Apparently Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson is not a fan of the moniker “free-to-play,” though he is, apparently, interested in testing the teeming free-to-play waters. Jokingly, he suggests we call it “as expensive as you want it to be” but goes on to say that “people who think ‘free to play’ is a great future are mostly game developers, not game players.” To a certain extent he’s right and I’m really a fan of his description of the model.
“The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psychological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than Half-Life 2.”
So he doesn’t like the term free-to-play. He is, however, curious and tweeted today that there will be an implementation of the model in Mojang’s legally-troubled Scrolls though Notch is quick to emphasize that the game itself will not be free. Micro-transactioned character customization is on top of the list, I’m sure; beyond that it’s all up in the air. Regardless, I really want to see what Scrolls is all about.
Scrolls Will Include “Aspects of Free to Play” [The Escapist]
