The War Z is taking an extreme approach to free-to-play economics: Even if you pay for weapons, you can still lose them.

Hammerpoint Interactive MMO The War Z—it’s about zombies if the title didn’t key you in—is getting ambitious with the way it penalizes players for failure. Just like Brian Hall’s phenomenally popular DayZ, death in The War Z will make you lose all of the goods you’ve gathered in your backpack in the zombie-infested world. The War Z goes a step further than most games that use strict penalties to enhance immersion. If you die, you’ll also lose goods you paid real money for in the game.

Like most contemporary MMOs, The War Z lets you purchase weapons and items with cold hard cash rather than finding them in the game world. Since, the game is free to play up front, this is how Hammerpoint makes its money. Depending on the difficulty mode you play though, purchases don’t entitle you to bend the rules.

“Yes, you’ll lose what you have in your backpack when you die—both in Normal and Hardcore modes,” Hammerpoint’s Alex Josef told Cinemablend, “And yes, if you bought something using real money, you’ll lose that item as well. This is a price you have to pay.”

“We’ve discussed that a lot and at the end decided that this will provide a pretty good incentive for players to either be extra cautious while playing, or just not spend too much money in the game and, instead, try to procure all items by finding them in the game world.”

It’s an incredibly risky, and laudable, economic strategy for a free-to-play game. Money could easily be turned into a way to cheat the game. Just pay for goods and your items are disposable, unbalancing how non-paying players interact with paying players in the game.

The War Z and other free-to-play games need to be careful though. If free-to-play games don’t work to strike this kind of balance, the market could suffer the same way arcades did. People will simply abandon the model if prices grow to high. Arcades didn’t die for a single reason. PC and console technology caught up with the majority of arcade cabinets by 2000, but graphical and audio parity was only one reason that people stopped pumping quarters into video games only built to last for a few minutes. The bigger problem was cost. Even today, it’s unusual to find an arcade cabinet that only costs a quarter to play. By the time arcades were wheezing and Namco, Sega and Capcom were letting operators charge as much as a buck for a Tekken round, people had had it.

Free-to-play games have an even tougher job though. They need to be balanced, but they also need to maintain the low price threshold of a quarter. Easier said than done.

As its modern day retail business withers, GameStop looks to the past. CEO Paul Raines talks about his company's new vintage games business.

When life starts to get strange, when you seem to be at your wits end, that’s when you start to look to your roots. You may not be able to go home again, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. GameStop’s joints are creaking. Video game retail sales in the US have plummeted from $22 billion in 2008 to $17 billion last year. August 2012 sales alone were down 20 percent year-on-year. GameStop’s tried to build itself up as a digital distribution giant like Valve’s Steam, but digital sales have failed to equal lost physical goods revenue. The future is hazy for GameStop. Time to look backward.

GameStop is going back to its past. Chief executive officer Paul Raines has hinted in recent interviews that GameStop is interested in getting into vintage game sales. Just think of the incentives! Someone comes in to the store to pre-order Resident Evil 6, and they end up dropping an extra $50 on a beat up copy of Resident Evil 2 for PlayStation 1. “We think there’s a vintage sales opportunity, so we’re accumulating some inventory,” Raines told Polygon in August, “It’s a big idea, and there’s a few problems with it. The first one is sourcing the product, the condition, the refurbishment, all that stuff. But there’s a customer for it. If you go to eBay and look at all the gaming stuff that’s on there, it’s unbelievable. We’ve got to be in that business. We will be.”

Seeing people drop $1000 on a shrink-wrapped copy of Chrono Trigger has got to make the company salivate. If it can capitalize on an existing, lucrative niche market to bolster back up its struggling stores, it’s time to start buying up the old stuff!

Vintage sales won’t be helping out GameStop’s brick and mortar operation though. Raines elaborated on GameStop’s vintage plans in a new interview with Joystiq on Friday. “We’ve thought about this vintage thing as an online initiative, and that’s where we’re doing most of our work.”

“[If] you’re a collector of Call of Duty, and there’s an old Call of Duty original, Call of Duty 2, floating around, it has a lot of value for you. Right now you don’t have an easy way to find it, because it might not be available on our website, but it might be in 300 out of our 4,600 stores in the US and you don’t have a way of finding it. So if we can put that collector’s type product on a really cool site that allows you to see what we have available and so forth, then think it’s interesting.”

It’s not just the games that represent GameStop’s past. One of the first retail chains absorbed by GameStop in its great expansion more than a decade ago was FuncoLand, a retail outlet that specialized in selling all games, not just the latest and greatest.