The Daily Eagle

Free to Play vs Pay to Play

Tommy Sandrin, Grade 11

If you know me at all, you know that I love MMORPGs, and I’ve played a fair amount of them. As I grew older, and my parents wouldn’t pay the monthly fee anymore, even if I asked real nice, I started to see the biggest differences in F2P (Free to Play) and P2P (Pay to Play) games, and the mix between them.

Just to clear up any confusion, for a game to be considered free to play in my books, you have to be able to reach max level in the game, and have the majority of content open to you. For an example of a free to play, I will go back to one I almost always seem to be bringing up; Maplestory. In Maplestory you can reach max level and go anywhere you like without having to spend a dollar on the game. What you can spend money on is things to make your character look all pretty, stuff to make gameplay a bit easier, or to change any mistakes you made, or get a pet, etcetera, so not huge game changing stuff. 

As an example of a P2P game, I think the one most people know of would be World of Warcraft. Of course you can get a free trial, but you can’t get very far in it. Also, just because I feel like I should cover them, there are games that are sort of between the duo of F2P and P2P, like Dofus, Runescape and anything else that will let you get pretty far in terms of levels or what have you, but have the full world closed off to you. I’d call this limited F2P. They’re a little odd; you could play free forever, but chances are after a while you’ll be sick of grinding on the same few mobs. Now, to the meat of this article - the pros and cons. The most obvious one of course, is the fact one is free, one is not, but if you play the game for any decent amount of time, eventually you will probably spend some money on it. Really the main difference is how you spend the money, be it either a monthly fee, or a one-time purchase. Another difference is that usually a P2P game will probably be of a bit higher quality, perhaps updates will come out faster, patches will be done quicker, more things will be added, while a F2P game might not get new content for years at a time, because they won’t have the steady cash flow behind them. This isn’t always the case however, and you should hold the companies behind these games accountable for what they make, but that’s a rant for another time, eh? The point I’m trying to get across here is that P2P and F2P don’t have huge differences between them, and if the fact that you might have to spend money on a game is turning you off from it just know that even if you go for that F2P game you might still end up spending some of your hard earned cash on it, so go with the game you are more interested in!