Free to Play Vs Pay to Play MMOs.

The age old question, whats better? Free to play or pay to play? Lets have a heart to heart on this subject and maybe we will be able to find some common ground.

To start I have to say there are pros and cons to both, but first lets get into the good stuff that makes each of the business models tick, then the bad stuff that makes them bomb! Kablooey!

Free to play is pretty cool due to the fact that well, its free. There is not a single penny that you need to pay in order to jump in and start playing. This is great because if you are bored of the games you have its an easy way to play something new without any commitment.

There are many types of free to play games out there. There are browser based games, games for your Iphone and Android devices ( most of which are complete junk by the way), text based games and full blown graphically intensive games.

The free to play model does have a catch. Cash shop! Oh yes, the mighty cash shop, where you can spend your hard earned dough to pimp out your character with vanity items, clothing, weapons, and content.

Here is where the free to play gets a little dark, that cash shop wants your money. Bottom line. Some companies do make it rather difficult to progress unless you drop some coin in their cash shop. It can become expensive. Some people can easily spend 100's in a month, micro transactions galore. The small amounts add up quickly, sometimes too quickly!

Some like to call it pay to win, especially if companies offer a slight edge when using the cash shop. I know that Gamers First does this to a slight degree with there game APB-Reloaded. There is not anything wrong with this, the ones that complain usually are too broke or too young to afford using the cash shops anyway.

Cash shop-o-rama!

What I have experienced so far with free to play is that the money you do spend on the cash shop goes back into the game. That's a good thing right? You want the bugs to be addressed, you want them to update game mechanics, you want new stuff to do, (even if you have to buy the new content, no matter how small that content actually is.)

To sum it up, its all about self control when spending your money in the cash shops. For some its easy, for others its a little more difficult. For me, most free to play games are garbage to begin with. They are a distraction for a very short time, after that time is up they get uninstalled and forgotten.

Pay to play games have been the norm since Ever Quest, at least to MMO fans it has been. If you have strictly played consoles then its a hard concept to get behind.

O.G Gangsta up in this piece yo!

You have to buy the game, plus pay 14.99 a month just to play it? Yeppers! The good thing about this model is you will hopefully have content to play for as long as you subscribe to the game or the game dies, which ever comes first. That could be years by the way, years! Ever Quest went strong for 12 years! No cash shop for weapons, or content, but I have seen them for vanity items. *Cough Cough, Blizzard, Cough CCP Cough*

Are vanity items a big deal? Not to me at least. I could care less if you bought a 10.00 dollar pet or every single digital pet, mount, dye, costume, funny hat or monocle in the shop. It doesn't effect the outcome of the content. It just makes your character look pretty, or pretty obnoxious!

For your 14.99 a month you get patches with content, fixes, updates and whatever else game companies want to throw at you. If they release a new expansion then of course they are going to make you buy it, don't be a silly wabbit x-packs are for buying!

In my opinion its sort of a wash. To play these online games you are going to have to pay at some point. Free to play can be expensive, pay to play can be too, but in a controlled fashion. With pay to play you know that every month 14.99 will be deducted from your credit card, and you know that every few years you are going to drop 40-50 bucks on a expansion.

There is not a right or wrong answer here, it really comes down to choice.