When they emerged several years ago, free-to-play video games were dismissed as too good (or, perhaps more accurately, too bad) to be true – worried traditional publishers contended that they weren't up to the standards of paid-for games and, anyway, they weren't really free. But free-to-play games now dominate on mobile and tablets, and every week, new evidence emerges that they are also usurping paid-for games on the consoles and the PC.
Recently, for example, EA's COO Peter Moore announced that all its traditional franchises will embrace free-to-play in the future, and there was widespread surprise that Bethesda Softworks' state-of-the-art massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, The Elder Scrolls Online, will take the subscription, rather than free-to-play, route.
But is free-to-play really as irresistible as the name suggests? Can it really offer a credible alternative to traditional games? And are British developers at the forefront of the free-to-play revolution?
RuneScape, the grandaddy of free-to-play MMOs
One unmistakably British game certainly sits at the very top of the free-to-play MMO tree. RuneScape, developed by Cambridge-based Jagex, has been operating since the dimly remembered (and pre-pervasive broadband) days of 2001. In that period, over 220 million player accounts have been set up. Jagex won't say how many of those are currently active, but according to the company, "millions" of people play it every month.
In the past, hardcore gamers dismissed RuneScape as primitive – it plays much like a role-playing game (RPG), but had vastly inferior graphics to paid-for games like The Elder Scrolls. But it has just undergone the most ambitious revamp in its history (moving from Java to HTML 5) and the result, RuneScape 3, is much more akin to a paid-for game graphically, even though it still runs in a browser.
