Free To Play Weekly: Two Games Bite The Dust! (Ep 149)

90% of game doing founder packs are cash grabs
so we pay 20-200 bucks to buy a pack and also tell them all the bug ?
what happened to game tester ?
what happened to they letting you play and for that you report bug sounds fair not any more now they want your money to

Are founders packs cash grabs or community growth? The answer is plain and simple. They are both.

Founderpacks are a good thing and a bad thing. They have to be done right, but most companies don't understand it and want hundreds of dollars.

The best Founder Pack I personally came accross is the one for StarMade. You can try the "Demo"completely for free without restrictions, it's basically the full game. You can even create servers, join servers and play it. This client will be updated until alpha ends and can still be used after it.

So you can first take a really closer look at the game and then decide if you want to found it or not. And yes, that's the way every developer should go.

It's not only Founder Packs. Nearly every single player game released in the last 3 years had major issues at release and felt more like a alpha/beta than a finished game, so we basically purchase a Founders Pack covered as "Retail Version" and then had to wait for patches as big as the full game (i.e. Assassins Creed: Unity - 44gb patch for Xbone).
So this is an overall trend in the gaming industry and not only MMO's. The trend is to give players access to an unfinished game and yet let them pay the full retail price.

We need more Demos for Games instead of just founder packs.

Founder's Packs are becoming common and in many cases are nothing more than a cash grab, but we live in the day of gaming companies looking for alternative methods of gaining funding to make their games. What I would like to see in these Founder's Packs is an actual incentive for funding their game, because that is what the player is doing..... taking the place of large scale funding companies. When a funding company releases money to develop a game they become part of that companies success and/or failure with potential to receive compensation for it's success. So far I haven't seen this type of reward in any Founder's Pack.

About the founder's packs I think it depends. If big companies like Nexon or Trion Worlds have them, its a totally cash grab. If small indie game developers have them, they maybe need some income of money to develop the game.

Driving through a large open world map like half of the United States with fully destructible buildings and objects and some autobots vs decepticon missions would've made this game into an EPIC GAME. Not that moba based crap.

Hasbro should have not gone with Transformers they should have done My Little Pony MMO they would have had a LOT more success there are more bronies with disposable income than Transformers fans.

Maplestory 2 should have a founders pack. But some mmo's are horriable and have no future but the trash can. They should of released the mmo Transformers like 10 years ago, the graphics are horrendous now. 10 years ago it would of been ok. Just keeping it real.

I think it's hard to separate the Founder's pack into either cash grab, or growing the community.
Some companies don't have the resources or name to attract people just by announcing a game, some companies just take advantage of the fact that it has become acceptable to charge people to play an unfinished game that might never be completed.

Take Transformers Universe, are we supposed to believe a Transformers game being made by Jagex and Hasbro, needed to sell Founder's Packs to get the word out or to fund the development the game?