Path of Exile - Editorial @ Gamasutra

Couchpotato

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Gamasutra has a new article that talks about the mechanics, and ethics of how free-to-play is used in Path of Exile. It's worth a read for any fans of the game.

Over 5 million people have signed up to Path of Exile. "Roughly" 1.2 million people are expected to play its next expansion during the month of its release, Chris Wilson, managing director of Grinding Gear Games, its developer, tells Gamasutra.

The game -- a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler -- is completely free-to-play. Its microtransactions are entirely cosmetic and have no effect on the gameplay -- and its gameplay is tuned like a premium game, with no stopgaps or gates. Yet its developers are wildly successful.

How does that work?
More information.
 
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You compare this game's F2P model with something like LOTRO's that charges you 5 bucks for character-specific XP-disablers (after they get done ramping up experience on everything in the game), plasters their store buttons/ads on every UI in the game... and you come away breathing a sigh of relief.
 
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I rarely have any lag and or disconnects, so it's a non-issue for me even with a relatively poor wireless to DSL connection! Servers and internet connectivity will vary across the world, though. Poor network and server performance adversely affects always online games, which I think makes it a bad architectural decision. There are, however, design choices to make the game more robust in the case of brief outages or latency spikes.
 
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