Your next fix of crazy drifting from Ridge Racer won’t cost you a penny, initially.
Namco Bandai recently announced that Ridge Racer: Driftopia will be coming to the PlayStation 3 and PC sometime later this year, there’s no word on a Xbox 360 or Wii U version, but that’s something we’ll more than likely find out at a later date as the publisher is being somewhat tight with platform specifics.
As you might have guessed, Ridge Racer: Driftopia will include microtransactions. You can pretty much expect to have to pay for anything and everything, so cars, tracks, music. You name it, you’ll probably have to pay for it. That being said, it’s not the worst thing in the world, you do get the base game in its simplest form for free so you won’t lose out on any cash for giving it a go, just some space on your hard drive.
Free-to-play titles are becoming a lot more commonplace these days and Ridge Racer is just the start, I think we can expect to see many more free-to-play games in the coming years, especially with the next-generation of consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Next Xbox.
The only thing that bothers me is that buying all the content via microtransactions may actually cost more for the player than if the game was released as a full retail game, which would more than likely included all the stuff that you’d buy in the free-to-play.
A prime example is the free-to-play racing game for iOS and Android devices, Real Racing 3. The cost of all the content would be greater than $500, whereas a typical full release on a mobile is typically less than a tenner. See what I mean?
Maybe free-to-play isn’t really that consumer friendly…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnmeo3aOpzg&feature=player_embedded
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What do you think about “free-to-play” games? Do you think it’s a good direction for Ridge Racer to be going?
Source: Joystiq