The Proof Is Undeniable: People Will Still Pay For Great Shooters

The wild successes of Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders show that "free-to-play everything" is not inevitable.

Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I'll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.

The biggest multiplayer shooters of the moment cost money. Arc Raiders is $40, has no free trial, and it's a top seller. Battlefield 6 launched for $70 and instantly became the most successful game in the series (later adding a free-to-play battle royale mode). Both are raking it in, both are reviewing well, and both are being played more than several of the sturdiest free-to-play shooters on Steam.

The numbers won't always look like that, but the wild successes of Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders prove an important point: people want to pay for great multiplayer shooters again. That's music to my ears, because it didn't always look like we'd get back to this point.

Not long ago, it wasn't unreasonable to believe the future of all multiplayer gaming was free-to-play. Under the umbrella of Fortnite's ascension in 2018, new battle royales started cropping up for free, and they were instantly popular. Meanwhile, traditional shooters that dared hang a price tag were suddenly viewed as old-fashioned. DICE was on the wrong side of the trend when it put out Battlefield 5, an eventually beloved game that was ignored at the time.

When did the shift happen? I reckon it's less about how paid games have changed and more up to how the modern free-to-play experience has become a nightmare. Storefront first, videogame second. Everywhere you look are games tangled up in so many layers of microtransactions, limited-time events, and premium tracks that we've been collectively wrung-out by the upsell. Paying the price of that exhaustion are a graveyard of good games that deserved to exist, but were shut down because they weren't immediate hits as free-to-play products.

You can't argue that the biggest free games aren't technically a good value, but they come with crap that you're just supposed to put up with because there's no cover charge. Marvel Rivals is a decent example: Heroes and maps are free, but the experience of playing it as a free user is like walking a used car lot with an increasingly impatient salesperson.

Paid games, in the best cases, offer a more favorable contract. Battlefield 6's best quality is that it's plucked out of 2011—a g

Source: PC Gamer