Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play
clickerheroes2.com
clickerheroes2.com
Clicker games usually have almost no actual gameplay, and pretty much only interest people because they exploit many of the same type of psychological tricks that free-to-play games use to keep players hooked. They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression.
I honestly don't think that charging people up front will work, especially not at a $30 price point. Microtransactions work for this game style because you can take advantage of all the time people feel like they've "invested" into the game. Once they've spent hundreds of hours progressing, it's not difficult for some people to justify spending money here and there to make things a bit faster. I don't think many people will feel the same way when they're asked to pay $30 before they can even start getting addicted.
If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.
This game works so well (within its scope) because of its ability to surprise you with the crazy narrative and convoluted mechanisms it brings in as you progress.
Games have the ability to let you have a kind of "lived" experience of something. Sure, a good book makes you live the story through the eyes of the protagonist, but adding the act of making choices within a game framework on top of that changes this fundamentally. This more than anything else is what defines games as a medium.
Clicker games are in a way very interesting deconstructions of what it means to be a game. Cookie Clicker started out as a joke making fun of other game mechanics[1]. Which shouldn't be surprising, since some of the best jokes are deconstructions.
[0] https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html
[1] https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/gaming/cookie-clicker-julien...
Cookie Clicker is fun and entertaining, but I'd recommend playing it (and all other "incremental"/"clicker" games) with the JavaScript console open. Enjoy the story, flavor, and twists, without the wasted time and idleness.
Also try Spaceplan.
For those interested in these types of games I would recommend subbreddit https://reddit.com/r/incremental_games
First time I heard about clicker heroes game was 2 hours ago, reading your reply. Guess why it took me 2 house to reply? That’s right, I’ve been clicking and clicking. It’s crazy how something so pointless can be so addictive.
I have to agree with you. I would definitely not pay $30 up front to play it, but once you get hooked, I can see how easy is for people to start pouring money into it.
i'd rather pay upfront than be nickeled and dimed afterwards. Esp. if the production quality of the game is up to scratch (e.g., no unrecoverable bugs, good looking graphics/sound, and intuitive UI etc).
Sorry, I mean to say: there's no inherent evolution of plot or mechanics. It's a game that's literally defined by "numbers increasing on the side of the screen, and microtransactions to make those numbers go up quicker." What would that look like without the microtransactions?
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Try to think of each of them as a graph of growth over time. Gold is roughly upstream of DPS, but There are additive, multiplicative, and even quadratic effects than may be applied to that relationship in the form of hero powers, items?, etc. However, since by design the relationship between hundreds of effects (mostly in the form of hero powers) isn't clear, some purchases are easily 100,000,000,000,000% better than others, which is to say one wastes your gold.
It's more of a long term time based math puzzle than a game, but there is definitely an evolution of mechanics, as you put it. Also despite the name, I'm pretty sure you pretty much never click in it past the first 10 minutes.
MMOs have been wildly popular in the general community, precisely because there are no significantly complex mechanics. Yes, there can be, but a very small portion of the player-base are engaged at that level. You don't need amazing aim. You just press a sequence of buttons. The plot is often totally incoherent and a lot of people skip it. And plot can be supplied by the player's imagination, fitting in with existing fantasies they hold (writing fantasy dialogues for your virtual pet, or I'm the king of the realm, building it by clicking things).
Even FPSes are changing, in Blizzard's Overwatch, the most loved/despised hero Mercy[1] is "skill-less". You're not trying to get head shots or twitch aim or anything, you're keeping 5 bars full while moving around with very simple mechanics. And love it or hate it, you can't deny it's brought in a lot more diverse set of players to the game, I've never heard so many female voices in an FPS.
It make me think that games can be thought of as combinations of several elements, plot, progression, mechanics, difficulty, etc.. Some people like parts part of that. They hate other bits of it. The progression thing seems to be one that's very easy to "exploit" through gambling mechanisms, it seems to be some sort of built in congitive mechanism that probably benefited us when you needed to plan ahead to build a shelter, or go on a hunt, or go out and get X berries, or anything that required a multi-step process for future planning.
[1]Overwatch is a 6 v 6 first person shooter team game where there are lots of different characters to choose from that have very different weapons, skills, and roles, including healers. Mercy is a healer who can heal using a beam that requires extremely basic aim and can fly from player to player. This has allowed players without highly developed aim or positioning skills to enter the game and enjoy it, and then gradually develop those other skills to move to different heroes. The general consensus in the community is that this has allowed it to be much more accessible and fun for people who haven't been playing Halo/CoD/Battlefield from the age of 12.
The reason why they are easier is because you need effective tanks and healers in the game, and hard healers or tanks as the only option will make players just be DPS instead. This is why Ana always sucks and never solved the problem of adding more healers; if you like sniping, widowmaker or hanzo is better, and if you like healing, Ana is really hard to heal effectively with due to lack of defense and the need for precision much more than any other healer.
I think the Hanzo/Widow problem might be your personal view more than anything, there are lots of players who like winning games and did play Ana over them. The Hanzo/Widow "I want to DPS"[2] problem wasn't too bad until the disastrous Mercy re-balance caused a lot of problems including marginalising Ana players. Those sort of players don't like playing Mercy, so ended up as DPSers or, at best, Zenyattas.
Personally, I think the whole game would be simply better if they deleted Hanzo and Widow. I don't think snipers should be in a team-based, objective game.
[1] For the benefit of others, these characters are known as tanks (soak damage but don't deal as much) and usually initiate a full team fight, a match can be seen as a series of fights and knowing when to "push" is a key skill of Rein/Winston.
[2] A DPS is damage per second player, they do a lot of damage but are easier to kill. They can attract some players who aren't good at playing the objective and are just trying to get kills. A lot of people consider this role to be the most fun in Overwatch.
That's false. Skill is not required. It can help you progress faster, but it is definitely not required.
And I would argue that, since Clicker Heroes has exponential progression (outsiders) on top of exponential progression (ancients), that if you lack skill you're not going to get nearly as far as in any other activity, when measured in absolute terms. My max hero souls per primal boss kill is currently at e132. If you don't know how to optimize ascensions and transcensions properly you're not going to get very far at all, and will make very slow progression even at around e3. That's over one hundred orders of magnitude lower.
(Yes, the game is absurd.)
That's demonstrably not true. Universal Paperclips[1] had a progression, with new game elements becoming unlocked. Spaceplan[2] had a plot, and quite a bit of humor, and was absolutely worth paying for.
That said, whenever optimal play is found using a spreadsheet it's not really interactive gameplay.
I got this game (on iOS) about 2 years ago, and enjoyed the progression, and found myself continuing to work on it in 30 second chunks a few times a day. Weeks, months, now years later, I still keep the game on my first home screen and at least once a day continue the progress.
I decided to grab some rubies, mostly to support the developers, spent maybe $25 over 2 years, and felt like I got the best of the deal. Balance is tough, it's been a long time since I've had any desire to buy more rubies. I pre-ordered after reading this article, happy to support their hard work.
At least for me, they made the math behind the grind so blatantly obvious I've lost interest in any game that uses this mechanic for real.
I wasn't aware there were people so into these games they'd drop real money on them, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around gacha games being so profitable.
Tv Tropes had an entry that is called something different now, but i knew it as "Truffault was right." It's point was that you can't make a movie about the evils of war without inadvertently throwing in enough cool stuff (handsome actors, big explosions, lots of drama) that you end up glorifying it by mistake. That's what happened to Bogost...for all his commentary he just strengthened the whole social game mechanic by distilling it to its ideal form.
I think this touches on an important aspect of microtransactions that to my knowledge remains largely unexamined (but maybe I'm just not reading the right critics). Specifically, games are traditionally built as tools that players use to have fun. From house rules in tabletop games to Game Genie/Action Replay to Automatic Mario rom hacks to Minecraft texture packs, players changing games is something that's been part of gaming culture for a long time. When publishers turn a game into a marketing venue for microtransactions, however, they're essentially laying claim to that entire space, turning it into a dictated, manufactured product rather than a self-directed process in the player community.
There is still a community but it doesn't feel like the same game since microtransactions were added. It's still a fascinating example of a player run economy though with (virtual) "Mac OSX Earbuds" being used as a primary currency at one point
This is how you end up with gambling addicts blowing thousands of dollars for a virtual in-game skin, and it has enabled a vast network of grey-markets gambling operations to fuel those addictions [1].
It can be difficult for normal people (who mostly just enjoy the gameplay and maybe once in a while splurge on a few dozen bucks to make our virtual avatars look nicer) to emphasize with people who have real gambling problems, but that doesn't make it any more ethical to exploit them so blatantly.
Hiding these gambling platforms behind the veneer of innocent-looking games also exposes gambling to a younger audience that's much more susceptible to predatory tactics often used by gambling platforms to build up their addiction. There are pretty good reasons why gampling is a regulated industry, and online games that employ these kinds of systems are way overdue for some oversight.
If they want me to pay for simply giving me a higher value of X resources, it's bad.
If they want me to pay for adding new content to the game, that's fine.
There is a grey area when it becomes apparent that they removed key content from the "full game" in order to charge extra for it. The new Battlefront 2 debacle shows that.
This should also cover the cases of user added mods since making your own content or hacking your copy of the game would be fine.
Jeremy Lin, the NBA player, talked about getting his teammates to play Clash Royale with him. He was shocked that everyone had better troops than him after two days. Apparently they all dropped thousands.
As a player it doesn't really bug me.
Imagine a game where players only interact if they are the same level. If you can pay to gain levels, that doesn't necessarily make the game unfair. If you can pay to gain an advantage at the same level, that is unfair.
Right after purchasing a new gizmo, you (in PvP matches) would be matched against players who don't have that gizmo. So you get to enjoy yourself with the purchase for a while. After that, the matchmaking system would then send you against players who have some other more awesome gizmo which you don't have yet. So you get to lose more, and are they incentivized to but the new gizmo too.
I've played against clear whale players - several levels higher than me, troops massively over leveled for the match making strata we were in - and they were uniformly terrible players who I beat easily.
Clash Royale is a really interesting game in many ways - it's Free-2-Play path is carefully calibrated to offer a perfect opportunity to pay them £10 on a "special offer" after you've been playing for 6 months to speed you over the grind hump at level 8 ish. That's the point where your in-game currency rewards can't quite match the amount of currency you have to spend upgrading your troops. Once you are over that hump though and get to the next arena level your in game currency rewards increase again relative to upgrade costs and you are back on another F2P coast.
Their non-special offer real-money shop though is absolutely appalling value for money. Anyone who ever buys gems from them at regular prices is crazy in the coconut.
It means that yes, if getting to the top matters to you, you'll likely spend a lot of money, but spending money on it doesn't really alter whether or not the matches themselves are fun.
In tournament mode the levels are capped so it is an even playing field where spending money doesn't get you wins. I believe other developers have a lot to learn from their model
And that's yearly cost for wow, if you leave the game and come back in a year you have to pay another 60 upfront. I can leave the game and come back to play for free, I won't have any of the new cards but those are hardly essential and you can certainly make a competitive deck with the cards you have if your account is as farmed as mine.
I also hate the term free-to-play, because it purposefully hides the fact that for many games, you either need to grind a lot to acquire content/in-game currency or have to spend a lot.
Almost all the products advertised as free ask for some other form of payment.
Not all of them are harmful, far from it, but we fail at discussing it if we can't even name these different variations.
There is the game platform that will give you games for free because it wants you to register so there is less friction later on when you want to buy something there. Also, this way you have registered your mail in order to send you ads.
Many services on the web are free but this time they mine your personal information in order to target ads
Free to play games want to hook you like an addict using manipulation techniques.
Etc
They are all very different, and not necessarily all bad, but we don't even differentiate them that well in my opinion.
I was easily willing to spend $10 for such a game, because of the scarcity. I would expect some indy dev to jump into this space, but I guess microtransactions are just too lucrative?
Your willingness to pay $10 for a SimCity-style game probably explains the scarcity. If you and enough others were willing to pay $40-60, you'd find that game.
If you only want to pay $10 for a mobile game tops, you will get what that $10 is worth; a 4-5 hour experience with little replayability, but has great graphics and is fun. Someone is not going to recreate a AAA title that had millions of dollars put into it in their bedroom for maybe 23k people to pay $10 for it, or even less.
I simply find it hard to believe game development suddenly became so much more expensive in the last few years of F2P rise. Isn’t this just about a whole industry discovering an opportunity, and accordingly a new standard of expectations of money to be made ?
I guess the canonical example of "you can deliver a premium gaming experience on phones for under $10" is Minecraft, but unless you can sell the volume Minecraft is, you need to make more per user than they do.
$10 for a mobile game is perceived as expensive. Many people say "I don't pay $15 for a mobile game", even if they are ready to pay $30 for the exact same game on a game console or PC. And if you look at Steam and the Android Play Store, you will often notice that the the mobile version of a game is often much cheaper, even though they are not significantly different.
Upfront payment simply doesn't work on mobile. Looking at the "most profitable" apps on the Play Store, the first non-free app is ranked 78th.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suburbia-city-building-board...
In the past, you had to spend money to have something to play and the game would last you for a short while. Nowadays, if you are into competitive gameplay, you can just install League of Legends, DOTA2, TF2, Paladins, Starcraft 2 and lots of MMOs and play for years without paying anything. In most of these games, you only pay for cosmetic stuff, or for early unlocks, but they aren't really necessary to progress.
That's the good side of F2P. But then you have the nasty "you run out of energy, pay $5 to recover" games, which milk you each step of the way and aren't fun at all without paying. These should be frowned upon.
As an "old" and grumpy gamer, I agree, but I think we are past that point. Nowadays I think new gamers are losing track of the fact that they are supposed to play to have fun, and see getting rewards as the only end-goal.
Recently Hearthstone (collectible card game) announced a free roguelike single-player mode, and the only thing many people in the community can think of is that the only reward for completing it is a minor cosmetic item, and that is not sufficient, that they should be better compensated for the time "invested" in it.
Mind, it is an attitude that is a consequence of the culture of microtransations and lootboxes that also Blizzard helped to establish, so it's hard to take the company's side.
To be fair to Hearthstone players, the reason why they have this mentality is because the game is expensive and the amount of in-game currency one earns by playing every day is pretty small. So spending a few hours of entertainment time on Dungeon Run's is essentially giving up potentially earning gold for a pack. I don't think this would be as much of an issue had they not removed Adventures, which had a traditional purchase model (pay $20 to get complete content).
It isn't rare lately for people to come to https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/ and discuss possible ways to monetise games. How to best implement microtransactions, opt-in ads, or even some talk lately about cripto mining.
Then yesterday someone wrote a post about the 'unannoying way to monetise', which is to make the game paid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/7e1u9f/t...
It wasn't massively well received. If you look at the top comments, they still prefer F2P and microtransactions. And then CH2 dropped this bomb today.
From my personal experience, I am quite skeptic about a paid model for this particular genre of games. Also, 30$ for this kind of game seems a little bit too step.
Nevertheless I wish them best. Hopefully if they are successful they will show the way for others and we will move away from these kind of predatory techniques.
But actually this is a feature and not a bug since I actually appreciate the sense of "I'm done for now" that lets me pause gameplay for a couple of months and wait for a new tier building or something else. I think a more polished clicker game sounds rather scary given my player profile since I could easily see myself get totally absorbed. So CH2 being $30 is good news for me personally since that guarantees I wont get caught. =)
I would say that Clicker Heroes is far less demanding of your time than Cookie Clicker. It's difficult to play Cookie Clicker and be mostly idle. Clicker Heroes only asks a few minutes a week to make meaningful progress. It's a different beast than most clicker games, because your game makes significant progress when you're not playing.
$30 for a mobile clicker game just seems too much to me. I don't think it holds so much value.
NES games were a lot harder to and took more time to produce (we're talking writing the game in assembly for a lot of them) and had less effective tools at producing content than we have today.
You also had to assembly the cartridge and transport it to the retails. Hardware was not as cheap as today (nor was transport I believe).
Compare that to your 2017 mobile game which can be distributed via internet (very cheap), produced at a high level language, and you can make in less than 2 weeks with less than 4 people.
Don't you think that a game providing hundreds of hours of gameplay does hold a lot of value for the user? Getting hours (or even days) of entertainment for $30 certainly looks like a good deal. Especially if you compare it to $8.50 for a ticket to a 2-hour movie.
It also follows the sentiment often found on HN, where freelancers and consultants are advised to price their services based on the value they provide to their clients.
Pricing is more nuanced than just calculating the expenses.
Clicker games are not nearly as engaging as those games were. It's not just the cost/hour that we should measure with, it's also the quality/hour.
But that price point. That makes me worried. Browse around Steam to see the company they are trying to keep at $30. In the reddit thread the dev said they've chosen this price point based on $2m production budget. Fair enough they've done their homework and run the models. I'm sure they've done a competitive analysis. But it feels too expensive to me.
I really really hope I am proved wrong. As spectacularly as possible.
A game with one repeating background, versus a game with a whole range of varied backgrounds, can be order of magnitude cheaper to make. But typically this will be reviewed as "crappy graphics" or "boring art", and the more expensive version will be panned for being too expensive. Sometimes crappy graphics won't matter, sometimes it will.
From the video, there is no comparison in terms of development resource. There is much much more art, many more frames of animation, much less smoke and mirrors in the engine. I can understand why the development budget is $2m.
But I have a horrible feeling that most consumers will be like you, and not see that, and not think that all that effort is worth it, or that they've put much effort into the new game at all. And a good chunk of them (not you) will be very entitled about it, about not getting it for free. The reality of game development, unfortunately.
So yeah, I expect a lot of incremental gamers will view it the same way.
And gamers that aren't fans of incrementals are going to be even harsher on the gameplay.
Cogmind is a good example of this[0]. Traditional roguelikes are typically in the "completely free" category. But that core audience that loves the genre is a lot more likely to pay twenty dollars for such an extremely polished and well-crafted game in this genre.
EDIT: Of course, whether or not clicker games are niche games with a hard core audience is highly questionable. If anything they are surprise addictions for casual players browsing the web.
But... it's a clicker game. A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
I threw some money in the form of Rubies into the game, when it became pay-to-win (to some degree). But really, I was way better than my clicker-guild-mates because I personally had optimized a better strategy than them. So even when others spent Rubies, I personally was able to keep up with them through simply better tactics.
Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth to pay for some in-game benefit. And I knew that if I dumped $100+ more dollars in, my superior tactics + money injection would lead me to higher clicks.
At that point, I just became disgusted with the F2P model and quit Clicker Heroes.
It was a very well programmed game, and I think getting rid of the F2P format will help this game a LOT.
Well that's the thing, isn't it: A lot of people spent a lot more than $30 on Clicker Heroes 1. So yes, obviously people will spend $30 on a clicker game. The question is whether they'll do so via an ethical business model.
The whole p2w model is based off of getting players invested with their time before making it too difficult to progress without investing cash. I'd bet the people who spend $30+ on the p2w version won't be willing to pay $30 up front to start investing time into a brand new game.
I did quit after the addition of Rubies. But the game was legitimately good at balancing the heroes. A good amount of my effort in Clicker Heroes was spent on optimizing builds through linear algebra and other optimization problems.
Anyone who download the free game and talk about it or recommended it to a friend is free marketing.
With enough friends talking about the game or play it without paying, one person in that group will spend $30.
But without the groups existing in the first place, that same person may not interested in the game enough to buy it.
Come on ! This is clearly tailored to hook into our addiction loops by always presenting us with a next task that is almost complete.
I have a very hard time believing that these folks did not know exactly what they were doing.
Personally, I feel they should have managed their costs to a more reasonable price point, but I didn't feel like engaging in debate on reddit over the point.
Yeah...a game like Clicker Heroes should be less than a 1 year effort from a single programmer and an artist.
Of course dropping $30 for what had been a free game is a bit of a shock on first hearing the price (price anchoring can be a major hurdle), but after reading this (and reflecting for a moment: most games that I spend any real time playing are easily worth $100 or more to me even if it's rare that I end up having to spend that much on them) I'll definitely be pre-ordering.
Simulators are different. You do not gain competitive advantage by buying DLC. You get some more content, and usually they're high quality, historically accurate and come with nice documentation (checklists, etc).
No-one would have the time to play with all the DLC in train simulator. There is hours worth of playing in each. Heck, it took me an hour just to figure out how to get a steam locomotive out of the rail yard.
Flight simulators and racing sims (iRacing) are similar. You can expect to spend hours of time with a new aircraft or race car. In racing, you race against others with the same or similar car, so you gain no advantage.
I can warmly recommend trying out Train Simulator or Trainz. It's fun and relaxing gameplay.
This means that if you set a limit on it, you'd be limiting your profit by an extreme amount.
I'm all for it by the way, I think games that sell game affecting content for thousands of dollars are targeted scams portraying as games to get away with it.
Especially because games like league of legends and path of exile had shown how you can do free2play while only selling cosmetic items, if you make a good game.
Some people, like me, spent a ton of real money to unlock all champions faster. According to Riot, it's not "necessary" to have all champions unlocked. However if you don't own a champion, you cannot pick that champion early in the team drafting phase for someone else to play (swap/trade) - even in ranked. It is a disadvantage, though admittedly minor - a 5 man team that owns all champions has more flexibility in drafting than an enemy team that has holes in what they own.
With enough play times, you'll have more than enough to buy all the heroes without paying real money and then there's nothing else you can use it for.
Real money is only required if you want to buy skins.
Also, with hundreds of available champion to play you are not really required to play the most recently released champion. Just play from pools of all existing champions until you get enough point to buy new champion.
Compare this to a traditional game like Cities: Skylines. You pay once for the base game, then there are various DLC expansions that work as you suggest. You don't need them to complete the game, they just add new features and can only be purchased once.
Edit: 'Pay to win' is a better description for most games in this category (and Clicker Heroes 1 looks to follow that), although there are some free to play games like Dota 2, which have DLC that just provides cosmetic changes and isn't needed to win.
And for multiplayer just 1 player (I think the host) has to have the DLCs, everyone else gets them for free.
And BTW, Cities: Skylines is distributed by Paradox :)
Maybe it is A/B tested ? I doubt it though, I think it is an old feature.
If you need 100 hours to unlock all the characters (playing through lots of times was common for fighting games I recall) but you advertise you can buy them for $60, it puts a price on your time and takes the achievement of spending those hours getting better and puts it as "worth $60".
That's why some people make their own furniture, while other can buy it for $100.
It's true some responsibility does lie in the person with the wallet. But it just strikes me as odd that none of these companies are really held accountable for exploiting human behavior, specifically by gaming communities.
There is a good presentation from the CEO of Kongregate talking about this here: https://www.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales...
I share your moral intuitions about exploiting whales if whales are, in fact, little old ladies suffering from social isolation or teenagers with undiagnosed depression. But the F2P companies say that they've done the research and come to the conclusion that most of their whales are gainfully employed professionals.
That sounds... not intrinsically implausible to me? I enjoy video games, quite a bit. Games, books, and hating on Bitcoin are my hobbies, and hating on Bitcoin is cheap. I have probably sustained $100 a month on video games for ten years now, and that would frequently be concentrated on a single game for an extended while (e.g. LoL for 2 years), likely resulting in me easily hitting their whale lists.
I feel like if I'm a central example of a whale that it isn't unethical to sell me things that I like? It's not a material amount of money given my financial situation. It compares very favorably to the time commitment for my main hobby, which causes _much_ more friction than the money does. (The primary reason I don't play LoL anymore is an unpauseable 40 minute game doesn't play well with having young children.) Most external observers would categorize me under Either A Responsible Adult Or At Least Fakes It Decently Most Of The Time. Similarly well-adjusted people in my social class spend similar amounts of money on things which are not morally different than Evelynn skins, for example Hamilton tickets.
Just as in casino gambling, where I believe the term came from, a whale is someone who throws a few hundred to several thousand into a game in a month, possibly in a large number of smaller transactions so they don’t even realize their running total. It’s the people for whom the “10’000 rubies for 49.99” in-app currency chests are meant for.
So they kept adding new packages at higher prices until it reached about 120$ IIRC. All intermediary packages are just there to make the "best value" (read highest price) package more enticing.
I think the poster girl from the slides of 40-year old californian MMO player is artificially nice, because $7.5k for a typical Californian isn't much and the social aspect makes you think there's a human connection involved. But this is just the good-for-pr end of the whale spectrum.
(Of course the most artificial part is that she's getting paid by the industry)
All this while being incredibly censorious of their stores otherwise, to the point of bragging about their store curation. Political commentary is out. But gambling mechanisms aimed at children is OK. Hell, outright name your app "Big Fish Casino" or "Slotomania".
I'm not super interested in clicker games, but I pre-ordered anyhow, because I have to believe the future of gaming isn't just a never-ending series of venal cash grabs.
(bought with in-game currency; I never spent real money)
They really need a built-into-store way of saying “Buy If Not Deleted In 24 Hours”, and then I would try so much more.
Cap the max expenditure in the real money shop. After that level, players can continue to purchase, but they won't actually be charged real money.
If desired, can also add a "donate" button for the hypothetical players who pay huge amounts to support the game/company.
Also, it'd ruin most games, because of the way they're designed.
For instance, gacha games like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Record Keeper, and Mobius. If you could cap out at (for example) $300 and then pull for free from then on, you'd end up with everything you ever wanted, all the time. There'd be nothing to stop you from just pulling until you got everything.
The entire game would need a redesign to deal with that situation.
Premium currency in most F2P games is the same way.
I'm not arguing with you, just exposing the reason that nobody except Nintendo has done your suggestion so far.
And to my knowledge, they've only done it twice. Pokemon Picross and another Pokemon spinoff game.
effective cost per new unique user <= life time value of the user
1. New user
2. Recurring user
3. Paying user
Additionally, if users invite other users, that lowers your effective cost per new user, increasing your profitability.
The process of getting paying users is very lossy, with only a small minority becoming paying users. That's why paying users have to pay so much.
For a while it was generally accepted that freemium games monetize more than premium games. But with the recent proliferation of games I am unaware if that is the case anymore.
I haven't seen this addressed yet, but what if the whales we are seeing are not poor addicted victims nor rich people but simple fraudsters?
It really makes sense if you are a person with access to "unlimited" credit that you can't spend in a way that can be traced back to you.
There is so much credit card fraud going on, and it's surely possible to decouple that from the actual in-game transactions by buying cash cards. The credit companies can't trace back the money, and the in-game transactions never get challenged.
So you can use stolen credit card to buy lots of gems. Then post on a web board offering to gift cheap gems to people for cash.
But this might be because in my legislation there are strong consumer protection laws. Ymmv.
There seems to be a counter trend in the current micro transaction game market which will catch some of the people who long for pure premium games.
My guess is they intend to use the first game as a platform to bring people into the second. The drawback of premium is that 1 in 50 people who see a game buy it. The drawback of F2P is that 2% of players will spend money in it. This is a move to cause a conversion higher than that by effectively selling the F2P players, a premium game.
They charge for skipping a bunch of grind, but in this case 'grind' is playing matches, which is why I'm here in the first place so...
That's a pretty common thing out there - wonder how well that model actually works in reality? I've never seen hard data.
Clicker games are somehow idle fun but i never thought about paying for a clicker 'game'.
Nope nope nope.
And without knowing anything about the game, they've guaranteed that I'll never buy it. Corrupted or incompatible saved games is a great way to kill interest in your game.