Zombie Studios Wants to Prove Not all Free-to-play Games feature Pay-to-win Model

Jared Gerritzen, Zombie Studios director said that with their Blacklight: Retribution they want to break the idea that all free-to-play games feature a pay-to-win model, and they can also offer a core experience.

Gerritzen explained that the studio built the next-generation version of the game based on 2012's Windows PC game from the ground up with a new monetization pipeline.

Gerritzen's idea is to teach players that free-to-play games are not all about spending "hundreds and hundreds" of dollars. He continued to explain that the transactions in the game are a lot smaller and offer players small advantage like skipping the amount of time it is needed to do something.

"When you think of free-to-play, there has only been a handful of western games, a lot of them are from other territories, where they are very much OK with the free-to-play mentality," he said. "It is not as openly complained about, you don't have massive forums calling it pay-to-win."

"You are going to see these come and they are going to be big and everyone else is going to be like 'We can not keep making pay-to-wins now,'" he said. "You are also going to see a lot of other bigger companies that  really rest on the yearly content see a completely new marketplace."

Announced in March that the title was headed to PlayStation 4, Blacklight: Retribution will launch in beta stage along with the console this week November 15.

"Anytime you ship a downloadable game, unless you have a hundred thousand dollars worth of play testing or thousands of people coming online, you are always going to find something," he said. "So that is why we are considering it a beta, and we'll be able to get more content on to the PlayStation, constantly evolving it."