Fun thought experiment: If KSP was a free-to-play game...

[Corona688]

13 hours ago, Brownhair2 said:

Asteroid Day and Asteroid Redirect Mission would be paid DLC

That one I actually don't see much wrong with.  If they're going to keep developing this, they either need more money or more customers.

[jwenting]

Today's special: 10 Terrier engines, only $4.99. Maximum 5 packs per user.

THAT's what a free to play KSP would look like, you'd have to buy every part for real money in some item mall (or every part past 2-3 per day maximum, unused parts don't carry over to the next day).

[Madrias]

Pay 10,000 funds to unlock your 10 action groups for 1 month.

Pay 500 funds to revert flight to Launch.  Pay 1000 funds to revert to VAB/SPH.

Feeling broke?  Buy 20,000 funds for only $19.99!

Oops, you killed a Kerbal?  Say goodbye to 30,000 funds.

Buy Kerbal Life Insurance for 40,000 funds and not have to worry for a whole month about accidents!

Sorry, but you'll need to pay extra for those nuclear engines and RTG's.

Need more science?  Pay 10,000 funds and receive a month's worth of Double Science!

Triple your reliability by funding your scientists.  Only 30,000 funds to stop rocket explosions for a month.  Otherwise, expect random failures on a 1-in-10 chance.

While your game is loading, we're gonna make you watch ads in 1 minute intervals.  If your game takes 1 minute and 1 second to load normally, you'll get two unskippable 1 minute ads.  Every time you get a loading screen, expect the same thing.  These ads will be totally irrelevant to your content and may get you weird looks from those who hear them playing.  They'll start at MAXIMUM VOLUME and cannot be muted or turned down.  Want the ads to go away?  $19.95 and they're gone... For this month.  Enjoy.

 

(I tried to go more the freemium route.  Everything's obtainable provided you're good enough and willing to put in the grind.  At the same time, there's annoyances you'll have to put up with along the way, and incentives to buy stuff.)

Edited July 18, 2016 by Madrias

[Vermil]

If KSP was a F2P game I wouldn't know about it.
And even if I did know about it, I wouldn't spend a second checking it out. When I realize that an advertisement is for a free to play game, my brain goes immediately black, just like a camera shutter, and I continue with my life elsewhere.

...and if you've written posts in this thread, I haven't read them. Sorry.

 

Edited July 18, 2016 by Vermil

[KerikBalm]

So... like the terrier you can get for free, but then you have to buy an unlock ofr the LV-N?

The panther is available for free, but the rapier and whiplash can only be unlocked with a currency that you buy with real money..

It would be horrible.

It would likely also be coupled with an inability to mod it easily. Which would be even more horrible.

[NSEP]

I think it would be such an indie-game still in its early alpha stages. It would not succeed to be a good game like what we play today.

[Xavven]

On 7/12/2016 at 8:45 PM, Znath said:

Depends which route of freeplay...

 

You could go the cosmetic-only route some do.  Premium users get alternate paint schemes and recoloring etc.

 

Or the freemium route eg "pay to unlock things early"

 

Or the "pay to win" route and stuff like nuclear engines, ion thrusters, and planets beyond jool are pay only.

And don't forget the "energy" route. There's a new "energy" bar that starts at 100% and drains when you launch a rocket. When you don't have enough energy left, you can't launch anything. Luckily, "energy" recovers over real-life time, so if you wait long enough you can come back and play some more. But bigger craft require more "energy" to launch, so it gets to the point during late-game that you can only launch a new (big) rocket every real-life day.

But wait, for only 10,000 Squad-Koins (which is the equivalent of $1) you can restore your energy bar by 60% right now.

Or, for 50,000 Squad-Koins, you can have infinite energy for a week!

And if you buy 100,000 Squad-Koins at once, you get a 10% discount *RECOMMENDED BEST VALUE!*

 

Ugh.. I threw up in my mouth a little.

 

The problem with freemium, free-to-play, pay-to-win, micro-transactions,whatever you want to call it, is that the financial interests of the developer ends up affecting the gameplay itself (cosmetic-only shops excluded), and almost always to the detriment of the gameplay. I would much rather pay full price for a game and unlock all of it forever, because then the devs can balance the game for the sake of making a good game, instead of exploiting humans' mental weaknesses to keep them addicted and spending money.

[Fengist]

What most of you are tending to forget is that this game, by itself, is pretty boring and the parts are unimaginative.   The ONLY thing that keeps this game alive is the modding community.  This game would have died years ago if not for people like Romfarer, RoverDude and Claw, who all started modding this game and moved on to work for Squad.  Had Squad tried to charge for usage, none of us, including me, would have even considered creating a mod and the code for this graphically challenged game would have been left sitting on a beach in Mexico.

By itself, with the bad physics, bug infestations, total and utter lack of long-term immersion, it's barely worth the $20 I paid for it years ago.  With all of the mods out there, one of the best investments I've ever made.

[Xavven]

9 hours ago, Fengist said:

What most of you are tending to forget is that this game, by itself, is pretty boring and the parts are unimaginative.   The ONLY thing that keeps this game alive is the modding community.  This game would have died years ago if not for people like Romfarer, RoverDude and Claw, who all started modding this game and moved on to work for Squad.  Had Squad tried to charge for usage, none of us, including me, would have even considered creating a mod and the code for this graphically challenged game would have been left sitting on a beach in Mexico.

By itself, with the bad physics, bug infestations, total and utter lack of long-term immersion, it's barely worth the $20 I paid for it years ago.  With all of the mods out there, one of the best investments I've ever made.

Undeniably, modding has helped the game overall. I don't disagree with you completely, but I will say that I think the stock game isn't boring. 99% of my 1100 hours in this game are pure stock, and I clearly haven't been bored for that long!

[Kermanzooming]

On 7/13/2016 at 4:07 AM, tater said:

Given the amount of time I've spent enjoying KSP for $25 (or whatever it was), I think it is already free within rounding errors.

This.

I wouldn't mind at all paying for some nice DLC, and I think Squad may have a market size problem in the future; there are only so many space nerds interested in a game of serial kerbal killing  space exploration.

Also; can't encourage enough supporting our dear modders; they make the game so much better that they deserve some kind of compensation.

[Zild]

The essential formula for creating an F2P game relies on two steps:

1: Create addiciton
Stimulate a routine (i.e. make the player return to the game every day or every few hours).
Do this by adding a new, crucial resource that is only generated by a certain player action, and which can only be generated at a set rate (e.g. 1 every four hours). Simply logging in is one option, but having the player repeat a more invested action (maybe designing a new rocket, or launching a rocket into orbit of Kerbin) could create a stronger addiction. The cycle of regular action followed by reward builds a craving to continue receiving those rewards.

2: Block craving (only after addiction has been achieved!)
Introduce artificial barriers to prevent players achieving the reward, that can only be overcome by payment.
Do this by making the reward (above) harder to achieve with each mission, to the point that the only way to keep up is to buy upgrades (better parts, space centre buildings, etc.) with real money.

Note that many games often use multiple reward systems. I guess the idea here is to have an easy reward to ensure ongoing addiction ("energy" for regular logins) and a harder reward that can be blocked ("drops" for completing a mission, winning a battle, etc.); the addiction to the easy reward keeps people playing even after prolongued suspension of the hard reward.

So how do we cram this into KSP?

In fact KSP lends itself rather well to blocking craving because the missions naturally get harder over time: launch a rocket, suborbital, low orbit, high orbit, Mun intercept, Mun orbit, Mun landing, and so forth. The existing mission control functionality could be tweaked to provide far fewer options that push players towards missions that are too hard to achieve without payment, although easy (yet time-consuming) missions could remain to allow non-paying players to grind.

Reputation gets simplified into a reward for every successful launch. Science gets simplified into something you get for completing missions. Missions get simplified into a choice of Easy (grind), Medium (possible without payment for a skilled player, but with real risk of it all going wrong - i.e. wasting lots of resources for no reward) and Hard (cash payments for super-quick advancement). The tech tree gets removed completely and parts are purchased fresh each time for a combination of reputation and science. Parts are simplified so that casual players can get to grips with them easily rather than having lots of functionality and lots of choice; each part comes in two flavours: cheap inefficient parts or expensive efficient ones. All gameplay challenge is removed in favour of pay to win.

Congratulations: You've just turned KSP into one of those crappy rocket / paper aeroplane launching games!

(I will leave the subject of anti-social spamming mechanics to somebody else...)