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All PvP multiplayer will always be free (no pay to win).
Idk about you, but this sounds like best of both worlds to me (funding for quality story content, and wide accessibility for multiplayer).
I assume that this means that you also hate a game like Starcraft 2 since it has basically exactly the same monetization model as the one they planned for Stormgate? Or is this one of these weird cases of 'since it wasn't free2play upon release it doesn't matter if it's free2play right now'?
Firstly, SC2 is not free to play, it only allows some game modes to be accessed freely. Many people have paid for the full game and the expansions, and the people playing for free do not have the same play experience as the people who've paid to play.
Secondly, the F2P model mostly means 1) always-online, 2) scummy micro-transactions, and 3) smurfs and account spammers.
Lastly, dedicating yourself to a GaaS is always a gamble because the plug can be pulled at any time that the game is deemed no longer profitable, and then all your effort and progression goes down the drain, and as much as you might like the game you can't play it anymore.
There is no reason for an RTS to not be playable offline, and players should be able to start their own servers and connect P2P or equivalent rather than having a hard dependency on official servers which will eventually go offline.
As you said, this one is using Starcraft 2's F2P model, which is one of the best models imo. Selling co-op heroes and extended campaigns gives an actual gameplay reason to spend money vs just cosmetics. But they have cosmetics too which is fine.
Not many F2P games do this. Most show up with shallow gameplay, with heavy MTXs. They only sell cosmetics, so unless they make money right away, don't expect much in the way of gameplay content. Many shut down within a year or two as a result. Hence the hate for it...mostly aimed at Console/PC F2P games rather than mobile games.
You can freely play any game mode, it's just that some PvE content requires you to pay for it, but every game mode still has a completely free part so you can play it more than enough to know if you're willing to pay for more of its content. So the experience, wether you paid or not, is not too different, you just can't play all available PvE content.
What has it to do with always online? Sure, we do not yet know if Stormgate will be an always online game, but free2play has absolutely nothing to do with that. For example Starcraft 2 is also not an always online game, you still can play the campaign or custom maps or games against the AI while being offline. You just can't play modes that require other players.
And which of SC2's microtransactions are so scummy? And why do buy2play games not have any scummy monetization schemes? I've seen perfectly finely monetized free2play games but terribly monetized buy2play games, I don't really see how a fair or a terrible monetization model is in any way connected to a game being free2play or buy2play. Sure, thre might be a slight correlation between them, but it's really not like it's a clear indicator.
Though no idea about Smurfs, never played anything where they could even appear, but I guess they are a potential problem? Though they probably would still exist with a game being buy2play, they would just be more rare.
Well, yeah, every game where you can lose access to it due to a game flopping is rather annoying. Though we do not really know if we truely would lose access ot everything we bought if that happens, especially the campaign seems like somethign that should stay available forever no matter what happens. But I guess this is mostly speculation from both of us, since we really can't know how it would end up being.
...but to be honest, I don't really see how this is directly related to a game being GaaS. Any game, wether free2play or buy2play or GaaS or not, if a game requires servers, like a game focused on online play, you will not be able to play it anymore once the servers are down. On the other hand, a game like Anno 1800, which also used the GaaS model for a while by providing a whole 4 seasons worth of content over time, is absolutely fine even if any server would go down (well, at least as long as you still can download it somehow). So I think your problem is less GaaS and more if the game requires a server to function or not, aka if it will have an offline mode or not.
Also, to reduce the likelyhood of this happening you can just wait a little bit longer to see if the game is popular enough after release to finally decide if it's worth it to pay money for the game or not.
I agree, there is no reason why a game, nearly any game in fact, should not be playable offline. Though I can see that at least matchmaking would require internet, or a server. But at least custom groups could be done with invites via Steam, so you wouldn't need the game's servers.
Though while being offline I don't really see how P2P would really be better than LAN. But sadly we do not yet know if they will provide us with a LAN mode. But this is again independent from a game being free2play or a GAAS anyways. After all GaaS mostly means that we can except to frequently get new content. It's not like it would mean that all purchased content dissapears together once they stop to further support the game. Though there certainly are some examples where this happened .... but this certainly isn't the rule.
...but yeah, I certainly also very much hope that it will have an offline mode. Obviously not yet during the testing phase ... but totally once it released into Early Access.
I think its just more on the side of F2P games having a bad reputation when it comes to quality, pay to win etc for every LoL there are a ton of F2P games that have failed and it gets worse when you take into account kickstarter/early access money going into some of those projects. F2P makes sense in some cases but I think that when you talk about RTS games its not very common to see if at all. Starcraft 2 isn't a great comparison since it was created and sold as a full paid game with two expansions for about a decade before Blizzard made a smart choice and made the game F2P to get some more players in while selling microtransactions and such when they otherwise would not pay for the game. If anything the lack of support for a F2P SC2 is kind of a red flag itself.
Though from what I know free2play only makes it easier for cheaters, it doesn't enable them. I'm pretty sure that there also are many cheaters in non free2play games. So wether a competitive game is free2play or not, the devs probably still have to actively work against cheaters and make it as hard as possible for them.
In this regard RTS games have a slight advantage, since you can't just cheat yourself more ressources, units or make your units stronger, since those cheats wouldn't have any impact on your opponents screen/game, which would just cause a desync. So I guess the only concerns are map hacks and macros. And while they might help, I think one huge problem in competitive play is to keep up a high level of multitasking. And for less experienced players stuff like map hacks might even cause them to play worse due to their split focus.
...but no matter what, they still stay concerns. So let's simply see how they're going to handle those cheaters. Even though it might only affect a small part of the playerbase (SC2 devs once said that 80% of their players never even touched PvP) it still should be a big priority for them to prevent cheaters, I think.
1. Making games costs money! So somewhere this money must come from (except open source hobby projects). So either its full of advertisements, or lives by ingame currency and item shops. Some games like fortnite do it right, allowing to buy cosmetics only (as far as im aware at last), but as soon as such games end up having battle passes, powerups, energy limits, or buyable equipment with stats, F2P will be P2W. And having the choice of paying more then others just to be able to win is a super bad concept.
2. Without any cost, cheaters can simply create a new account and flood the game without the need to re-buy the game. Thats also a common problem those games have.
My personal favourite stands still from the 90s:
1. Play a demo version. Like the intro campaign, and super super limited multiplayer options, so you can experience the multiplayer part too.
2. Buy the game at full price if it suits you
3. When the game is successfull buy addons. Addons usualy nearly doubled the game content for half-to-three-quarter of the price, as a majorits of assets and code can be re-used. Addons, because DLCs are getting out of hand IMO too, as you start to pay half the game price again for +5% content dlc.
Sadly thats a model barely any company follows anymore.. :(
Also, they already told us how they plan to monetize their game. They want to sell us campaign chapters and Coop Commanders, which is primarily playable PvE content, so no pay2win, as well as cosmetics. And I think they also want to have a BattlePass that contains cosmetics. Energy Limits is more something you see in mobile games, less in PC games. And buyable equipment for an RTS is just weird. Though I guess Age of Empires Online did exist ...
And well, they very often love to say that they won't be Pay2Win and won't have any NFT's, so I doubt that there will be any boosters. Not like they would make much sense in a competitive RTS. But I mean, in the end we still would have to wait for the game ot actually release to know for sure if what they said is true. But at least when just listening to them it sounds like they try to not be Pay2Win. And it's also not like a Buy2Play game can't be Pay2Win anyways.
Expansions, aka addons, certainly have their advantages. Which is also why for example Factorio plans to do one. But it also has their limitations. It forces players to buy a big bundle of content even though they might not actually enjoy all of it. And on the other hand, the devs are forced to put a specific amount of stuff into these expansions since it is expected of them. In an interivew a Blizzard dev once said that them having to add several new unit per faction per expansion was actuallly quite troublesome for them.
FrostGiant also wants to use the free2play model so that they allow their players to buy the content they want to play. If players don't xare about the campaign or PvP and just want to pay Coop, they can simply buy Coop Commanders. If they don't care about any PvE content they can simply buy ... I guess cosmetics? In Expansions you always would have to buy everything together. Though I guess the pricing is an entirely different issue, since I do agree that many small DLC's tend to cost more than a single big expansion ... but I guess that's something we would have to first see on our own to know if they priced their PvE content properly. For cosmetics I honestly have no clue what it could even mean to price it properly ...
Also, to be fair, back then F2P games were simply unrealistic, since the Internet wasn't yet a proper thing, so they couldn't really monetize their game except with exactly that model, to sell the base game and big expansions. And it's not like it's a bad model, it's just not always optimal.
Nowadays there are so many different games on a market that a big entry price might be a too big entry hurdle for new players, which is why free2play games get more popular since they make it easier for new players to get intersted in them. And it's also so that many big companies lost a lot of trust due to releasing unfinished products, so even less players are willing to spend so much money on a game before they know that it runs properly. Which also means that a free2play game must be in a better state than a Buy2Play game, since the game first has to proof itself if it is even fun enough for the players to spend money.