Speak for yourself, I haven't grown used to having to pay for a game piece by piece only to pay more in the long run. I use my tablet to get all my web browsing done so I can come home and play real games that took more than a week to make. There will never be anything "free" about F2P. Games made on the cheap lack the quality of a game that took some money to make. You get what you pay for. Mobile gaming has not surpassed the realm of being 10 minute diversions on your smoke break. AAA "F2P" titles are never really free. In order to encourage sales, it is necessary to offer an advantage to paying players. Every F2P is by design pay to win, and you will pay far more in the long run than $60 to win because you're also paying for several people who will try it and leave without paying. Oh, and let's talk about Zynga's "success", how's that success doing now? Last I checked the company was falling apart. Remember how awesome the internet was to get into before that bubble popped?
Oh, right. Was this article about F2P or always online games/single player modes? It seems to hop around quite a bit, these are two different things. One is an economic model and the other is a social model. Here's the thing about online games. They don't work well for every single game. I read an article on Kotaku awhile back where the author was playing Final Fantasy Tactics and mentioned that game would not be able to be an online game. Certain builds and classes like the Calculator are incredibly OPed and gamebreaking. In a single player game, cheapness and cheating are no issue, you play how you want. In a game where you're online and socially connected, those things would be gamebreaking and unfair to others. You do not play an online game how YOU want, you play an online game how EVERYONE wants. Still don't get it? Watch the new SimCity, maybe you'll get it then. SimCity in the past was about cheating, fooling around, breaking the game, making things how you want. People did not play it because they aspired to be urban planners, they played it because they wanted to play around with virtual cityscapes. An online SimCity where everyone has to be equal strips away the God Mode and leaves you to be nothing but an urban planner. You won't be able to play God this time, because not everyone can be God.