In any closed community, there is a tendency for certain community members to seek ways in which to assign themselves special statuses. These statuses are universally structured to establish superiority over other community members. As it relates to this Soapbox, certain players for some reason like to dump free-to-play fans into a subordinate role identified by inferred commonalities: free-to-play players are casual, free-to-play players are lazy, free-to-play players are entitled, free-to-play players are children, etc.
This method of reasoning avoids what is almost certainly the most important truth of free-to-play design: It is a decision made by the developer or publisher in the hopes that it will result in a higher return on investment. Free-to-play isn’t implemented by “lesser” gamers or freeloaders looking to ruin everyone’s good time; it is implemented by people who make the games because those people think it will result in the highest possible revenue. Countering a criticism of the sub model by complaining about people who prefer free-to-play games is like arguing that Wal-Mart is a bad company because some people like shopping there. In other words, it misses the point.
Free-to-play is not a perfect payment model. It has many pitfalls and problems, and is far from the perfect and most gamer-friendly method of monetizing any given title. But criticism of the model is only valid if it relates to the model itself — price gouging, content quality, pay-to-win, and grindy game design are all excellent places to jump off if the goal is poking holes in F2P as a design theory. What is not valid, however, is making assumptions about people who prefer the free-to-play model and using those assumptions to assail free-to-play as a monetization structure.