This is one for the entire industry.

Surely the idea is you play for free but as you use the game, you pay money? Top-up with extras and so on.

On my old phone this is called Pay As You Go not Free to Call.

They call it free to play as you can play at least some of the game for free to wet your appetite. It is your choice if you wish to spend money to expand on your play experience.

On a phone you cannot make calls for free or do anything on the network for free and so you have to pay to do anything at all. They are not the same at all or even similar.

on a pay as you go phone you pay for everything. you just do it 'as you go', instead of a contract. there is nothing free about any of it hence they cant use the word free in it.

these games are free to play. you dont have to pay a penny. there may be pay restrictions along the way but you can still play the bulk of the game (and in sto's case all of the game) for free.

you may disagree with their business model, but compared to other f2p games out there it is a reasonable good one.
why? In theory you can get anything there is by playing the game...it only takes a lot of time.
there are no real limitations in sense of missions only available to paying users or anything.
for the most part all free ships are competitive in endgame and PVP.
and the most important point: you can earn the currency used to buy ships etc while playing.


compared to a phone, this would mean: you phone for free, but with less quality than the paying user...but while you do phone you load up your account with points to upgrade to a better quality. The more you phone for free, the more features you unlock.


ofcourse those ships and other features are highly overprized, but considering that you can earn the currency to buy it while playing makes those prices understandable.
I certainly would prefer, smaller prices, but less possibilities to earn the currency ingame.

Because it gets more people in than "Get very basic access for free and end up spending a lot more than $15 a month if you actually want anything in the game that has any real use".

I don't! I use the dilithium exchange.

It is called free to play because you play for free. I have a level 50 in a sovereign. I never spent a dime of money to go through all the mission content. I can do stfs, I can do dailies, I can do pvp, and still not pay a dime. I have played everything the game has to offer without spending any money. I also have about 400k in dilithium that I can use to buy other things if I want them.

The items in the c-store are primarily nothing more then pretty little do-dads. Most of the players do not need any of them. You buy items because you want them not because you need them to play. Using a $25.00 regent over a free sovereign means I finish an stf run 10 seconds faster? For those who do not pvp there is not enough mechanical difference between ships to warrant buying them, so you are buying them for pleasure, not necessity.

Rather then the cellphone example a better example might be a automobile. Your uncle might give you an old car when you turn 16. It was free and it runs fine. That does not mean you might not put money into bondo and paint to make it look nicer. You might put in a new stereo and new rims. You might even throw in some seat and steeringwheel covers too. Maybe you have put a few hundreds dollars into that old car, but none of that changed how the car operated. It simply changed how you feel about it. That is free to play: it works fine as it is but you might want the do-dads to change how you feel about it.

I think the Op was trying to point out that you need the Internet to play so its really not free to play looking at it from that perspective which is the same as a phone because you need to be connected to make the phone calls in the first place.

No, they're saying that even if you play the game for free, you still have to pay real money in the C-store.

Which isn't true because 1)nothing in the C-store is completely necessary to play the game and 2)you don't have to pay a dime because there are the offers and the dilithium exchange through which to earn zen.

It's Free to Play the plainest meaning of the phrase. And it's not too hard to figure it out especially since the game didn't start out that way. Got it, yet? I'll wait....


Times up. STo was a subscription based games at the start. And converted over to the Free To Play model. So the phrase means you don't need recurring subscription in order to access the game and play it, nothing more. Generally you have a plain, no frills, economy version of the game. If you want more? Well, that'll cost ya.