Consoles Must Embrace Free-to-Play and an “Apple Kind of Experience,” Says Xbox Co-Creator

73
Lee Bradley

Xbox co-creator Ed Fries believes that console manufactures must provide an “Apple kind of experience” and embrace free-to-play.

Currently on the advisory board for Android console Ouya, Fries reckons that "it's getting harder and harder for the traditional consoles to ignore the Apple kind of experience.”

“Anybody can develop for the platform, certification is a relatively cheap and painless thing, and in the old days of consoles there are all sorts of myths and legends that say that's a bad thing to do."

Fries reckons that this kind of clinging to the past is the reason why "the game business melted down in '84."

"You've got guys who make games like Fez who can't do an update to their game because it costs too much, if that game was on iOS that wouldn't be a problem, but because it's on XBLA, it's a problem."

Not missing a chance to pimp his new console, Fries said these problems will "go away with Ouya, they'll go away if Apple brings some kind of product into this space, the console makers like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, they have to respond to that, it's just the future."

Ultimately, Fries believes that the industry is heading towards the free-to-play model and console makers must be prepared.

“They'll have to respond to the free-to-play game model, the world is changing, people want this free-to-play experience, game developers want to build free-to-play experiences and the console ecosystem has to adapt to that."

Yet more support for free-to-play then. When handled right it can be great, but there are some disturbing examples of the model too.

[via GameInformer]

Comments
73
  • The people that come out with these kinds of comments are always in a place where the comments are self serving. Maybe if his current job wasn't for a fucking kickstarted "console", his words might have more impact. Same with the people who makes mobile gamed talking about the death of traditional games. It means nothing coming from them.
  • This guy is telling me I WANT FREE TO PLAY but he's forgetting that I WILL NEVER PAY to any of your offered garbage ingame. Get over yourself, Ed Fries, you arrogant douche. The only thing I want is a new console... waiting!
  • No, just no. I'm sick of people saying what I want. I do NOT want an Apple experience on my console, I do NOT want movie/tv hiring, I do NOT want a bajillion adds recommending crap to me I don't want. What I do want is big games that I can sit on the couch with a controller in my hand and just play. Rant over.
  • Free to play is all well and good but whose gonna stump up the investment cash for great games like Borderlands, Portal 2 or the GOW series? I don't mind paying if I get a worthwhile gaming experience out of it.
  • BS console are fine as they are, Free 2 Play is not Free 2 Play, but Pay 2 Win.
  • I think those games should sat on the ipod and ipad and consoles should have there big AAA games
  • *stay on the ipod
  • I can't think of any free 2 play game that has ever been worth playing for more than a day or two, f2p is great for mobile/handheld, but is terrible for console/pc gaming
  • I hate everything Apple, if XBOX goes that way I will cry
  • Are these guys on crack? Nobody wants this free to play shit apart from casuals who water down our hobby with their unwanted presence in this arena of entertainment. Both groups can fuck off & leave it to the pros as far as I'm concerned.
  • this is coming from the guy that got fired for his crazy theories on the original xbox I think roughly 3-6 months after launch. And maybe some free to play would be nice I mean look at happy wars a great example but that won't work for everything could you imagine if halo was free to play, where you would get the first single player mission free and every other mission you would have to purchase and for multiplayer you could only use the needler unless you bought other weapons. just wouldn't work
  • I am not really sure who he is talking about when he says "people want this free-to-play experience",.All F2P games are basically ripoffs. You end up paying more for a half assed experience.
  • I'm happy with pre-ordering online and receiving my physical copy a day or so early, and waiting 2-3 days for game's that are out already. People that support streaming/downloading games are either too lazy to walk to the shops/click a few buttons or too impatient to wait a couple of days for a game. Like I said in my previous post Free 2 Play is not Free 2 Play, it is Pay 2 Win, just sell a game and give everyone a even playing field.
  • @10: It's a good thing that it's not up to you, now isn't it? While I agree that no one wants free-to-play nonsense, saying that casuals are an unwanted presence is just stupid. I'm not a casual by any means, but that type of elitist attitude is what is wrong with gamers in the first place these days. They're fucking games, man. Why take it to such a degree that you are right now? If they are that important to you, you may want to re-evaluate your take on things and consider getting another hobby that merits being that damn serious about it. Also, whether you're a pro gamer or not is irrelevant. No one should tell any other person to fuck off and leave because they're a casual gamer and you feel they're ruining anything for you.
  • I do agree with his patch theory though, it should be free or very cheap so we can have some bugs / glitched achievements fixed with many other issues
  • The reason f2p has never really taken off is because to make a game that is innovative, memorable, awe-inspiring and simply just fun takes alot of time and resources, you CAN'T expect them to charge nothing for their efforts. Also if their making no money how are they expected to make their next games bigger and better?
  • If we want free to play games why do more and more publishers release special editions of games with art books/statues/ soundtracks etc....BECAUSE THERE IS A MARKET FOR! We dont want free to play casual crap or better said pay to win crap, we want physical copies of our games and own wat we pay for ,not something you download and where you have to pay for additional content ,especially when you have like dozens of downloaded arcade games and you cant play them anymore because you switched gamertag or console....THANK YOU MICRO$OFT!!!!
  • @17 just go into your download history and redownload them as long as your using the same account. If you make a brand new account then yea that wouldn't work but I switch consoles 3-4 times now and my entire library of arcade games including games I bought when the system launched are still following me around
  • The best thing for this industry is for the whole fucking thing to crash again.
  • @3 Amen brother. And despite all this talk of Free-to-play and motion controls being 'the future' as long as we keep buying proper fucking games someone will keep making them. It's supply and demand.
  • If I wanted an a Apple experience, I would have bought a shitty Apple product. I don't like being told what I want, when "What I want" is the same thing that I have been AGAINST for several years. If consoles started doing this, I would probably NEVER buy a game again.
  • @18 thanks mate but i did switched account and consoles(multiple times, RED RING OF DEATH ANYONE?) and there is no way to get them back sadly , thats why i almost never buy arcade games or DLC again. I learned my lesson ,once again..THANK YOU MICRO$OFT!!!!
  • if this ever happens to xbox and such, you'll lose me as a customer! and im sure a lot of others as well! i'll keep my console offline, away from any update that could implement it, and just play the games i already own. no more money from me!
  • if this happens i am off too, apple are pricks and mobile gaming is shit, free to play is shit too, we need to pay money for decent games, its the industry that are trying to go free to play to protect all the crap game designers that people dont buy their games they make so they want to level the playing field.
  • It's a crazy world when I'm happy to pay for games but am having free stuff forced upon me. TAKE MY MONEY YOU MONSTERS!
  • @20 Too bad that isn't working and everyone wants the Call of Duty audience instead.
  • While Free 2 Play/Pay 2 Win is a great business model for the development of games that take little in the way of investments but reap huge profits. However to say it alone will be able to sustain a console over the long term is quite frankly crazy. Yes I agree that gaming is evolving and F2P is certainly part of that evolution. But traditional disc bound games, along with full games on XBLA will still be the main part of the platform. I believe Episodic content like Walking Dead will be a more likely and better recieved way of progressing.
  • It's funny how "Free-To-Play" isn't free for very long before you get slammed with microtransactions that potentially end up costing as much or more than the going rate of a retail game. You basically get the bones for nothing and if you want the meat, you pay. The first post in the comments nailed it. I'm usually on the side of independents in most cases but I got really turned of to their attitudes in general, go watch Indie Game: The Movie and tell me Phil Fish is an awesome dude when it's over.
  • i dont feel bad for those guys having to pay for updates. as a business owner when i make a mistake or provide a poor service; it cost's me.an update to the game is a bussiness expense.the reason they charge is so theses guys dont just dump tons of trash on us and pretend to fix it later.
  • This idiocy again, I thought that the point would of been driven home by now, console gammers do not want this free to play crap pushed down their throats. One or two things in the background, fine, but when you try to push it more and more, all you do is make gamers angry, I'm a more traditional gamer, I always will be for the most part, I don't love digital download games all that much, because I don't physically own the copy of the content, so it doesn't feel like I actually own it. Free to play games for the most part are just fun little things, I decided to give 'Happy wars' a go... my first real taste of a free to play game... it was horrible, nothing more then a little entertainment, without any degree of depth ect. that I look for in a good game, This free to play model is made to only make money, nothing more, sure, some things are fun, but everything about it is money making in the cheapest way. Every game is made to make money, I'm not saying normal games aren't, but there is more effort put into a full retail games, pulling together a good video game is an art, combining visual narrative, user control, dialogue, soundtrack act. all into one package, think of some of the games you've played, where you've just stopped playing suddenly, to look at the scenery around your character, hell, I'll use the newer halo games as reference's here, some of the backdrops are breath taxingly detailed. You wouldn't get that lever of detail in free to play. Every console should be able to relate to multiple audience's, there;s been a massive lack of core gaming with the wii though, but you need to draw the line before you start throwing away core gamers, fan base's ect. for new and short term idea's. Free to play games should never, ever be brought into AAA types of titles, if it does, then we'll see the end of gaming, plain and simple, well that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you should get the point I mean by this. Free to play is pay to win, pay to win, mean skill isn't as required, skill not being required, means that the competitive edge of gaming starts to disappear. This model needs to die, plain and simple, it shouldn't be pushed on us like kinect was, where everything is suddenly becoming kinect based or having kinect featured, gaming should move forward, sure, but it should move forward in that way with all forms of gaming being carried with it, not social gaming only being pushed forward, by something that can't physically handle detailed movements at all. And now my rants going off topic... best leave this here before i get to off topic, end note, free to play needs to burn.
  • Pretty sure Fez could have been patched for free, but they wasted that putting out a broken patch that killed saves. Patching the patch is where the problem lay. I haven't played it since, as good as the game is, as I don't want to run the risk of my save corrupting.
  • And a side note I want to make regarding the update element, games shouldn't need updates unless there's new content, period, it means that developers can be more lazy finalising their games, when there was no updates, more time was taken to polish a game, because when it went out, that was it. It's the developers faults for not fully testing and making sure everything is fine, that there are errors and issues, there will always be glitches, sure, it's impossible to cover every variable, but it's on the developers head to do that BEFORE the game is released, even if it means delaying it. It would be better for microsoft to massively dumb down the cost for an update, sure, but it's on the developers heads to fully code something efficiently, though it is understandable that smaller groups may not have the time or man power to do that, I suppose, (like mine crafts port to the xbox here for instance, but that's an indie game, or at least was, there are expected glitches and issues there. And dammit I'm ranting again.. this model just annoys me so much.
  • @ 14; When I was a youngster, not many people had game consoles... mainly the geeks who loved gaming. Everyone else used to go to friends to play, but no-one bought their own machines. It still had THAT stigma. Fast forward to the PS1... & due to some 'cool' marketing, all sorts of people who would never consider buying a console got one... you know the sort.. the townie piss head who would have the obligatory & predictable copies of Actua Soccer/Fifa, Tiger Woods & Tekken ... MAN STUFF GRRR! With the exponentially increasing influx of gamers over the following decade & a half, I have witnessed the decline in quality of many once great IPs. Mainly due to pandering to what I would class as 'casual' gamers; nerfing difficulties,abandoning taxing gaming mechanics, more hand-holding, shoe-horning in a co-op or multi-player mode to garner sales. I think a lot of changes to Videogaming have been for the worse, yet I still cling onto some of the golden moments of gaming, & a few still come... I have been thoroughly enjoying X-Com this year... no pandering there at all! Meh, Maybe I'm a gaming dinosaur, but F2P is just another step towards this casual gaming hell where housewives on facebook are seen as the market of the future (tongue in cheek comment). Sorry if I offended anyone who perceives themselves as a casual gamer.
  • And I do believe that comment #3 sum's up everything to perfection. Seriously, spot on.
  • Free to play is probably the worst thing to happen to gaming since online passes, you get a very limited experience from what usually is a terrible game that's been made to get as much money from micro-transactions from the idiots who play them. This crap needs to stop now before it goes too far and ruins the way we game forever, I can just see it now "you have insufficient credit to respawn, buy credit to play now!", that may seem like an extreme example but if anyone here owned a 360 from launch when you just put the disk in and went then compared it to how the 360 is today you'd be outraged.
  • ill still pay to play better games...
  • F2P Is a bullshit system. I want to buy a game full price with all the content on the disc not buy bits of it for half a game. I don't want Borderlands 5, for example, being free to download on a F2P model but if you want an extra backpack slot/weapon/mod etc you need to micro transact for it. Or a FPS game like HALO/COD or BF where its free via F2P but if you want the good gear you need to stump up the cash or you pay for the campaign/co-op or multiplayer individually. Fuck that. Its not a level playing field for consumers where some people who have more money than others can buy the best stuff in a game keeping the less well off down, ruining games appeal and fun.
  • Too add to my comment @13. We already have very little in new inventive idea's or games that are just fun, I remember spending ours playing Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc and when you wanted a bit more of a challenge you would but in something like Tekken, Time Crisis, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil. Developers have already ruined some really good game's by following trends, the first 2 Dino Crisis game's were brilliant and then the third game came out and it was as if someone had been taking acid and crack while designing and writing for it and killed the series in doing so(I personnaly really wanted to find out what happened at the end of Dino Crisis 2), same goes for resident evil, yes the controls were not the best but the story and game play elements were top class, solving puzzle's, looking through documents for passwords and hints to puzzle's, which all stop at RE4(which only had one puzzle, the sliding block one) when they started turning it into a third person shooter rather than a survival horror.
  • How does this Ed Fries guy know what I want? I don't want an apple experience, that's why I have a Droid phone. I certaniley don't want that experience on my Xbox. And how is this going to work exactly? With all the ingame content that you would have to purchase, will it add up to more than 60 dollars by the time you finish the game, including achievements and all? And what if its an old game that I would normally buy used for 20 bucks because I want a new game to play but don't feel like paying 60 bucks? Will I still have to invest 60 dollars or more into it as well? What a joke this is.
  • Does this ed fries douche have an email? we need to blast him with our opinions if somebody can find it.
  • Same shit, different messenger, I will not support anything that follows this model.
  • If console gaming goes the way of Free to Play, and has stuff like 'in app purchases' an any of that other garbage where you have to pay to have certain things, then I will quit gaming altogether. I want my consoles the way they are now and not built around some garbage free to play model.
  • The people have spoken! Power to X360A!
  • Do NOT want free-to-play!
  • I'm so tired of seeing this article and free to play propaganda (because thats what it is) from these guys trying to force their way into a free to play market. Consoles have survived for generations. Way before this free to play concept/scheme started. So I seriously doubt its going to change now, and overnight. Consoles will be fucking fine.
  • I'm gonna find this guy, introduce him to a flamethrower and make sure that Ed... *Puts sunglasses on* FRIES!!
  • No, actually, you know what Ed Fries? No I do NOT want an apple experience on my xbox. I want that experience on my iPhone/Android device where it belongs. and no, the majority of "people" do NOT want that experience. CASUAL gamers want that experience because they've played so many games on their iDevices that the definition of gaming has become misconstrued. Real gamers want nothing more than to sit down, on the couch, with a controller and a drink at hand and play video games that have had lots of hard work and effort put into them, and believe me, we will pay money for THAT experience.
  • Yay free to play, oh but u want a characteristics play as 10 bucks please. What u keep dying, well if u bought some weapons u could fight back. No thankyou free to play is a way to nickel and dime even more and will point blank refuse to touch free to play. God forbid capcom did free to play - Press Start (160 ms points) Save game feature - 400 ms points Story - 1 million ms points (per 5 minute chapter {were making smaller games now aren't we!})
  • Screw that.
  • @33 Thank you. Glad I'm not the only one who feels that way. Take the Zelda series as an example: Ocarina is a classic, but Nazi started the hand-holding trend that continues to this day and it was the first to incorporate unnecessary stealth into the series. Wind Waker started to lame travel concept with its dull sailing ( love the game, but damn was that boring...the train from Spirit Tracks was way worse though ). Twilight Princess began heading towards extreme linearity as opposed to the more open world feel of A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time. The Wii & DS games were not only really linear, but their item sets are lame and the focus on touch & motion controls make them feel gimmicky. I'm already worried about what Nintendo has planned for Zelda on 3DS & Wii U... I don't want what these idiots keep telling us we want, though I do agree about Microsoft's terrible policy towards patching broken games ( I want my fucking achievements damn it. I earned them, they should unlock ). I don't want Pay 2 Win games, I don't want games like Zelda bogged down by gimmicky touch & motion controls, I don't want multiplayer added to everything, I don't want a sidekick holding my hand, I don't want a bazillion video & music apps on my FUCKING GAME SYSTEM...I just want good, fun, balanced games that use a normal traditional controller. I want games like Chibi-Robo 3, Mother 3, Pandora's Tower, Card Hero and Project X Zone not crap like NintenDogs and Farmville ( if I want to play a game about farming, I'll play more Harvest Moon )
  • It's simple quit it with the hating and realize one thing free 2 play is good for cartoony games games not worth your full time and attention, what they should do is change there subscription system 2 that of ps3 cause we all have little kids screaming, idiots using a kinnect to talk will playing games like cod and you know who you are, gold is not worth it now if they did it were you get games that's fine then people could still do multiplayer they just don't get free games and and that is it I don't won't to play online with idiots who don't get achievements or get killed and cry and bitch and hackers and modders but if its free to play online people can't complain that much because. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR AND WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO GIVE MONEY TO ASS-CLOWNS THAT BAN A GUY WHO MAKES FUN OF MODDERS OR BANS A FULL AUTISTIC KID FOR FUCKING SHAME.
  • I completely agree with #3. If I have to "Adapt or Die" then I think I would rather die.
  • well i hope this is true. i agree that things are changing. i didnt want cd/dvd based games. i was happy with my cart games. but it still happened. it ruined gaming as more focus was put on graphics. now we have motion control ie wii,kinect & ps3 move. now its free to play. i hope this will mean great mmos to come out. games like WOW & champions online. these titles have been free but never released on 360. so i hope blizzard & cryptic can now release them to consoles. i'm not narrow minded to this. if they build a good system. i can see ALOT of people going to it. add some great titles and you got sales. i can see ms & sony losing out. if they dont get on board with this. i'm not for any company. i'm for what best suits my gaming wants. some really good games at launch & i'm in!
  • @53, I don't think you know what free to play is... free to play doesn't suite gaming at all, that's the point... since when has wow been free to play as well? There's a demo version, but thats all :/ Free to play is not the next big gaming model, because it destroy's competition at it's very foundation.
  • Free to play is not what sells on Apple. It's the cheapest and accessible games. If only MS was not charging so much for indie and arcade games, they would see increase in sales as well. But I am surprised to see someone working for MS admitting that they are money grabing bitches, not willing to allow a dev an update to reasonable price=)
  • @54 well i know happy wars but thats about it :) i was thinking that games like DCUO. which do have free up to a certain level. would now be free. however, overall you're right then. maybe i dont know what this stuff is about. i'm 45yrs old, been playing since the 70s. i feel lost now lmao. maybe you can explain this better. for dinosaurs like me. i thought WOW was free now too. i know crytics is free to a certain level. so i thought thats what it was about. but the adds that people are talking about. are already on our xboxs. just saying. please explain then what this is about, thanks :)
  • Free to play can work if its say the Guild Wars model of you pay once for the game and a lifetime subscription and then you can use real world or in game currency to buy items that do not directly impact gameplay like extra character slots or cosmetic items. Or they could go the Angry Birds way and drown us with ads we can disable for about two bucks.
  • "You've got guys who make games like Fez who can't do an update to their game because it costs too much, if that game was on iOS that wouldn't be a problem, but because it's on XBLA, it's a problem." The only reason is a problem is because people keep releasing shit games. Here's a fucking idea for you idiotic developers: Don't release your fucking game until it's properly bug tested, polished, and complete! Then you won't need to worry about how expensive patches are because you won't need to release any patches. That's easily the worst thing about having our consoles internet enabled. Remember back on PS2, GameCube, N64, PS1, Genesis, Super Nintendo, and so on when you bought a game and it was actually fucking finished? You weren't paying to beta test and incomplete product, you were buying a completed product to enjoy. And if someone did put out a game full of bugs, it wasn't excused like it is today. It was negatively reviewed out the ass and didn't sell well at all. Now games never get tested and fixed properly because they can just make us pay for the "privilege" of doing it for them! And when review time comes, it's always the same handful of bullshit excuses "Oh the game is so big that bugs are okay". No it's not fucking okay! There were big games back on older consoles and they didn't have game breaking bugs out the ass. They might have small, minor bugs, but nothing that puts an end to your game. And you had to hunt for them too. Dick around for hours in GTA Vice City and you MIGHT find a bug that lets you fall through the map and walk under the entire city. Play Borderlands 2, Batman Arkham City, or AssCreed Liberation normally without even looking for bugs and YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING SAVE FILE MIGHT GET CORRUPTED!! Why the fuck are we not giving these games 1/10's until they fix their shit? Yes, I propose a new rule: if your game has a bug that randomly eats the entire save file, you get an instant 1/10 or whatever the worst possible review score the reviewer is using is until you patch your goddamn game so it works properly. Why the fuck are they releasing games this broken in the first place? Why the fuck is it even LEGAL to release a game that's so goddamn broken?! So no, you stupid person in the article who's name I can't remember. The problem is not patches are too expensive and the answer is not introducing an apple experience. The problem is completely broken games being sold to the public and the answer is finishing the fucking game before you sell it!
  • @58 i agree but look at skyrim. it gets a 10+. yet even now with all its patches. its still broken. proably never to be completely fixed. yet people & reviewers give it praise. skyrim was fine till they released the patches. now you still cant complete quests. yet gamers say. its gonna have bugs. thats the norm. well i find that unacceptable. games back then were awesome! except N64 company that did superman,carmageddon extra. genesis was best console yet. still is as far as i'm concerned. i can see gaming now going steam way. things are going to get worse for ms. as ms has gotten lazy now. just like nintendo did.
  • Alright, I'm playing Devil's Advocate in a forum where no one's gonna care but I gotta hurl my two cents at someone and pray it hurts. He's wrong about us needing to enjoy an Apple experience but what's the alternative? The Windows 8 experience? The Ouya has potential, as much as any small-platform could have while publishers are wary of how marketable a decision it would be to put their games on it. The number 1 issue with the Ouya is piracy concerns. We're told we can go in and play around with the code or use the console as a devkit, why wouldn't the few intelligent gamers remaining take advantage of that? If that weren't a problem, the free-to-play model COULD appeal to everyone in the same way "free trials" are done with PS+ members. It's free to play a chunk of the game or a certain time-frame of it. Then you pay if you want the whole thing. I don't see the problem with this but I'm sure all of you do. "Oh no, I heard a buzzword, I must become a hot ball of rage on the internet!" Everyone bitching about the new direction of 8th generation gaming needs to understand that it's not necessarily a bad thing, just different. And the ones complaining about the future of free-to-play digital ownership aren't allowing themselves to think about the pros, only the cons. You really think the video game industry is gonna survive another crash the way it is right now? Let the people who have been playing games longer and better do the talking. Once those who choose "die" over "adapt" actually die, only then we can finally have a civilized conversation about this.
  • @60 agreed, i'm 45yrs old. been gaming since i was 6yrs old. i've embraced ALOT of changes. your coments couldnt be more spot on. gone from carts to cds to dvds & next is probably streaming. with the use of the cloud function for storing data. the industry is facing anouther crisis. like it did in the 80s. i remember that incident too. also parenting groups trying to ban consoles as well. i know what needs to be done next. it'll be an expensive system. but it needs to be done. things like a kinect that can adapt to any play space. streaming games. vr headsets. blueray player just to catch up to sony. physical games will be gone. hard drives will be replaced with the cloud option. things like that need to happen.
  • Adapt or die? that's such a BS ultimatum, ill go with option 3: go outside :/ But seriously F2P has a up and a down side, we can't write it off without seeing both sides, I know people don't like change but oh well things change so better get used to it, just wake me up when we finally get our virtual reality helmets xD
  • @#52/#62: All right, then. Death! *bangs gavel* . . . by adaptation!
  • @5 Team Fortress 2, and League of Legends (and later DoTA 2 once it's out of beta) beg to differ.
  • Hey ed fries fuck you.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2 is f2p and they did it very well. There are no restrictions on playing, and the pay items are all novelties that you don't need to enjoy the game. I wouldn't mind f2p games if they stuck to that model.
  • I must be the only person here to realize he said nothing about forcing us int a f2p universe. I guarantee none of you are leaving the console world(or the gaming world for that matter) if COD45 comes out for free. Stop bellyaching and realize that the f2p model won't become the norm or standard but will be a solid niche inside the gaming community. if you want Resident Evil 9 for free. In the f2P games that I've tried there hasn't been anything that they want you to pay for that gives you an advantage on the playing field(all though I only play battle nations and not something like a FPS that might offer a better gun.)
  • @ 61, I'm in a similar boat to you as I have been playing since I had an Intellivision, & I'm now 39... But I can't think of anything worse than The things you mention; Streaming games & storing data in the cloud sounds like a hell where I don't have final control of my gaming:( & VR headsets? This ain't Caprica my friend! Eughhh! You are welcome to these changes that take away our gaming freedom:P! I'm with the Sofa, console, controller, TV, Physical copy, Local hard drive brigade. Each to their own I suppose.
  • Free to play isn't needed even since its already on apple's products. I pay for my games and arcades too and they are both great fun if they want to add free to play I'm going to sell my 360
  • Fries is a funny last name... Hey! I'll have that with Fries! Get it? XD
  • @68 its not what i want. its the patents put forward by ms. which was an article on here a while back. which had glasses you could look at your walls,floor extra. also same article said about kinect2 being a watch type device. both patents have been put through & accepted by ms. which is why i'm sitting out next gen. i want no rods & i want to see where the market is going now. i've got 3 bookselves full of games. not boasting, just saying. thats enough for a lifetime lmao. i also think they still might add a hd. but eventually it will be replaced by cloud storing. think of the space these games take up. also think of the drm. i think streaming is next up. look at steam,netflix & so fourth. its not hard to imagine next gen doing the same thing. its more cost & space affective. :)
  • @ 71, I respect your opinions:)
  • Did he just seriously say that Microsoft should be more like Apple?
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