Allegedly Free Game: Difference between revisions

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*** Cosmic Break is a mild example. Currency for cash shop(Rt) can be bought with in-game currency(UC), but the price drastically increases every 10 units and capped to 50, a decent amount of Rt. The UC>Rt event resets each month allowing to gather enough Rt to buy what you want without paying after 2-3 months. A third of robots\weapons are in cash shop, the rest are from [[Player Versus Environment]]\[[PvP]] and UC shop. And the game continues to receive updates.

**** Lately, the updates have only seemed to be of the gashapon (called garapon in-game) variety. Some of the garapons require real money, and have a small chance of getting a bot that is usually considered [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|overpowered]]. As one [http://www.cosmicbreakfanforum.com/t8613p15-how-cyberstep-can-be-so-retard forum user] puts it:

{{quote| "On the other hand, [[Cyber Step]] continues to churn out Garapon updates non-stop, not even bothering with the Shop in terms of UC and Rt(it took months until an actual bot appeared in the Shop, and it was only 1 bot). Because 95% of the stuff people want are in the Garapon, people are unable to actually improve on their bots unless they were willing to sell their houses. Didn't help that the Gashapon was more or less a part of Japanese culture and that most [[Otaku]] are very willing to throw their money away on mostly useless stuff, so [Japanese] players were OK with that sort of thing and [[Cyber Step]] hoped that it would be the same case with the [English] players..."}}

{{quote|"On the other hand, [[Cyber Step]] continues to churn out Garapon updates non-stop, not even bothering with the Shop in terms of UC and Rt(it took months until an actual bot appeared in the Shop, and it was only 1 bot). Because 95% of the stuff people want are in the Garapon, people are unable to actually improve on their bots unless they were willing to sell their houses. Didn't help that the Gashapon was more or less a part of Japanese culture and that most [[Otaku]] are very willing to throw their money away on mostly useless stuff, so [Japanese] players were OK with that sort of thing and [[Cyber Step]] hoped that it would be the same case with the [English] players..."}}

* ''[[Champions Online]]'' has a "Free For All" setup, where anyone can play nearly all of the game's content for free. However, the free Silver accounts have severe restrictions placed on character customization (fewer costume choices, a handful of Archetypes, limited bag slots, and a limited selection of travel powers) and have to purchase access to the Adventure Packs (optional repayable mission content). Still, this is mostly an aversion of this trope as it is entirely feasible to level a character all the way up to end-game content without spending a penny on the game: nothing that is essential requires a purchase.

** All of the above restrictions can be bypassed by spending real money to unlock the restricted content; but there are two aspects of The game which are only available to the subscription-based Gold accounts: power customization (what color is my energy blast? does it come from my palm, fist, chest, or head? etc.) and Freeform characters (which are superior in every way to the Archetypes, both in terms of how much freedom you have in choosing powers and how many powers you can choose). Silver accounts are definitely second-class citizens in the game; though they are not outcasts.

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* Equine-Ranch. Sure, it's free to play indefinitely...unless you want to actually do something, like breed or train your horses to a winning level of even the basic level competition...or even own horses that aren't just "Grade" horses.

* ''[[Evony]]'' advertises itself as "Free Forever", but the only reliable way to get special items is to buy them for real money. This includes the Michelangelo's Script, a requirement to upgrade a building to its highest level, for $5 per upgrade. It also includes medals, which you'll have to buy if you want to have more than two cities at once. They also have three separate "[[Blatant Lies|free gifts]]", the best of which requires the player to spend $100. The worst part is that the game coins are called "cents" even though each cent costs $0.10, to make things seem cheaper. (All figures in US dollars.)

* [[Facebook]] hosts a wide variety of these types of games. However, many fall under [[Bribing Your Way to Victory]] rather than this trope.

** Some Facebook games come pretty close to Allegedly Free; you can get stuff you want or need in the game by paying money directly to the game or by completing real-world offers that sometimes require money. The upside is that some of the offers are things like product samples, so you're not ''just'' paying for that game upgrade you want, you're paying for a bag of coffee or a makeup kit ''and'' getting the game upgrade.