Black Desert Online Really Feels Like It Should Be Free-To-Play By Now

The other night, I was sitting here at my computer and received a message from Matt. He’d linked the Black Desert Online Steam page to me and noted that the game can be picked up for free through July 10. This… is not an unusual occurrence. In fact, it’s a bit of a joke among some of my friends that Pearl Abyss should just go ahead and make the game officially a F2P offering.

This has nothing to do with the work the dev team puts into the game. I mean, it has a mostly positive rating on Steam and a Metacritic rating of 80. That’s honestly not bad for an MMORPG where players are very often looking for rather different things from a game. It looks nice, has an interesting story, and deep mechanics. (Okay, some things about the game can be too deep. It’s a bit difficult to walk away from this game and come back later, because it’s pretty likely you won’t have any memory of how systems work.)

Here’s the thing. Black Desert has a standard purchase price of $10, which isn’t bad for a full MMO. But I’m not sure people are bothering to spend that much on the game, or spend at all. Not because the game isn’t worth it, but because it’s well known that if you just wait long enough, it will be offered for free. And this isn’t a “you can play for free until…” scenario. You pick up the game for free on Steam, and you get to keep playing it even after the deal has come to an end.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m trying to get a friend into a game I’m playing and I know this to be a given, I’ll tell them to wait, particularly if neither of us is certain they’ll keep playing. Ten bucks isn’t bad for a full MMO, at all. But free is better, particularly in today’s economy. So, at the end of the day, I’m not really certain how many people are going to pick up the game for the standard price, or even half off for that matter.

Of course, some might wonder how they’re going to make money if they’re not selling the game. And my response to that would be, have you seen the cost of the DLC they currently have available on Steam? The more players that are in the game, the more of them they can sell.

I will admit to not having been in-game for a while, but I do seem to recall an in-game store and game-specific currency as well. While I’m not a fan of any game’s system of buying gems, or what have you, to be able to make purchases from the in-game shop, it is fairly standard, and accepted, and whales are more than happy to do so. I’d personally rather have them just offer me a horse for $25, but the point stands: there are plenty of ways to make money off of players who are already in and invested in your game. Even the cheapest among us are going to spend something here and there.

I’ll also admit that if the game cost, say, $15 more and Pearl Abyss didn’t have a habit of offering it at a 100% discount often enough for those familiar with the game to feel okay telling friends to wait, I likely wouldn’t be making this argument.

That said, with the way things currently are, I still believe it’s time the shift was made.