Hacker News Reader

Comment by merb | Hacker News Reader

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.

> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game.

The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly.

I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above.

For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.

also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp

it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective

Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving!

But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!

Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?

The delays in these games are designed to make you pay to skip them. If it wasn't a free-to-play game, the delays wouldn't have been there in the first place. They're just there to make the game worse.

Exactly. So play games that don't use these abusive tactics, instead of rewarding them...

You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine. There is nor requirement to buy anything - the game leaves plenty to do. It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

> You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine.

As implied by the earlier commenters, that's obviously not the case.

> It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

It's only an "option" because they crippled the game in the first place.

> Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

And thus, freemium is inherently abusive. But even then, there are more acceptable ways to do it.

For example, look at how Smite does this: free to download, you can pick between grinding/microtransactions to unlock each character individually, or pay $30 to unlock everything in one go and effectively go back to what the game should have been from the start. Cosmetics are still paywalled, but at least there are no more microtransactions that have any effect on gameplay.

I'm not against paying for games. I'm against constantly being hounded to pay for the same thing over and over again.

You're not. You're paying to play it more efficiently. I could spend 30 minutes collecting 8 Pokemon (lets say that gives you 3000XP) or I could use that same 30 minutes to collect 16 of them and double my XP on top of that (giving you 12,000XP). This lets me play the game faster. You aren't buying anything other than the ability to do more with less time.

I have come to see the same. I want to reward game creators for giving me enjoyable entertainment, and taking the risk by going free-to-play rather than forcing me into an up-front purchase.

I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.

> Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game

This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats.

Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun.

In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.

I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke.

The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.

free to play, with no gameplay restrictions is an excellent model. when you can then do IAP to get "extras", it's a great "pay what you feel it is worth" type model.

another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.

Also works well in CS:GO. The skins add nothing to the actual game play, yet people like the value they add. Just a shame that it brings kids into a gambling state of mind. Would've been nicer if you could just buy them outright.

You can, it's an actual market. The price is just high, because the chance to get them is low. If you could buy them for what I assume you expect to be a lower amount, they would not sell nearly as many chests, or no one would want the item anymore because it's no longer rare.

Pokemon Go has a really interesting mechanic for this - one of the in app purchases you can buy is for a 'Lure' that you can place in your physical area (in game) that attracts Pokemon for all people in the area.

So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.

Something most people don't know either, you get 10 coins a day for each gym you have a Pokemon set up to defend (up to a maximum of 10 gyms) - giving you up to 100 free coins every day for just playing the game. And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either (and they are pretty common even in my suburban area, there's three on the ~15 minute walk to the convenience store down the street) there's little reason to spend money unless you are sitting in your house all day playing instead of actually walking around (which is by design).

Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.

> And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either

Based on what I've read and my own experience (including a month as a beta tester), this isn't quite accurate. There are a few items that can't be harvested, including incubators, lures, lucky eggs, and backpack upgrades. Those can only be purchased.

Bah, you know what, you're right. Still, 100 coins a day from defending 10 gyms (not hard to do if you are in an urban area) is enough to pick up any item in the store (minus the storage upgrades), at least. Lures are really nice considering they benefit everyone in the area, so if you are nearby a group of players lure trading can be a pretty good deal.

Urban gyms are easier to defend? It seems to me the more people in an area the harder a gym is to defend, especially if you're early in your 21-hour cycle. I was in the last 20 minutes of my cycle today, and the gym at my suburban post office got taken from me about 5 times. The frustrating part is beating the gym and not getting one of mine in to defend it before someone else does.

Didn't mean they were easier to defend, but they are more prevalent. I live in the suburbs and there's only one gym within walking distance, so I'm limited in gyms I can even defend without traveling into the city center.

And not only are you helping others around you, it's also enhancing the social aspect of the game. I saw lots of lures at tourist sites in the city today, and people were naturally crowding around them to catch Pokemon - and talk to everyone else who had crowded there too.

One of the smarter ideas I've seen today - a local pub noticed they were getting increased traffic from players due to being close to both a gym and Pokestop. They mentioned in media interviews that they might permanently fund a lure in the Pokestop as a way to attract more players to the pub & offer them discounts on purchases if they mention the game. That sounds like a potential business model...

It's fascinating to see this game making such a cultural impact in a matter of days, with much more room to grow on both the social and business side of things. It has massive potential to double as a wallet not only for digital goods, but items that can be purchased in the physical world.

Could be, but in-app purchases often rely on very skewed spending behaviours. In other words, you alone may not be the best representative here, at least not with the 'whale' that is found for every 1000's of "you's".

why? do you also refuse to put quarters in arcade machines?

Not parent, but for me: Yes, I do. Arcade machines led to terribly designed games then, and running a game on purchases leads to terribly designed games now.

This is not to say that there can't be good free-to-play games with IAP, but the vast majority of the payment models is terrible in game quality (not talking about success). I honestly have a hard time coming up with a good example of an app, but in the PC space, excellent examples of quality free-to-play meets success is TF2 and Dota 2 where you can't buy an advantage yet they are hugely profitable.

I've spent at least 200 bucks on dota 2, and regret nothing. I have yet to spend any money on IAP in apps simply because I haven't seen any implementation I find acceptable.

maybe my childhood has given me an overly rosy view of arcades? :)

agreed theres plenty of bad implementations of iap, but i think with time people are figuring out how to do it well.

i must confess im not much of a gamer in adulthood, but eg i think space team and clash royale are both excellent apps w/ iap.

(as a side-note, most online advertising is much more aggravating to me than purchases!)

Funny you should mention it, but I've played a fair amount of Clash Royale as well (level 8 at upper arena 5). I still have a hard time recommending it though. It's such a great game in there, but I feel the IAP and the structure around it is what plagues it.

Pacing it to gouge money to unlock chests, no max levels on cards (especially in tournaments), selling epics and chests etc.

I wish there was or I could come up with better ways to monetize it other than hats, but the game could be SO much better, and I would feel good about sinking money into it. The only thing that would happen, were I to put money into it, is that I would maybe bump up an arena or two earlier than otherwise, but then I would be in the exact same spot there instead. There's no end to the gouging, where gouging != possibility to put in more money.

... not when I own the hardware :)

Didn't arcades pretty much die out once powerful game machines people could play as long as they wanted to for free became affordable?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com