If somebody on the internet doesn't like the business model of a specific game, he is likely to insult that game as being "Pay2Win". And if you ask for a precise definition of when a game is Pay2Win and when it isn't, you never get an answer. The inconvenient truth is that even if somebody rants against Pay2Win, he most likely loves another game in which progress and winning is also in some way depending on the amount of money spent. At best we can talk about a hypothetical scale of Pay2Win-iness on which all games could be placed; but there are very few games that are either 100% Pay2Win or 0% Pay2Win, and most games are somewhere in the middle of that scale.

I can't find a better example for an 100% Pay2Win game than an auction. While auctions aren't usually considered as "games", they do share some characteristics with games, like having strict rules and a win condition. And obviously winning an auction is pretty much 100% depending on how much money you're willing to spend.

On the other end of the scale we already get into an argument about what money we are counting when we talk about Pay2Win. Because if we talk about computer games, most of them require some money to be spent to play. You need to buy a computer or console, and you need to buy the game. So you could say that you can't "win" such a game without "paying". On the other hand the cost is more or less fixed. You might have a tiny advantage in a PC multiplayer game if your computer is much more powerful than the computer of your opponents, but that effect is small enough to be neglected. Paying for let's say a second copy of the game wouldn't give you any added progress or chance to win. So we might as well bundle all games that are "buy once, play forever" at or near the 0% end of the Pay2Win scale.

If we now look at a typical MMORPG, and what game could be more typical than World of Warcraft, we find that it is surprisingly far from the 0% end of the Pay2Win scale. Just ask yourself how much money YOU spent on World of Warcraft or whatever other subscription MMORPG you played for several years. For me that is well over $1,000 spent on World of Warcraft alone. And that expenditure isn't independent of progress in the game: Since I don't pay for WoW any more, my progress has stopped. We talked yesterday about how getting to the level cap in World of Warcraft and even getting epic gear was possible without ever doing any challenging cooperative multiplayer content. But what it does take is time. And if you are just a normal person with a job / studies / family / friends / food / sleep occupying most of your time, it takes months to get a new character to full epic gear at level cap. Months which you have to pay for in subscription fees. That is even more extreme in some other games, e.g. skill progress in EVE is done in real time, offline, and thus solely depends on how much money you spend on the game. Which is why many EVE players pay for multiple accounts. The more you pay in a subscription game, the more you advance, so it isn't 0% Pay2Win.

The games most likely to be accused of being Pay2Win are those which are free to play and then have an "item shop" or something which allows faster progress or other in-game advantages in exchange for money. If you want to place those on our Pay2Win scale, you'll notice something weird: For many of these games it is extremely hard to correlate progress with the amount of money spent. In most of the cases it is a matter of "you COULD pay to win", which doesn't automatically mean that somebody who has progressed more than others is automatically the person who paid most. In many cases it is possible to arrive at the exact same point in the game by either spending more time or more money, or even by being more skilled. If you look at forums for games like World of Tanks, you'll always see people who are adamant that somebody who landed a good hit on them must have been using money for "gold ammo" to do so; but if you study the game mechanics a bit you'll realize that it is very possible to one-shot another player by simply being very good at aiming with a tank and equipment you can easily get for no money at all. The Pay2Win argument often looks like a lame excuse for players to explain why they have lost or didn't progress that much. It is easier to claim somebody else is a "wallet warrior" than admitting that he might just be better at that game than you are.

So I think that on the Pay2Win scale those games shouldn't be represented by a single point, but rather by a range: How much money do HAVE TO spend to progress in the game? And how far could you get if you played badly but spent a lot of money. For some games those bars could cover most of the scale, with both playing your way to a win less money spent than for a "buy once, play forever" game and paying your way to a win being possible.