If you imagine a perfectly fair and balanced PvP game with perfect matchmaking, the result would be something looking like World Chess Championship, in which every game is a draw; or, if the rules make draws less or not possible, every player would have a perfect 50:50 win:loss ratio. That is a bit of a problem for game developers: While some of them arrive at near perfect 50:50 win:loss ratio for most players (e.g. World of Tanks), this often results in some players being unhappy about losing half the time. Other games got around the problem by faking PvP, making players play against an AI using the name tag and the armies of an existing, but unaware player. If you don't even know that an AI with your name lost to another player, that loss is not a problem to you. But then a good AI is expensive and hard to program, and real PvP is much cheaper. So I see more and more games being based on cannibalism.

All players are not created equal. Especially not in Free2Play games, where there are the free riders and the paying customers. So from a game company point of view it makes perfect sense to exploit the free players as a resource for their paying customers. "If you aren't the customer, you are the product / content". So what we get is pure Pay2Win: The paying customers pay to effectively achieve a win:loss of above 50:50, while the free players end up losing a lot more than half of their games. It is simple math, you *must* have frequent losers if you want to have frequent winners.

The problem of that model is one of longevity. While winning only half of the time may bother some people, losing most of the time bothers many people. You can keep a stream of naive losers via advertising, but that only works so long. We live in a world of an oversupply in games, and if you keep losing it's easy to just quit and play something else. The cannibalistic model eats its new players until there are none left. And it doesn't stop there; the same game mechanics than leave the players who spent only a little in the role of the permanent losers. Until they quit the game, and the next layer of customers finds itself in that bottom spot. Ultimately the game eats itself, because it drives people to quit. Thus more and more we see online PvP games shutting down after a year or two.

I don't think the "free players as content model" is economically viable in the long term. If a game isn't fun to play for free, the conversion of a free player to a paying customer will never happen. I prefer the perfect 50:50 win:loss ratio, or playing against an AI.