I feel a bit ashamed, because my main thought during the last four hours of Warframe was, "gosh, I wish I were playing Mass Effect." Which isn't really fair to Warframe. Aside from them both being sci-fi 3rd person shooters, the two games are nothing alike. They're not really trying to do the same things. So any comparison between the two would be pretty pointless.
This may be a case of me devaluing Warframe, just because it's free. You know, the video game equivalent of the placebo effect. But I don't think that's what's happening here. After all, Mass Effect has been bought and paid for for so long, it is, by this point, effectively free.
No, I think Warframe made me realize that the real cost of my video games is not measured in dollars and cents, but in opportunity costs. What am I giving up in order to play this game? And at some point in the past (and it must have been fairly recently, because I don't remember feeling this way even two or three years ago), the confining factor on whether a game is worth buying changed from "do I have the money for this" to "do I have the time for this?"
Warframe is an enjoyable game. Its fast-paced action and deep economy and character customization are more than one could reasonably expect from a free game. In terms of "fun per dollar" it is off the charts. But it's not Civilization V or Skyrim or even Mass Effect. So, oddly enough, this free game is far too expensive.
Still, it's a remarkable time that we live in, that things like Warframe can exist. I wonder if the realities of digital distribution are responsible. The deep discounts given by Steam's various sales make it possible to get totally life-absorbing games for what amounts to a trivial expense. And that, in turn means that no serious gamer is ever without a video game, nor even without a novel video game. Thus, when introducing a new game to the market, the alternative to your product is not nothing (as might have been the case in the not-too-distant past), and it's not even the other video games on the market. Your competition is, in fact, every video game ever made, including all the absolute classics. And the price point of that competition could be anything, and was probably a single digit figure, amortized over the course of months or years to be practically nothing at all.
Seen in the light of these market conditions, free-to-play seems less like a strangely generous way for people to pay for games voluntarily, and more like the inevitable end point of the market's logic. Of course as long as supply goes up geometrically faster than demand (because every new game that comes out is also going to be reasonable competition for future games), then the price of games is going to drop, even down to nothing.
Yet that doesn't explain how games like Warframe are able to stay in business. It may cost nothing to play, but it clearly did not cost nothing to make. A great deal of care and effort went into creating the levels and designing the weapons and making the different warframes visually distinct. Not to mention the continual maintenance of balance patches and bug-fixes. How can the game make money that way?
The impression I get is that for many people Warframe is less of a game and more of a lifestyle. That they buy platinum to get customization options or to speed up the production of new items not so much for the value of the things in themselves, but to gain distinction in the community. It's an irrational impulse, but one I understand. I myself am guilty of buying games on day one, specifically so that I can talk about them on the internet. To be one of the first to play a game is a kind of social capital that has a certain value. Rare warframes and paint colors are much the same.
I think that's why I never really got into Warframe. I never really connected with the community. It's my fault, really. I always feel uncomfortable starting conversations, especially when I don't know what I'm talking about. More fundamentally, I think that I'm not a very good fit. Every community has its own energy and expectations, its own in-jokes and rhythms to its conversation. That, as much as anything, can define a game. Blade Symphony was hyper-competitive, yet honorable. Dungeons and Dragons Online seemed to be fractured and insular. And the people of Warframe had a kind of ostentatious swagger that had a definite appeal, but which I could not at all pull off.
What I need to do is find an online community that is staid and polite, and comfortable with exchanging pleasantries only once every week or so.
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