Metro Conflict: The Origin Dropping B2P Model for F2P
Shortly after Metro Conflict launched on Steam Early Access with a price tag of $19.99 the developers quickly realized no one was going to pay to play the once free to play shooter. In response to the lack of interest the game announced it would go free to play. The lack of interest in Metro Conflict shouldn't be too surprising. The game was originally available through OGPlanet and shut down due due to little interest in the title. Red Duck, the game's South Korean developer, is hoping that a free to play transition brings new life to the game.
Anyone who purchased the $19.99 bundle gets access to all the game's characters as well as a bunch of other goodies. Metro Conflict is developed by Red Duck, the same company behind Alliance of Valiant Arms.
Update: Red Duck has sent us a comment:
We’re not trying to sugar-coat anything here but we do have our reasons behind our decision to transition over from P2P to F2P. We believe one of the biggest changes we’ve brought with the time OGPlanet serviced the game as our publisher in 2015 is the focus of game development.
It looks like Red Duck has worked on Metro Conflict quite a bit since OGPlanet published it initially.
With all F2P games, developers look for revenue streams by introducing content for sale. This is all well and appreciated but with the recent gaming industry saturating the market with free to play games, many developers and publishers alike are somewhat forced into selling content that has an impact within the game. A good example would be VIP status weapons. The problem with such business models come from lack of balance-ability. In many cases, such avenue brings forth Pay to Win scenarios which ruin the game experience for many.
Red Duck seems to be against "pay 2 win" with Metro Conflict.
With this said, our focus wasn’t to simply ‘sell’ our game for profit but to offer our game initially as a package product which includes all features and contents for free of charge. You will see that we have removed all micro transaction options out of the game. This is our way of firmly saying.. absolutely no pay-to-win scenarios. Unfortunately, even with many great users joining us through the Early Access period, we’ve been experiencing low concurrent number of users for fluid match making to take place. As such, our immediate and prioritized plan of action was to resolve this issue for our valued EA users. Our decision to transition over to Free to Play stems from this issue alone. We do not want Early Access users to have trouble getting matches in-game.
The reason for Metro Conflict going F2P seems to be Red Duck's loyalty towards people who bought the game.
