this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don't have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of "how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?"
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it's a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money
and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it'd still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I've played, because I've spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you'd think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just...doesn't matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
I'm old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.
But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.
3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)
CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had "early access" packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.
Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p