From Fee to Pay to Free to Play

The other day I download the Crimson Alliance for XBLA, and to my surprise, it was a free download. There was no trial option as with other games when I selected it, making me think that it was an error in my favour, and I’d better take full advantage of it, much like prom night. This was no the case. The game wants your money, it’s just got a new technique for doing that. You can certainly play the game, for free, but not the whole game, as it were. Free-to-play games are a concept that only cropped up about three years ago. Billions of dollars in profits later, they’re now everywhere, from facebook, to iPad, to now the notoriously stingy Xbox 360. These are games that basically market themselves inside the structure of the game, offering upgrades and perks for a fee. The Crimson Alliance is no different. When you download it, you’re essentially playing the trial version of the game, and then to unlock the full characters you play, (whatever that mean in this context, since you’re able to play as any one of three characters, but in a supposedly limited state), you either have to pay 800MS points a pop, or 1200 for all three. So right there, they already found a way to make a 1200MS point game worth 24000 points, assuming you bought each of the three characters separately, for reasons known only to you. Even then, you’re no guaranteed a full unlock of all the new bosses and levels, so you have to pay an extra 1200 for those. That’s 3200 points. Then there’s offers in the game to buy gold, using real money, converted into a points system. So you can continually pay extra for a fake currency to buy fake items in the game you can earn otherwise through play. It’s a strategy that makes financial sense for the developer, not the gamer.
The game itself isn’t that spectacular, except for the opening sequence. In it, you see a woman’s naked ass and side boob. That’s about one minute into the game. So it’s got that going for it. I doubt, though, that there’s any other nudity should you play through to the end. I’m a person who has watched many a high-art foreign film to the end credits, just because I was channel surfing and saw four seconds of nudity. I’m all for nudity in video games. With all the ultra-violence in games, it’s the last great barrier, and for some reason the most controversial. You can act out shooting up a Russian airport in one of the top selling video games of all time, but you can’t run around topless with Lara Croft without modding your game. Of course, if it becomes common place, the media will start blaming every teen pregnancy on video games just as they do school shootings.
The game’s really just an updated version of Gauntlet, with a sort of WoW look to it. Apparently, by buying all five titles in the XBLA Summer of Arcade, you can get it for free, but I don’t want even one of those titles, let alone five, and one of them requires the near-useless Kinect.