I think CyberSundayz's concern is that free games that have microtransaction are typically unbalance for those who wanted to play for free.

If you dont want to buy the items, you will be owned by those who actually put money into the game. In the end, it actually become a race of who is actually putting more money into the game to get the best weapon,perks, cars or whatever.

I am fine with paying for it, as the developers still need money to develop and support it. However, with past experience from BF: Heroes and other F2P games, they tend to love to rent the item, than sell it to you. So, you get this cool gun for 3 days, after that, please buy again. It is annoying, and in the end, you probably end up spending more to play the game than buying a boxed game in the first place.

Those facebook game on the other hand, people are actually pouring money into them to the point that people are spending 10k USD on some stupid virtual farm to 100k USD from some middle eastern guy. Not all of us can do that, and i rather spend my 10k USD in investment on real farms than a stupid virtual farm.

At least with 10k USD, you can a whole warehouse full of traditional games or the entire Steam catalog,which is much better than people spending the same amount on a virtual farm that is only confined to that game. You can play those games any long as you want, or anywhere you want. Not to forget the amount of selection you have with the entire Steam catalog. What does spending 10k on Farmville or some free MMO offer you, other than the existing experience that is in that game only?

I do no believe that those games have steep maintenance or development cost. Those games are just there to rip people's money on totally pointless virtual stuff.

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Added on May 26, 2011, 10:54 pmThose games are not even as expensive as a typical big budget game like Call of Duty or GTA. They generally cost very little like 150k USD for a Facebook game.

It is not like other big budget games do not have to do patches, server maintenance, staff salary and so on.

This post has been edited by Cheesenium: May 26 2011, 10:54 PM

Thats as if you dont need servers, programmers, graphics artist to work on GTA or Call of Duty.

GTA and CoD needs even more man power and time to make than those cheap money ripping games.