Quoting: crumblesFree to play has ruined too many games that I used to care about and I have yet to see one that doesn't go down the drain once it goes free to play.

Yes and no. The biggest danger of pure F2P (not B2P) games is that they get designed from the ground up to be unfun, boring and tedious after the first few hours of trying them out - unless you pay up. Almost 100% of all mobile games are designed that way, which why I never play any.
There are certainly some F2P MMOs falling in that category. The most famous case being SWTOR. There is like no way whatsoever you can play that game without still being subscribed to it and have any fun with it. Or Neverwinter (the Perfect World one, not Neverwinter Nights), which is also a good example of making people run into (pay)walls at every corner.

However, I have seen several MMOs converting from P2P to full F2P that managed to do so in a fashion that still left the game in an enjoyable fashion even for players that spend very little or even nothing at all. Star Trek Online and Champions Online (funnily enough also by Perfect World) are very playable if you don't insist on having the absolute best available stuff at any time. Same goes for Rift. I didn't play it in a while, but for a while Skyforge was fun, too.

IMHO the best middle ground in terms of business models is B2P, but as can be seen in the case of this game, it doesn't work so well for niche games (and while this chart is probably meant to demonstrate how healthy the game is, but 10k-20k players a day is pretty much the equivalent of "dead" as far as MMOs go).
Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online use the B2P model with great success, but both aren't exactly niche games (they measure daily attendance in hundreds of thousands, so...). The charm of B2P is that devs don't absolute HAVE to put annoying dis-features into the game and force people to buy them away, since they get at least some revenue up front from every player.

Btw, most of the games I listed here work very well in WINE, with very little or no glitches. So it's not that Albion is the only choice if you want to play a MMO on Linux. It's thankfully not. ;)

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Quoting: iiariThe simulator genre really does have no end....

It really doesn't! Which is a good thing. I prefer fresh ideas over the same old boring "mouse hover target reticle over enemy's head and click to shoot them in the head!" shooter stuff.

I will probably get this game when it's out!

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy[snip]

The EU acts pretty much like a nation already in the sense that it certainly caters only to the interest of its ruling elite. You know...like any other nation. There is not one single nation on Earth not like that. They ALL care only for the 1%. That's really not an argument against the EU. It's an argument for reform and change, and for going to elections and vote these people out.

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The EU is in that fuzzy "not yet a nation, but not individual states anymore either" state. It's written goal actually IS full confederation one day. It's taking a while, because there are too many dumbass nationalists around that don't understand the "the sum is greater than its parts" thing.

People that defend that disgusting corporate practice of having no problem with moving your jobs to cheaper regions, but charging you prices as if the thing had been made in a high-wage country fail to understand that for the practice of trade the EU -is- one nation already. Goods, money, ideas and people can move absolutely freely inside the EU and did so for decades, so banning regional price discrimination is just a logical step. Nothing more, nothing less. Our our side of the pond, we don't allow corporations to block someone living in Texas from shopping in North Dakota either. Same thing.

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Quoting: razing32Am i living under a rock ?
What games did Romero Games actually make ?!

Assuming they started making them a decade ago, I'd say we're a decade or two away from seeing their first game.

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As long as you're not a MMO that's constantly being worked on and improved by a sizable live-team, don't think for a second you can ask me for more money after I bought the game. The idea of milking people's wallets way after the initial purchase has become a complete pest in the gaming industry, and led to games designed from the ground up to be unfun and tedious (unless you pay up). Sorry, but I keep to games I can just buy -once- and have fun with.

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I love this game, except that they -really- need to fix the performance issues. I have a decent machine, and larger cities still bring everything down to a crawl. It's called Cities Skylines, not Town Skylines, so I feel I should be able to build cities occupying 25 tiles if I feel like it.

Other than that, Cities is a laughably better city builder than anything EA ever made.

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Screw them! Companies that base their business strategy around taking away consumer choice end up on my shit-list pretty quickly, no matter if they support Linux or not (not that they would). I wish them a quick bankruptcy and their management a very long time of unemployment.

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I have NO idea why MMO makers still try to launch their games with a business model that makes it harder for the game to find an initial audience that keeps it going. When subscription models started consistently failing, pretty much any MMO kept using it anyway - only to convert the game to B2P or F2P a few months later, when they game already lost momentum. It is very hard for a post-launch game to attract new players, and MMOs need a LOT of players to be interesting for players and be profitable for the publisher. And while this game didn't try monthly fees, it's such a niche game that due to its outdat...errm...old-school design appeals to so few people to begin with, that even a B2P model was more or less guaranteed to fail for it. Regardless of what they said about the game growing, but they wouldn't have changed the business model if they were happy with how the game is doing.

Not that I'd care about how well this particular game does (it's too "old-school" for me), but every MMO that's not doing so well will further damage an already fading genre and convince developers not to make MMOs anymore...

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I have never played the board game, so I don't have a connection to this game. When I want a WW2 strategy game, I will just start Hearts of Iron IV. Paradox has spoiled me forever. Most strategy games released by other studios are too shallow for my taste. That and I slowly get jaded of the WW2 setting.

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