“It’s not uncommon to say we didn’t have a super-stellar launch” was one of the first things Gazillion Community Manager Ryan Collins told me during our Marvel Heroes play session on Thorsday. (No, that’s not a typo.) Since its June launch, the team’s been working nonstop to improve the game experience and make it more [...]

Every free-to-play game is pay-to-win. That’s a sentiment I see all the time. No matter what game is being talked about in an article, someone in the comments will talk about how it’s pay-to-win. Everyone has their own definition, and what’s totally reasonable to someone is exploitative and expensive to another. The undeniable truth is [...]

It’s not hard to spot the trend in new MMOs to have minimal hotbars, or in some cases, small and unobtrusive UIs as a whole. More and more, developers are abandoning the “six-rows deep” array of buttons and powers in favor of smaller, more focused ability sets, and a few – such as The Lord [...]

In the wake of stories like this one, the United Kingdom has cracked down on the free-to-play industry. New guidelines introduced last month by the Office of Fair Trading seek to regulate F2P devs in the UK, aimed at doing away with misleading or overly burdensome pressure to spend, especially when directed at children. While [...]

The year­-end numbers from market research firm SuperData are in, and they paint a positive picture for online games that adhere primarily to the free-to-play model. SuperData reports that online gaming revenue overall in the U.S. grew 11% in 2013, to $11.766 billion, with F2P games accounting for $2.9 billion of that, as opposed to [...]

The indie group of Swedish game developers that are building their MOBA Deadbreed, have been hard at work preparing a game that they believe is their own collective vision. Amidst all of the excitement and effort that being a project leader in a development team gone rouge must entail, we got a chance to ask [...]

I didn’t mean to play Hearthstone. Really I didn’t. I never even signed up for a closed beta key. I only started playing a couple of days ago, once open beta hit, and I can’t… stop… thinking about it. That isn’t the same as saying I can’t stop playing. I do still play other games [...]

I’ll say this for Square-Enix, they definitely go the atmosphere right in Nosgoth. As a human, you feel trapped and distinctly hunted, waiting for the jaws of death to swoop down upon you. As a vampire, you’re a supreme predator, skulking your way through the shadows and across rooftops, stalking your charge. The action is [...]

In a recent guest column on MMORPG.com, Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey responds to a Forbes article that casts doubt on The Elder Scrolls Online’s ability to succeed as a subscription-only MMORPG. Both articles, as well as Forbes writer Paul Tassi’s response to Dancey, are long and informative, and good reads, but I’d like to focus [...]

There’s a battle going on in the virtual skies, and it ain’t pretty. One one side, you have the juggernaut known as Wargaming and its B-52 of a title, World of Warplanes. It’s opponent is the smaller, nimbler Gaijin Entertainment and War Thunder. One will rule the skies while the other goes down in flames! [...]

In a recent interview with Edge Online, Dark Souls II Producer Takeshi Miyazoe made light of free-to-play games and their, shall we say, inconsistent quality: Again, the notion [of going F2P] draws laughter from Miyazoe. “Yeah, right!” he snorts. “Not yet, and not for a while I think. It’s one of our bigger IPs right [...]