"Fee to Pay", as I cheekily refer to it, is all the rage after Zygna made a fortune from bilking gullible 40-something housewives with Farmville (not a snark, they've released statements saying that's their most lucrative market), combined with industry leaders salivating over the idea of how much Blizzard has made off its subscription-fee game, WoW.
The F2P game is free to download, and free to play...as a glorified demo. The underlying thinking is not that different from the thinking of a drug dealer: Give them a taste, then suck them dry once they're addicted. A not insubstantial part of the content, often tied to advancement and/or major features of the game, is then sold ala carte rather than as a subscription, and began in the realm of seedy, cheaply-made and marketed-at-kids-MMO scams. Since then, some of the big names have played with it as well.
Some games (such as Team Fortress 2, WoW, and the one superhero MMO) handle it better than others. But those that tend to handle it well start off as traditional sales, and then go F2P rather than abandonware at the end of their life cycle. The ones that handle it well also tend to do cosmetic items only, or occasionally mechanically-meaningless perks such as increasing the number of characters you can have or removing a level cap.
Those that do it poorly implement 'paid shortcuts'...and do so in a way where players with the time but not the money to burn are gimped by the size of their wallet. "We're sorry, the ER Small Laser is locked. You can either grind experience for 40 hours, or pay us $5. And in typical level progression fashion, the better stuff will only take longer to get from here. To get the entire arsenal, you can grind experience for 10,000 hours, or pay us $800".
I have only encountered one game where paid shortcuts are handled with anything resembling decency, and I'm staying leery of it in the future...just because it's balanced now doesn't mean it will always be in the sequels. Oddly enough, it's made by Microsoft: Forza 4. Players that work for it aren't hampered in any way; the progress of a player willing to work for their 'money' has been accelerated since the last game, to where the most expensive car in the game ($20,000,000) can be gotten with less than 12 hours of intelligently-planned work. The alternative for those unwilling to put in such (relative to its price) little effort can instead pay $3. I'm keeping a very close, suspicious eye on it.
Others, and I'll be critical of TF2 here, have randomly-dropped 'locked chests' that can only be unlocked through payment...and are not guaranteed to be a new item. Thankfully, in TF2 specifically those are only one type of drop, so drop collection is not limited to pay-per-drop only.
The ones that do it most offensively turn it into Warhammer tabletop...he who has the most money wins. Paid items are significantly more powerful and greatly imbalanced compared to anything that players can earn by working for it, and the amount of time required to earn anything is even worse than the hypothetical situation above, sometimes tied to winning...and one can't win with low-end equipment, creating a chicken-and-egg scenario that can only be broken by paying up.
The tech has the potential to do good, but only if implemented in a way that benefits gaming as a whole, rather than lining the pocket of a company (and/or its investors) whom long ago abandoned logic, reason, and basic economics in favor of expecting return on investment and quarterly income to not only religiously increase with every iteration, but accelerate as well.
Extra Credits [currently hosted on Penny Arcade TV] has a very, very good dissertation on the subject.
DLC can be the next great evolution of the expansion pack, and a way to finally bring skins...a staple of old-school FPS...to the consoles. It could. Instead, we get games where features are intentionally cut to give the company something extra to sell, versions so wildly varied that you have to preorder 3 limited-edition style copies at 3 different chains to get everything, and most offensively DLC that's already on the disc but makes you pay to unlock it.
Free to Play could be the next great evolution of the demo. Try before you buy, any and all progress carries over when you do, and is fully integrated with the main game. It could be win-win...more exposure means more sales, and gamers no longer get suckered by a bad game. But instead, it isn't demo or buy. It's demo or get nickel-and-dimed for far beyond what the retail price would have been...and because they can soak some gamers for far more than the $60 they would have paid on a more traditional sales model, they find it attractive.
It could even be used for good with MMOs. Free to download, have a moderate level cap [say, 35% of max]. From there, tiered pricing. One character, no level cap, no bank space [have to carry everything you own], $3/month. Extra bank space is available for an extra fee, as is extra character slots. Once you're paying enough for a full membership [$15/month], you get everything, regardless of whether or not you've chosen it. This is the best place for it, honestly.
In non-MMOs, all that needs to be done is integrating the demo and the multiplayer component. Unfortunately, shortsighted industry leaders are salivating at the amount of money WoW and TF2 made and are scheming to figure out how to turn every game into a sick hybrid of MMO and single-use consumable, with visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads, and no concern for the ramifications of all games adopting that model. One or two games with a residual monthly cost is no big deal...or in my case, paying for Live. When all games have a residual monthly cost (and your save is deleted if you ever stop paying), even if I didn't object on principle I'd going to be buying a lot less games. My games budget is my games budget, it doesn't go up just because the price of games do.
Given the price of making a polished title that makes the most of modern hardware, I don't know if gaming will recover if this shortsighted undermining of the industry's future causes a collapse.
As it pertains to Mechwarrior, it's an MMO. Online-only, PC-only, multiplayer-only, in the same tired setting that every
MW-related game has had since 1995 (the 17-year block between Clan Invasion and the start of the Jihad), but rather than subscription fee it comes with ala carte sales of some sort.
