Scrolls to feature 'free to play' elements; Notch hates the term

Founder of Mojang Specifications and creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson (aka, Notch), recently tweeted that his upcoming game Scrolls will feature elements of games that describe themselves as 'free to play.' Ironically, this revelation comes alongside a recent blog post by Persson, entitled "I hate 'free to play.'"

The tweet reads:

@notch: And, yes, Scrolls will contain aspects of "free to play". We won't call it "free to play," though, as it's not a "free" game.

Despite the caustic headline of his blog post, Persson isn't entirely against some of the concepts and conceits of the 'free to play' model. Though he's not entirely sold on the trend of free-to-play games, what really irks him is the misleading nature of the "free to play" nomenclature, which he feels is more accurately described as "as expensive as you want it to be." Case and point: many gamers already jokingly refer to these titles as "free to pay."

"The idea [of free to play] is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money," Persson writes. "Various psyhological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited," he continued, "and eventually you end up with a game that's designed more like a slot machine than Half-Life 2."

Persson isn't yet talking about how "free to play" will factor into Scrolls, specifically, but we'll let you know as soon as he shares some more details.

The Minecraft creator also isn't averse to paying for post-launch content, or a subscription-based game. In fact, his post ends on a semi-ironic note: "I'll go play some Team Fortress 2 now until DOTA 2 is released. I can't wait!!"