🚀 go-pugleaf

So far, the first-person shooter developers used the following pricing scheme: they charged a set amount of money for each sold copy.

Now, I am playing Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer FPS. It has now evolved into the scheme when it is offered for free to play, and the players are sold the highly coveted items such as new weapons and accessories (hats).

I got a pricing idea for a single-player game. The game is given away for free to play. But each time the player's character dies and need a new "life", the new "life" is sold for a sum of money, say, 10 cents. Say, the character dies once every minute of the gameplay, on average. Thus, the player would need to pay $60 over the course of 10 hours of gameplay. That's the price of a 10-hour game.

The advantages are obvious. If the gamer started to play the game and did not like it after several minutes of playing, then he is out of pocket for under a dollar. The player can switch to another game. If the player has good skills, then he is rewarded for that, as he would be more rarely dieing, and thus, the game would cost him cheaper.

The game developers would be motivated to develop the better games, so that the players would be interested to press on with playing the game.

Obviously, the computer needs to be connected to the Internet during the gameplay, so that the seller's server counted the new lives needed and charged the player. If the player uses the "easy" difficulty setting, then he dies rarely, and would be charged at a higher rate, say, $0.20 per life. At the "hard" difficulty setting, the player would pay only 5 cents per life. And at "normal" setting, the price per life would be the said 10 cents.

What do you guys think about the pricing scheme ? Does it have a merit ? If it does, then I dare suggest this is the future of single-player FPS.