty fun now? Besides you know, play them. I'm no fan of the blind bag model of loot boxes myself, Apex Legends has them but I'm not convinced its a better alternative to just listing all the options in the game store at 'real world' prices and just letting people buy what they want when they actually want to buy it. Outside of legislative action I don't see anything that might make game makers abandon the idea without a fight either. Outside of certain circles there doesn't appear to be any great clamour for change here and that perhaps reflects that a whole generation or two of gamera have never known anything else and they're probably the ones spending big money on Final Fantasy skins.
Generational divides and deep pockets aside, it's going to be an interesting few years ahead in this space. I'm not sure I see the loot box model surviving it but the games themselves are going nowhere. A recent report revealed that older games like Fortnite are commanding more and more of our time, raising some question marks over the industry as a whole. As always, it is also possible that the near future will wrong foot us all. After all very few people see the next big crash coming when all is going well. Until the inevitable revelation/catastrophe (delete as applicable) I'm sure we will all just get by just about. All I know is that I'm just a humble man with a Nintendo shotgun in my hand, waving it at the sky in a vain attempt to make sense of it all.
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