Namco Bandai: “Free-to-play games can't be high-quality”
The F2P empire is expanding so quickly that it may soon build its own Deathstar, but not everyone's on board. Namco Bandai, however, may just take the anti-F2P rebellion sentiment to a whole new level. The gist of the Dark Souls publisher's argument? F2P isn't a dead end; it's worse. It's a quality-devouring black hole that the industry's willingly walking right into.
"Free-to-play games can't be high quality," said European senior VP Olivier Comte during Cloud Gaming Europe (via IndustryGamers ). "We need to put certain value on certain work. When you're a big company… you can't take risks too quickly, you can't make a change just because there's a fashion for a couple of years; you want to be there in 20 or 30 years."
He further argued that the unrelenting barrage of cheap, easier games is slowly sapping value away from triple-A games by causing buyers to expect to have everything handed to them on a silver platter.
So basically, Comte believes this rapidly expanding bubble is destined to burst in spectacular fashion. Even so, his argument seems a tad self-serving, if you ask me. He sort of just ignores the part where full-price products on PC tend to sink amidst a sea of piracy. F2P's a potential solution, and I think it'd be rather like walking the plank into a tank of genetic mutant sharks just to write it off because change is scary. How about you?
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.