In The Crossfire

How Warface Is Trying to Navigate the Warzone of Free-to-play Shooters to Conquer Consoles
 

Allods Team and Mail.ru are walking into one of the most hotly contested warzones between gamers and game-makers around today. The crux of the contention is on how free-to-play gaming can best be managed, leveraged and experienced so that game-makers and publishers can make the money needed to keep moving forward, while also allowing players an experience that doesn’t feel like they’re being squeezed for cash. It’s about innovative ways of delivering games to players in a crowded marketplace where our money doesn’t stretch far enough to allow us access to everything. It’s about gamers who want to feel like their skills in the game mean that they can be competitive even if they don’t spend a penny. It’s about fairness. It’s about consumer rights. It’s about entitlement. It’s about profit. It’s about everything that clashes when commercialism and art collide, and Warface is returning to consoles in the midst of all of it.

But Mail.ru doesn’t seem too put off by all of this. In fact, when we caught up with project manager Alexander Shimov to talk about the transition of the PC version of Warface to PS4 and Xbox One (having picked up the free-to-play shooter from Crytek in early 2017), he seemed quite happy with how Warface is positioning itself in the market.