Is "free" worth 96 dollars a car? Real Racing 3 Review | Hardcore Droid

Very often the case against microtransactions is overstated by zealous traditional gamers. Despite EA’s gung-ho attitude toward in-app purchases, they’ve mostly been inoffensive in practice. Last year’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Mass Effect: Infiltrator had totally benign currency systems that could be completely ignored by those who didn’t want to pay to cheat. But every so often, we get a reminder of why there is such hysteria about this business model; a game whose sole purpose is to extract as much cash as possible from players, while leaving them on a hamster wheel of tiny payments that never ends. Real Racing 3 is such a game.

[4lc4pon3]

hell no

[SkullBlade169]

Just play a real racing game (No pun intended) instead of a crappy iOS game.

[Derekvinyard13]

Dam!

[Somebody]

So the game has a pretty amazing collision detection and damages (for a mobile game) which is obscenely exploited as a device to extort money from the player. This racer reminded me of the sailing game I've downloaded. The amount of repairs your ship need after each battle is almost the same as the amount of gold you've recovered from the same battle. There's barely enough gold to upgrade the ship unless you take out your credit card to purchase gold that you need to purchase the upgrades.

So I avoided playing games on phone since.

[Soldierone]

This is why I'm against all the free to play crap. Yeah it sounds fine, yeah some "core" games do it right. But whats stopping companies like EA from doing this?

Next thing you know you have 10 lives in COD for a day before you pay for more. (50 respawns for a dollar!) You need to pay EA a fee to enter a new area in Mass Effect. You have to pay to "fix" a car in racing games. It never ends.

Look at DLC. Started off as "check it out, we can expand the game!" Today its "look we locked half the content behind DLC!"

[ABizzel1]

Free to play is a great concept, as long as it's done by a company with INTEGRITY (more of them out there than you think, just stop looking at the Big 3 for 3rd party).

On top of that you don't have to pay and unlock everything. Realistically you're not going to use every piece of equipment in most games, where they offer hundreds of things to buy in F2P, so stick with the free stuff and pay for what you want once you get to know the game well enough.

[Soldierone]

@Abizzel

This is my point. I already said some people do it correctly, and sure they may stay that way. However who runs the industry? The Big 3. We wouldn't have online passes if EA never started doing it. They start doing it, then all the "smaller" companies fell in line because it worked.

Now lets say they take free to play, strip it down to bare bones, and charge you for everything else. People fall for it, now all the smaller companies are trying it.

Like I said its nice NOW, but look at the potential. Businessmen of the industry are NEVER going to push something that doesn't benefit themselves. They then take their ideas and have thier PR people run with it.

[Zha1tan]

I'm sorry what?!

Ok war gaming are bad but this is ridiculous.

[HardcoreDroid]

And this is EA, not some fly by night mobile dev. What's more, it's merely a matter of time before they broach the hardcore gamer market.

This kind of sh*&%$ is coming to a console near you. One of the big wigs at EA (I'm not going to dig up the name right now)said that Freemium is the future of gaming. It is not pretty.

[3-4-5]

Freemium might also be the downfall of EA. And with them gone somebody will step up and take their place.

[HardcoreDroid]

A line in the sand needs to be drawn.

[sinjonezp]

Situations like this...i am happy for jail breaking....an associate of mine showed me how to get unlimited cash and cars in the game. As long as developers try to screw consumers, there will be people playing robin hood against them.

[level 360]

Definitely avoid these greedy buggers.

[HardcoreDroid]

The money is using the how-to-boil--a-frog-alive concept. You put a live frog in a pan filled with cold water and turn the heat up very slowly. If you raise the heat at the perfect inclination the frog will allow himself to be boiled alive.

In the year that I was born water and TV were free and most adults had major medical to pay for their families yearly health expenses; said expenses were about 1/1000th of what they are today.

The degree to which this happens is dependent upon the degree to which we let it happen, and it is already happening (Soldierone has the right of it)and it will take more than just Robin Hood and avoidance to stop them. Hardcore gamers have to make them make it fair.