Free to Play Games Vs Pay to Play

When it comes to online games many people wonder what is the better deal free to play which has some sort of ingame shop or pay to play which you have to pay money monthly. I'm sure even parents might have questions to these before they buy gifts for there kids this year. So this will cover the pro's and cons of p2p (pay to play) vs f2p (free to play).

When I say pay to play games when it comes to mmorpg's where talking about games like world of warcraft, EverQuest, Final Fantasy 14, and of course the new star wars: the old republic. While the list of pay to play games used to be much larger then it is today there are still some pay to play games out there and a few that are coming out. The reason that pay to play games have lost popularity is for one most people feel like they don't want to have to spend a monthly fee to play there favorite game. But the main reason pay to play games are disappearing is because game makers have realised that they can make more money by having an in game shop over a fixed monthly fee. As a pay to play gamer you don't have to worry about a shop where you can buy game imbalanced items the only buy able items are usually along the lines of cosmetic items that don't aid you with playing the game they simply give you some sprite effect. You can also judge how much it will cost for a year and there's usually a discount when you buy a whole year ahead of time making it even cheaper. Price wise most mmorpg's you can expect to pay about $14 dollars if you just buy month per month that's only $168 for the year. Comparing that with console games it might cost you $300 for the console and $50 per game. But you do also have to pay a fee for the game with pay to play usually about $60.

Free to play games have gained popularity recently because they don't cost anything money up front. The download of the game is usually free and you can start playing as soon as you download. Some examples of free to play games is like Conquer Online, Allods Online, Battle of the Immortals, Perfect World, Forsaken World, Mabinogi, and MapleStory. The list of free to play games has pretty much started to be endless with all the new games that have switched over to free to play trying to get in on the bigger amounts of money.

I'm sure your wondering how a free to play game can cost money because its free to play. Well all of the games above have what is called an item mall. Depending on the game the item mall contains items which you either can't do without or need in order to do well in the game. Without these items you either can't progress or will find yourself on the bottom of the food chain playing more hours then everyone else trying to build up the same things by farming mass amounts of items and trying to sell them. One of the main things people also forget is with free to play games the games service doesn't have to be good. If you have a problem with your account it might take them a long time to get to it. I have a friend that had a problem with Nexon games and its been 4 months since she had a problem with losing her game items from being hacked and they still haven't helped her. While I was hacked in World of Warcraft and they had all my items restored in less then a week. So service wise don't expect much from free to play.

The other main factor is the item shop and how imbalanced all of these games above I know from first hand playing. And for example lets take Allods for instance. In Allods if you want to travel around easy without having to walk every where you need to buy a mount from the item shop then you need to buy food so you can continually feed the mount so it goes fast. This is not much different then a pay to play game only it costs much more money. While the food doesn't cost much the mount does you can expect to pay 30 dollars depending on how pretty and fast you want the mount to be while the food is only a dollar or 2 the other items that you need within the game like items if you want to reset your skills for the character and other items to help with crafting. You can expect to pay up to 120 dollars in a month. That means in a year you will have surpassed what you would be paying per month to a pay to play by almost 11 times.

Other free to play shop games like Conquer Online used to have balanced systems in the past where there wasn't a shop and you could only pay for items used in the upgrade of weapons and gear. But greed got to them and now you can buy anything under the sun just about from the shop. But not only that they have talismans and if you don't have these you can't compete in PVP even if you have better gear then someone. In conquer you can now expect to spend ungodly amounts between the lottery system and the item shop making it one of the top corrupted games when it comes to item shops.

When it comes down to trying to choose the right game you have to compare a few things before you decide to play. First decide wither the game has all the things you like which will keep you happy for instance I personally like free for all PK style mmorpg's this is a very rare type that is normally not found in the gaming world. But other people might like faction based games with PvP or maybe they hate PvP and they want more of a fantasy game. The main thing is find what you enjoy. Then if its a free to play make sure that the shop is balanced you don't want to end up getting to a certain point in the game and then you have to spend 100 dollars or you can't progress because you need to stand on a cliff with a holy rock and chanting some magic words to get to the next level. You want a game with a balanced shop that you have the option to obtain the items in game for it by way of a quest or killing a boss or something along these lines. While there isn't many there are definitely some games which do still have this option.