[mbenjaminsmith]

>> As a player, I'd rather pay a small sum once to avoid the virtual currency - and find other ways to create whales (e.g., as suggested, more like content creation, sponsoring and some vanity items).

Except that I bet you wouldn't. Most players when asked say they would prefer a "fair price, pay once" model. Yet in aggregate they act very differently. If that weren't true we wouldn't now have a market where:

1) Seemingly most people complain about F2P

2) F2P is increasingly the most successful model

I think the people annoyed by monetization efforts are a relatively tech savvy, vocal minority.

>> it often seems that the rest of the players (the 99%, if you wish), have their experience hampered by constant dangling of offers in front of you.

I don't think that's really the case. Again, vocal minority.

But let's say it is. Speaking as a game developer now, we don't have to present the same experience to every player. A "cheap" player may be nearly a lost cause for direct monetization but valuable for word of mouth. If they're not buying we can actually scale back on the amount of ads presented and instead gently persuade them to, say, post their high scores on Twitter. If you're the type of player that likes to brag, then a prompt with a pre-filled Twitter post won't annoy you at all. It's not hard to figure out which player is which and it's not hard to adapt in-game marketing efforts to suit that player.

[MrMember]

I can happily say that I've given up on free to play games. The vast majority of free to play games out there are fundamentally flawed. At their core they weren't designed to be fun to play, they were designed to milk the player of money, or pester them until they give in and pay or give up and quit.

Sure, there might be a few free to play games out there that break this mold, but I'm at a point in my life where money is expendable but time isn't. I'd much rather spend money up front to play a game that has a good chance at being designed for fun than waste time trying to find a diamond in the free to play rough.

I believe there will always be a place for paid games, but if the market shift towards free to play continues I'll have no problem giving up video games entirely. Will the 'AAA' free to play games like Hawken, Mech Warrior Online, or Planetside 2 be fun to play? Perhaps, but I'll never find out.

[mbenjaminsmith]

Well you're pretty obviously on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Personally I don't play many F2P games and am much more 'core than the center of the market as well. Probably 95% of my gaming time goes to console games and I prefer the biggest budget, most polished titles available (just finished my second character in Borderlands 2). And yes I pay for them up front (and have them delivered by messenger to my home the day they launch, which absolutely makes my day every couple of months).

But as someone trying to build a profitable games company it seems suicidal at this point to not at least attempt to make some form of F2P work with my other design goals. Does that mean I'm going to make shitty games? I don't plan on it. I can say that designing a compelling in-game economy (that can be monetized) is without a doubt the most challenging part of design for me.

You can do what Zynga has done and build games from their monetization outward, but I don't think that's the only way to do it. I hope to do a lot better and I'm sure other companies have or will as well. Don't forget that the F2P model that is now so reviled (by people like you) is relatively new (freemium is not of course) so I think it's a little premature to say that all F2P titles will suck, forever and ever.