I bought this game and I love it, but I cannot convince any of my friends to give it a go. The up-front box price ($60 if you don't shop around!) is a major stumbling block. My friends have been conditioned to believe that gaming should be free or a game should cost at most a couple of dollars.
In this day and age, with the rise of F2P games, beta invites, youtube and Steam sales, this is the accepted norm. My friends can play SWTOR, a $200 million budget MMO with world-class voice acting and far more raids, dungeons and pvp content than this game, and other MMOs like DCUO, LOTRO, War Thunder and World of Tanks for free, and have all signed up for the beta test of TESO to "locust swarm" it and beat it during the invite period. For non-MMOs such as Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim, GTA4 and Max Payne 3 my friends can download the full campaigns of each for free off the internet. Just like youtube, which lets you watch videos for free (with the video creators being paid through advertising), there are these so-called "torrent" sites that game companies use to put up singleplayer-only versions of their games, which they gain revenue off from advertising on the torrent site and by enticing people to purchase the multiplayer-enabled version for real money. This strategy has been a major success, with companies like Rockstar Games going from strength to strength off torrenting and the successor to GTA4 (GTA5) coming soon.
When people can play and own award-winning universally 9/10+ reviewed third-person shooters like Max Payne 3 and Mass Effect 3 for free, how can Trion therefore expect people to pay $60 for a middling third-person shooter that has been panned by critics with 5/10 reviews across the board? I have been ridiculed by my friends for paying top dollar for this game. $60 is not chump change. It's enough for a night at the movies and a restaurant dinner with a significant other, or a night out clubbing, both culminating in a shag. In my friends' opinions, no game is worth more than a shag. I have been called a sucker and a crackwhore for being so addicted to games that I've put down real money to buy Defiance. I've been called a loveless loser who would forego a chance to meet his potential wife for life while out clubbing, because I chose to waste that money on a stupid game.
I have accepted becoming the butt of jokes in my social circle and a pariah because I believe in this game. I will continue to push this game on the people I encounter, even if that means getting laughed in the face for being a paying sucker. But I am only me. I don't believe my $60 can pay for the whole development staff at Trion, even if I spend additional money on the season pass. Trion need to move away from their outdated payment model, of expecting people to PAY for Defiance, if they want to survive and grow as a company. I know Trion have traditionally been sticklers in this regard. With Rift they have stolidly stuck by their P2P sub-based payment model. Look where that's got them. The last I heard, Rift was dead with almost all its servers closed. If this game is going to have any playerbase it needs to be F2P.
It is quite ridiculous. Defiance was marketed as a transmedia event. I can watch the Defiance show for free off SyFy or Amazon Prime's streaming services. Yet people have to pay $60 to get a copy of the game in order to follow the rest of the story. Just like the TV show, the game needs to also be free or people will just watch the show and the game will be left to wither away.
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Originally Posted by Kharnamatic
