Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
0 
Report this post
If you really like Trackmania, paying 10$ A YEAR for regular content updates and online is an absolute bargain.
Let me guess, you steal all the food you eat, and live in a free apartment? No, you pay for those things? Oh, you're such a good little consumer. Since when paying for things is weird? What world do you think you're living in?
I seriously do not understand what you think would be a better alternative here. You want all of this FOR FREE? That's just entitlement. A single payment? Would probably cost 60$ since it's Ubisoft, 6 years worth of subscription, 99% of the people who ever buy the sub will never play this game for that long, so it actually minimizes costs for them... And the 1% who plays this game for this long enjoys the regular new content so they have no problem with bankrolling it as long as it keeps coming. IF this game was a one time payment and that's it, they would've stopped making the new campaigns ages ago, and we probably wouldn't have even gotten 6 years of new content in the first place. It'd be all up to the community to make things like in the old games.
If you wanted a one time purchase AND the content to keep coming, then you can bet there would be some kind of paid DLC later down the line, like for example they would sell the campaign packs for 5-10$ each or something like that. Because for games like these that constantly come out with new content there ALWAYS has to be some kind of a recurring revenue stream, otherwise you won't have funds to make any new content. It's simple business. So, would you really prefer to pay for the game and then have to keep paying to access the new content? Like many other games do nowadays, that people like you keep buying. Or would you rather skip paying for the game upfront, and only pay a small fee for as long as you want to play it?
For ages we had online video games that ask for double this amount of money on a MONTHLY basis, this game is asking for half the price of a normal subscription and only charges is once a YEAR. Implying this is somehow normalizing some new bad trend is incredibly tone deaf. If anything this is a huge middle finger to all other games with subscription based business models and a proof that you don't need your players spending hundreds of dollar each year to play a game, just a fraction of it is enough to make the game profitable and keep it running. You're here, trying to act like you're smarter than everybody else, but in reality you know jack and make yourself look like the clown you are.
Would you rather have them ♥♥♥♥ out a new Trackmania game every 2 years at full price or put in paid battle passes and FOMO skin shops?
Last time I checked when something says it's free, it's actually free. (Excluding data collection.)
If we stay at the example of free food; I don't expect to get a free apple but am only allowed to chew on it a bit once every 3 months until a new free apple campaign part opens up for me.
No one argues that 10$ is too much to ask for, but calling it free is just a lie.
A little better structured store page would alleviate all complaints I think. That seems to be impossible though, since the sub model itself is not handled by Steam OR in-game but instead by their dumb third party store front.
All complains are from people judging this as a free to play game which it isn't.
There are plenty of others games with a similar business models or even ones where you have to pay AND to sub, but they tell you this advance. It's only natural for anyone downloading this expecting to play what they see on YouTube only to be hit by a paywall to feel let down.
The rest of what you've said however is 100% true, but straw man arguments are just stupid. Just leave them out, everything would sound so much better without them.
Way to counter your own argument. It's free but data collection makes it not free anymore?
Free food doesn't mean you have infinite food. If some guy asks for some food, then keep asking for more and more, eventually you'll have to stop him cause food is a limited resources. Free and limitless are 2 different concepts. You can have something that is free, but only occurs once every year. Does that make it "not free" anymore? Because there's a new campaign only every 3 months, doesn't mean that TM isn't free anymore. It just means content is limited, and you need to wait before (which all players, even those who pay, have to do anyway).
Then please define what a "Free to play" game is then. Cause from what I know, TM2020 can be played for free, which makes it a F2P. You can argue you get too little, okay, but to say it's not a F2P, that's just completely wrong.
Do you need to pay anything at all to play a little bit of TM2020? No, you don't, so it's free (contrary to those "Free" PS+ games where you need to buy PS+ to get those "Free" games). Do you have everything? No you don't, but you still have a good chunk of the game. You have access to Arcade room, which basically means you have unlimited tracks to play. You have more official maps than any other TM games, while still being free, so if you stick with official campaign, this is factually the best game of the franchise.
Yes because data and information IS money and if you refuse to give them yours in accepting the EULAs you simply cannot access the product, be it a game or a program. This goes even for some open source software and the only way to alleviate this is to modify and compile the program yourself.
Another Straw man... I've never said the apple is infinite nor that there are infinite apples.
All I was talking about is "A" (singular) free apple that you cannot fully eat without paying, so why call it free?
I know were you come from though. And I would agree with you, if that were reflected on the store page, but let me explain what I mean;
Yes, if we see the game as it is right now with everything there is in every club, each piece of custom content and everything, the complete editor and so on, that package would be free to play, then all than that would be outdated after a few minutes due to the awesome community this franchise has build for many years by now.
And asking, for anything that comes after this, for compensation in let’s say a battle pass then it would still be a free to play game. Although this game has content locked from the get-go at the very core, in for example the map editor, something that most games offer for free even if the game costs money, like in Warcraft 3 for example.
And asking for money to access this seemingly infinite, ever expanding, well of content is okay, and not doing so is a pure waste even in the eyes of the most stingiest person on the planet, I’m sure. I've never said anything else and even think that 10$ is a little less if you compare it pretty much any other game with a sub model.
HOWEVER the game says nothing of that sort, informs you of no restrictions what so ever on their store page, nor do they mention anything that would come close the need to paying to even access all of the building blocks in the map editor.
Just a little star with the remark "*Standard and Club access features" not even what that means.
And therefore the game not free to play, just free to try, or a limited experience, (vertical slice), demo, call it what you want, but you will not get the whole game here, just by paying.
By your definition every game with a demo version is also free to play and would require a mere one time payment to unlock everything. At least that's what it sounds like.
I'd call a free to play game a game in which you can do everything for free.
I wouldn't call FFXIV free to play even though they give you unlimited time, little restrictions and everything until the last expansion for free, which surmounts to somewhere around of 400 hours of game time. Still it's not a free game, since you can't access everything unless you pay. I think I'd draw the line at Overwatch 2 in this game they want 15€ from you each time there is a limited time PvE event going on which they lock away for a year until the event comes back and I am 100% sure they might want to you pay again at that time next year, but they at least tell you that on the store page. (The core PvP is just like in TrackMania free.)
Paying extra for a PvE mode in TrackMania would be okay too in my books as long as no one tells you that it's actually free.
I'll not get into details here how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up of a move that is from Blizzard, but if we stay at this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ company I can give you an example of a free to play game: Diablo Immortal. Sure it IS one of the most pay to win games to ever being witnessed by a western audience, but it had no limitations as long as you could reach the ripe age of over 4000 years to unlock everything for free.
(I now kinda want to see a PvE mode in which you battle bots like in Twisted Metal.)
Now... The Free to play marked IS ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and I'm happy that this game here isn't one of them who knows how it would look like if it were?
And I know that this here is the best in the franchise and I'd even call it the best Arcade Racer period.
I'd go even a bit further and say; If Ubisoft were to go ahead and remove the many EULAs you'd have to accept, or reduce them to one for that matter, remove the mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher and inform the potential costumer that there will be a pay wall in form of an 83ct per month payment, that this here would end up in the top 100 games on Steam for sure!
P.S. To address what I meant with that:
I believe that the things on the store page that have a price must be somehow linked to the Steam api, that is easily done by adding a remark in the game code, having it handled by the steam overlay, or have it linked in the in-game store, but that is surely not possible here because Ubisoft would need to have the Steam api inside of their launcher and I'm fairly certain that they neither want to give Steam a 30% share fo their revenue, nor to have Valve’s code swimming around in their store.
They could however leave it as is for their store and have a version here on Steam without the launcher and the ability to purchase via Steam with a costs of 13€ instead of 10€. (Including the 30% as markup.)
What ever they do, or what ever they want, they need to drop their external launcher when they want to garner success on Steam.