Read this article first, by the ever-prescient Peter Moore:What I want to do is use that article to sort of discuss a major point - as alluded to in the title. Are games a product or are they a service?Presently they are, of course, a product. To use Mr. Moore's analogy, you can already go into a store, look at some games, play a few demos, and buy one. You have bought a real, tangible product. Even on Steam, you go around the virtual store front, look at the games, check out reviews, maybe play the demo, and ultimately decide to buy. After buying the product, that's is - you have every right to do whatever you want with the product as you see fit. Despite Steam's protections, if you so chose you could still go over to a friend's house, download the client, download the game, and play it right there as if you brought the disk over to play. Afterwards the analogy becomes a bit fiddly bit still: it holds.To conflate that idea - that you go into a store and buy a game - with free-to-play (games as a service) is a complete and utter fallacy. In order to make the analogy more correct for Mr. Moore, let me put it more like this. It's like going to an amusement park store and buying some chotchkies that will supposedly "improve" your park experience while you are there. Because it's the amusement park store and the product is exclusive to them, it's the only place where you can buy it. As such, they hold a virtual monopoly on the product and can charge whatever they want. Moreover, the product itself doesn't work outside the park. You take that ride improvement item to Disneyland and it won't work. What's worse is that you can't take it out of the park with you - that little piece of flair only exists within the confines of park property. Sure, you might've gotten into the park for free but now you feel some perverse obligation to try to get your money's worth out of that little gimmick. Now that little item becomes part of the service, because it's not at all a real product. You have to pay them to make the service experience better for you.Consumers should be scared of free-to-play and this image of games as a service. If a bunch of business moguls are touting this as the next big thing, you should be scared out of your mind. Businesspeople are accountable only to one group of people in only one particular way - shareholders and money. They have no obligation to consumers whatsoever - the biggest free-to-play game in the world, FarmVille, is blatantly designed (and admitted to being as such) to separate fools from their money to make loads upon loads of cash for Zynga. They care not about how good the game, how artistic it is, or even how revolutionary it is - they only care about these things if there are big bucks to be had pursuing them. Considering the sheer number of sequels out there, I doubt that they're much concerned about these things at all.Also note the people who are espousing free-to-play and the idea of games as a service - they're the heads of all of the major publishers. What about the developers or more pointedly, the indie developers? Independent game developers seldom have the money or the resources to establish large online cash-grabbing infrastructures to support free-to-play service games. While storefronts like Steam may be willing to (and probably do it for less than Activision or EA would charge), it's still not an ideal solution for the Project Zomboids, the Dead States, the Endless Spaces, or even the Supreme Commanders of the world. Such gaming experiences are reliant on the game being a product, with players paying to have all of the cool objects, tools, and thingamajigs they want in the box.Finally, the idea of Free-to-Play being the dominant paradigm and the only way games are made in the future is a direct spit in the face of what gaming has historically been. Gaming never started with the founding of EA, Activision, Atari, Nintendo, or any other company out there in the world with a responsibility to profits first and then consumers (when convenient). It started with William Higinbotham messing around with a computer to create Tennis for Two - not done for profit, but for fun. As Peter Moore broods on his perch, crowing about how Free-to-Play is the new way (and oh, by the way his company has a ton of money to make that happen), people like Notch do just what William Higinbotham did - mess around on their computers programming, bending the laws of code around to suit their vision - and end up making tons of money because people recognize that he makes a good product, not a service.Gaming is a weird, weird industry. For a while, it seems as if business and creativity got along just fine to keep pushing the industry forwards and upwards. Now, with the idea of games as a service, business wants a bigger slice of that pie - it wants more and more influence over the creativity that drives the industry forward. The end result will be horrifying.Does anyone know of a way I can get a hold of Ian Bogost? I have a great new idea for a FaceBook game that is about buying silly things to dress up cows in and putting them in rooms with other cows.-Mike