As someone who games on both PC and Console I really am slightly perplexed by the generally hysterical response to the suggestion that a micro transaction based market will become a significantly more important part of the gaming market as time progresses, though reading the comments throughout the sets of stories on this topic here on Gamespot and other sites I do feel that a large part of this response is down to a bandwagon phenomenon based understandably off a fairly vague interview given by a senior member of the gaming world which has at least to a certain degree been misconstrued.

Let us get the one big fallacy that has been brought up within the comments on this and other site quashed from the get go: Real gamers do not play free to play games and free to play gaming does not support or encourage the development of real games. This is, to be quite blunt about the matter, a complete myth. The PC market has already shown that quality products can be produced from a free to play model stand out examples being Tribes Ascend and League of Legends as well as Team Fortress 2 which in its old age has followed this route and signs are that this model will continue to generate good IP with the upcoming Planetside 2 and RaiderZ. Yes for every good free to play game there are an armful that use the model exploitatively as perhaps best demonstrated within the IOS market but the very same can be said for games produced under the traditional business model after all let us not kid ourselves that every game released for a console or PC under the traditional model is a good one. There will always be chaff accompanying wheat regardless of how the process goes along.

Now as the fairly balanced article Brendan Sinclair wrote details not all games are suited for the free to play model, and unsurprisingly we have seen in both the PC and IOS market where this model is fairly common that the majority of games do not use the free to play model and it is Moore's comment that all games will use micro transactions that seems to have caused the most justifiable consternation on here. Of course it is worth highlighting that he did not say how that would work and people seem to have jumped to conclusions of their own volition to chastise Moore for this comment. After all if it boils down to basically what we see at the minute a lot where a 'demo' is free but you have to pay to play the full game then nothing will have actually changed aside from a move to a full digital distribution market which is by now rapidly becoming clear as inescapable as technology progresses.

At the end of the day the digital models of distribution have a lot of strengths for the majority of parties: No shelf space restriction limiting temporal or physical availability of products and of course a greater ability for producers to make profits and developers out of gaming without having to share the money with middle men in the form of brick and mortar stores, just look at the success Minecraft as brought Mojang, would it have been possible in a traditional market model? Let us not get worked into a fervour over this, the PC has already shown there are positives moving in this direction as with everything it is the execution of the model, something that has not been detailed yet that will be the deciding factor but spare pushing the illusion that the digital revolution will be the end of gaming. It's already been shown that is not the case.

In the recent review of the new Zelda game, Tom Mc Shea criticised the game for having too much padding, which lead me on to thinking a tad about padding in games. Now, it is fair to say almost every game has some form of padding in there, be it killing an excessive number of enemies for an achievement, or simply an excessive number of fetch quests, and further more, no genre is more guilty of this than the RPG genre as a whole. However in light of this the true issue of padding comes to the fore, it is not a sweeping generalisation that all padding is bad, nor conversely is it that padding should be acceptable, what the real issue is, is does the padding have a negative impact on the casual gamer playing the game, or is it something that we will only encounter going for that achievement or besting a game totally. I take Final Fantasy 10 here as my case in point (I know it is old but I have recently finished replaying it): If you are not bothered about 100% the game, you can breeze through it in around 30 hours with out actually encountering much padding material at all, it is only in fact if you are wanting to tackle every aspect of the game that it becomes an issue, for example getting 10 of every creature in the game to unlock all the monster arena creations, or getting to a set of stats where you can take them all on, but if you are wanting to do that then the padding doesn't actually matter, because it is simply part of the game. Which brings us to the conclusion on padding: Yes all games have it, but it is only an issue if it is in the way of someone who does not choose to go after it, if I am never going to kill 10,000 of such an enemy in a game to get an achievement does it matter that it is there, no, if I want that achievement does it matter that I have to kill or capture that many things, no. It is only when the latter is forced upon the former that it is an issue. Just a ramble from the box under the archway, it's cold out after all XD.