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.
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).
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.