Namco Bandai: “Free-to-play games can't be high-quality”

The F2P empire is expanding so quickly that it may soon build its own Deathstar, but not everyone's on board. Namco Bandai, however, may just take the anti-F2P rebellion sentiment to a whole new level. The gist of the Dark Souls publisher's argument? F2P isn't a dead end; it's worse. It's a quality-devouring black hole that the industry's willingly walking right into.

"Free-to-play games can't be high quality," said European senior VP Olivier Comte during Cloud Gaming Europe (via IndustryGamers ). "We need to put certain value on certain work. When you're a big company… you can't take risks too quickly, you can't make a change just because there's a fashion for a couple of years; you want to be there in 20 or 30 years."

He further argued that the unrelenting barrage of cheap, easier games is slowly sapping value away from triple-A games by causing buyers to expect to have everything handed to them on a silver platter.

So basically, Comte believes this rapidly expanding bubble is destined to burst in spectacular fashion. Even so, his argument seems a tad self-serving, if you ask me. He sort of just ignores the part where full-price products on PC tend to sink amidst a sea of piracy. F2P's a potential solution, and I think it'd be rather like walking the plank into a tank of genetic mutant sharks just to write it off because change is scary. How about you?