Free MMOFPS season is open:Tribes Ascend hits Steam ,Ghosts are in your PC machine, and there's DUST in your Playstation Eye

A deluge of seemingly free to play MMOFPS games is waiting to rain down on you mere mortal gamer... 


All PC games lead to Steam , well enough of the good stuff these days anyway... And so it came to pass that the phoenix known as Tribes Ascend risen from the ashes of the great Tribes series ( ask your granpappy) now sores among the clouds of Steam ... and totally free ( well watch out for the paid for cheaters boosted XP option) 

All these games seem to be free take the launch of the DUST 514 beta today , totally free the coders of E.V.E. promised , except for the paid for one off cheaters boosted XP option..

With the likes of Crytek also suffering a Crysis of conscience over which freemium model to adopt for their next opus we must all endevour to persevere in keeping free to play games free , and not be tempted by the paid for XP booster packs.


Or simply wake up to the fact that nothing is really free ,least of all in the world of games and they will make their money out of you some how some where down the line , or go bust trying.. 

Looking at DUST for the PS3 , I am overcome with sadness , not at the game but the realisation the PS3 as a platform and PSN is now in a twilight phase , PS4 has to hit March 2013 or Sony go the way of Nintendo and Sega .. that means gamers we have few precious months in which to take advantage of PSN as it is .What are the coders of E.V.E. hoping to achieve with DUST, maybe pull as many console gamers over to the PC as possible? And how long are any of these games going to be maintained ? 

Paid for MMOS start losing money about a year after launch. Big franchises struggle to maintain existence even 6 months after launch. In the case of DUST how long will Sony keep it's servers going , are you willing to put in all that time for one game and then have someone turn the switch off ? Several hundred Star Wars Galaxies fans were suddenly silenced by SOE earlier this year. 


The same holds true for any of the so called free to play games and Betas launched this week , including Tribes Ascend on Steam, Ghost Recon Online , and DUST 514. 

In olden days online gaming meant dedicated servers , people using their machines as servers and there was no need for the locked and finite life spanned private company owned servers we see accompanying games today. 


It seems a shame that now we have quality broadband ,  free to play , and paid for MMOFPS games , we still have not seen an evolution in how these game worlds are maintained and sustained in cyberspace... 


This in an age where terrabytes of useless twitterings , photos , videos etc can be stored and maintained for 100s of millions , so why can't a softco maintain a MMO for a few hundred thousand or million gamers? Why don't Google or Facebook take over the hosting of MMOs and free to play games? 


Take the wonder that was Battlefield 1 and 2 on the PC , the kudos of that series never came about from what D.I.C.E. threw into the often broken launched games , but from the community that created a thousand mods and updates.. see any of that with Battlefield 3? Just get in line to be fleeced for the premium DLC pack with the rest of the sheep... Till you do the same with Battlefield 4. 


So whilst I love all the free stuff ,I worry about whether any record will remain of the talent and hard work that has gone into creating these gaming worlds and experiences, as once the servers are downed the game is gone along with all the time you as a player invested. 


Funny how I am able to show someone Tie Fighter or Wing Commander running on DOS on the new iPad but I will never be able to show anyone the likes of Star Wars Galaxies or any of the above MMO/FPS games once the servers are downed. 


Similarly it is no accident that Facebook has gamers in the hundreds of millions , players can be confident the games will be around , including their lovely turnip and beetroot farm for years. Spare a thought for a once proud  Star Wars Galaxies online moisture farmer ...


The coders of MMOs and MMOFPS have to evolve the way they host or stream their content so it is platform agnostic and persistent , that is what all those wonderfully banal Facebook gaming success stories are doing. 


Right now I could download close to a terrabyte of Free to Play content , but none of these games has an end , other than when the developer chooses to pull the plug or money runs out , just think of the pain the Warcraft nation is going to face when that gets pulled.


oh the humanity....... millions of gold farmers silenced in an instant...

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