Monday, March 04, 2013

Real Racing 3: Freemium done WRONG

The title pretty much says it. EA has recently begun moving all of its game to the 'freemium' model. If real racing 3 is any indication I think it means I will be abstaining from their content. Shame really. The racing engine and graphics in real racing 3 are one of the best so far on the iPad. I would happily race the lower tier cars in freemium grind mode and probably shell out some real money to get at better cars sooner... but I absolutely REFUSE to stare at an artificial load screen basically saying 'pay or wait'. If they would offer a one time buy the game fee I would probably pay it... and I would pay more than the average mobile game cost. This is easily on par with most full console arcade type racing games, 30-60$ would not be an unreasonable one time cost for access to their launch content. Instead they went so whole hog to the freemium side that they costed the entire purchased content of the game at ~500$ (or almost 500 hours of game play some have estimated). Truly absurd. So if I have to choose between freemium grind and wait screens, or absurd content costs I choose c) none of the above and I hope many others do as well. Despite the fact I enjoyed the 'demo' (IE before you run out of included gold) a lot I deleted the game once I saw the asking rate for gold compared to the burn rate the game required to stay ahead of the 'that will be ready in 5 min or pay x gold' screens.

This is Freemium done WRONG.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

stop whining so much. you can turn off your internet and forward time, then go back in game. voila. then put time back to internet time. and turn on wifi again. tada. magic.