Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

0.19% of mobile users have "more money than sense".

99.81% of users don't see the point in buying the $5 "valu-pack" of [insert contrived currency here] to unlock an extra few hours of playtime every day.

Mobile developers get angry and post rants about people being averse to spending as much as a cup of coffee on their abusively designed time sinks.

And other gaming industries are starting to follow suit. There are AAA console/PC titles with microtransactions now, it's ridiculous.

View on HN

You have a point but it's also ridiculous that mobile game consumers expect every game to be free. Game studios often spend tens of thousands of hours developing a mobile game, why should that be free? The freemium model is just an unfortunate consequence of this cultural shift towards expecting all mobile apps to be free.

The mobile freemium model is exactly why I am so averse to spending money on mobile games. If I could spend $5 for a game and know that it is both worthwhile and fully available, I would do so. Instead, I've become cynical enough that I rarely bother unless the game is well-reviewed by sources I trust.

There are examples of games that got the freemium model right and are fairly successful as a result, and the pattern is always the same: start with a game with a fun core gameplay loop, do not gate gameplay content or progression behind paywalls, let players spend money on cosmetic/status symbols, or to more quickly progress in areas that could also be progressed more slowly without spending.

Warframe and Path of Exile do this and are seeing a good amount of success as a result.

One of the problems being ignored here is that, even if you only charge $1 for a game, I still have to trust you enough to give you my credit card info.

And this trust is actually far easier to earn if I am making larger purchases, not smaller ones. I'll spend $100 on something if I think it's a high-quality, one-time payment. But I won't even spend $1 on some seedy, risky experiment.

Distribution platforms mitigate this risk. These days, mobile app stores or services like Steam/Desura/Gog/Itch are what you trust, and they often have nice refund policies.

Well I've never heard of most of those, so why would I trust them? I mean, my phone basically pushes unwanted ads at me, so why would I do anything that would indicate that I'm willing to spend money over the phone?

Desura went bankrupt a few months ago, actually.

Exactly. Freemium is an attempt to maximize revenue given the following parameters: 1) 99% of the population won't pay more than $0.99 for a game, regardless of its quality; 2) 1% of the population will pay a fuckton.

So what do you do within those parameters? You try to make a game that relies on #2 to subsidize #1. The alternatives? Release totally free games (where's the business model?). Release ad-supported games (everyone hates ads!). Release games on a flat subscription model. Or accept that the whales are your actual paying customer base, and make games explicitly for them.

By and large, the mobile gaming industry has concluded that the latter approach is the optimal way to run a profitable business. The result is the shitty, manipulative, cookie-cutter approach to game design that has become so dominant today. But unless and until some of the 99% of us decide that games are worth paying for upfront, this seems to be the world we're stuck in.

>Release ad-supported games (everyone hates ads!).

Do people hate ad-supported games more than they hate games that nag you to spend money on them constantly?

Not sure it matters. Only a small handful of people can turn a profit on a solely ad-backed games. The Flappy birds of the world, which immediately inspire a wash of cheap copy-cats. Games like subway surfers and sonic dash still need some IAP money -- a high production value game costs about $3m to make these days so no major studio would trust a solely ads backed game.

It's rather sad really, taking advantage of some people's propensity to addiction, exploiting it for financial gain. Somewhat the digital equivalent of rigged casinos or drug pushers.

Hearthstone recently introduced planned obsolescence to its system (i.e. certain cards become "obsolete" and you can no longer use them in ranked matches).

I can see why they would want to do it, but it just makes me sad that good complete game experiences are going away in favor of infinitely evolving cash trains that will be forgotten as soon as their last server goes out of commission.

Most trading card games "cycle-out" content to drive sales. The business model works because the players want new content. I wouldn't liken Hearthstone — where people generally know how much they need to spend to get a competitive deck — with games that are socially engineered to reward sinking arbitrary amounts of time and money into them.

That's what WotC did with Magic: the Gathering very early (just a couple years after it was introduced) - it allows the company to make so much more money that it's really a no-brainer business-wise.

It's not all virtual currency. Sometimes it's extra levels. The ones who don't pay must just uninstall then try one of the other forty million free/freemium games.

I've played Boom Beach for over a year without paying a penny. If the game were to say "Content beyond lvl 10 is $1 a month" I'd probably pay .

But $12 is nothing to me, and dear in other locales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com