Thats the challenge of adressing the target audience in the right manner.
Just compare asian games with western games. Thats why this does not make F2P a bad concept by itself just for being F2P.
Something that comes to my mind: When I played Dungeons & Dragons Online, it had a fine approach that seemed fair and worked well.
-Some of the dungeons you could enter with your group were free. Alot others were paycontent. Once payed, you could play them as much as you wanted.
-The difficulty of the dungeons was perfectly fine for a standard party. It was a bit of a challenge, yet very do-able.
-If you screwed up, you could instantly buy health potions of mana potions in the shop, to get you out of hopeless situations.
-> Some content is buyable that is unlocked permanently and can be enjoyed just like a standard game. Some content is convinience only, that I only needed if I was actually failing the game. Without those added "pay consumables" I would have had to restart the dungeon.
For me, it was a fair and well thought out approach of making money, instead of charging subscription fees (online server based games always have running costs). I actually stopped my subscription, switched the game to the F2P mode, payed like 50 bucks for all the dungeons and basically owned the content for the lifetime of the game.
If I had kept the subscription based access, my costs for playing the game would have exceeded that sum by far until now.
If there is no incentive to spend money, the game would not be available to you at all, since there would be no return of investment or money to cover the costs for server, traffic, live/support teams etc.
Its a thin line where one thinks it starts being a "rip off" or a "fair approach". Though its not F2P by itself that is the problem.
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