I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it’s a bad game. Don’t do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you’ll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent’s cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
What I am seeing here is that mostly people regret playing free to play games. That tells me that their business model is working as intended but we should all wise up.
My regret is spending too much time making cool mods work together and then not playing the games, oblivion was the worst because I didn’t get it until skyrim was a year or two old and there were so many stupid mods out already. Most of them are janky or old and have incompatibilities with each other. I discovered pretty quickly that I need less options not more in open world rpgs because I’m an adult and don’t have time to play games the way my heart wants to (look in every door, under every bush, around every corner).
Free to Play games are basically a test of willpower. They use every trick in the book to get people to keep playing and spend money. FOMO via time limited events, gambling addiction via loot boxes/gacha, impatience via playtime or realtime limited resources, sunk cost via slow and difficult to earn resources/rewards. All of which can be “solved” with money.
On the other hand if you’ve got the willpower to just… ignore FOMO, ignore the gambling, and just walk away when you’ve played a little bit each day, F2P games actually offer incredible amounts of content. Over the past decade I’ve played about 5 different F2P games and never spent a single cent. Each one was pretty fun, and I just walked away when I got bored.
yeah the one I played the most of is Warframe, it’s very doable to just play it and I’m impressed by the amount of content they have put out… it almost feels like they failed at the model because I felt so little incentive to give them money beyond wanting to support them, fortunately they seem to be doing fine and I would think that would serve as a good model for others