Yet the vast majority of those games seem to have very questionable business models. This is great for shareholders but from a point of taste this is nothing to be proud of. Apple though used to be or at least tried to be the company of taste.
A perfect example of this is an app called "DayCount". The app's concept is very simple, enter a date, and the app will tell you either how many days until this date, or how many days have passed since this date. When you open the app for the first time you're immediately presented with a "Pro" version, for $3.99/month.
And almost every app does it now, many are "free" but as soon as you open it you realize that you actually have to "subscribe" to the app. Now don't get me wrong, some apps work great with this model. I just happily paid 1Password for another year of service, but 1Password is a genuinely useful application, and they keep my passwords, and paying them $2/mo to take care of this is a great deal in my opinion.
But what kind of value does a "day counting" app add that would warrant an annualized price of $48? I will say that DayCount is better than others, because it actually does something. I once saw an "Emoji Keyboard", a re-implementation of the default emoji keyboard, offered for $9.99/month.
Apple needs some more rules around what is and isn't allowed with iAP purchases. Subscriptions should have extra scrutiny put on them, make sure they actually add value and don't just extract money from users.
Hell it might be a good idea to nuke "Subscriptions" entirely. I get Netflix, Hulu and other services that give you ongoing value. But the notes app you threw together in half an hour using tutorials on Youtube does not deserve to charge $4.99/month for it's "Pro" version.
If users don’t want to pay a subscription for a service that they don’t think is going to add value — not for you or me to determine the value an app has for its legion of users just because it is not of value to us — they shouldn’t download the app or pay for it. Maybe users can use the day counting app to count down days until when their free subscription ends, then unsubscribe. Apple has made it super simple to unsubscribe to a subscription purchased through the App Store. If users don’t use said feature, that’s on them; it’s not the responsibility of the App Store.
Let’s take responsibility for our actions & subscriptions.
Pretty sure Target does that already.
The first says it is a 1 year subscription when viewed on in the store on my iPad, but does not say subscription when viewed in the store on the web. The other three do not say subscription on either the web or iPad.
I can't find anything anywhere either on the store or on the developer's site that says what any of those actually do above what the free version does.
Lately lots of games have started prompting me for "VIP" subscriptions on the order of $6 per week. Or... $312 annually.
Single-player games - so you're not even paying to join a community. One I can recall off-hand is simply a motorcycle racing game.
You pay the arcade subscription ($5/mo or Apple One) and the games are all free downloads.
Would you mind sharing some of your experiences?
What were some moments in particular that made you feel not good about what you were doing?
From talking to the folks at the company, I got the impression the target demo was lonely, often alcoholic people in their forties and fifties. Although I find it pretty hard personally to see what the appeal of our product was, I do think the business model was based on getting these people addicted.
If you want to see what the product was like, just search slots on iOS or Android app stores, the company in question doesn't exist anymore but it's all the same stuff. Google and Apple must be making a killing off of it.
Our whale customer profile was something like "Saudi oil-tycoon's trust-fund kid trying to keep up with the Joneses [other Saudi oil-tycoons' trust-fund kids] by throwing money at lootboxes until they get the high-spec or rare equipment required to be equal-or-better in social status."
The way to make whales spend money wasn't to make our mechanics more addictive; it was to "seed" a rare item to one whale in a friend-group of whales, and watch the others scramble to acquire it too, so as to not suddenly be relegated to lower status.
We actually built measures into our game mechanics that would try to subtly disincentivize people from playing if they looked to be genuinely addicted—and for truly severe cases, we actually reached out to customers to get help (since if they're addicted to our game, they're probably addicted to other games, too, so just kicking them off ours probably wouldn't help.) These people were never the key user-story for us, so doing things like this was essentially free publicity.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016417/-100-000-Whales-An
Frankly, I think the Chinese took it to another level.
I have seen no evidence that is true. I guess most of them would be a person working a regular office job who has $1000 dollars to spend per month and throws it at the game since they are bad at managing money / say no. There are way more middle class people who are bad at money than there are rich people who care enough about games to throw money at them.
The story about the trust fund kid millionaire is to help you sleep, it isn't reality. For example, I had a friend who spent thousands of dollars on league of legends over the years, he worked minimum wage jobs. That is the norm.
Edit:
> The way to make whales spend money wasn't to make our mechanics more addictive; it was to "seed" a rare item to one whale in a friend-group of whales, and watch the others scramble to acquire it too, so as to not suddenly be relegated to lower status.
Seeding rewards early to a person/group is a common way to trigger gambling addiction. So to me it seems like you are doing the worst of the worst kind of gambling addiction scheme here, since you admitted to not having fair chances per try but instead seed out items to trigger gambling addiction in people.
I saw hard data for at least the company I worked for, which may not be widely generalizable, but is still better than nothing. We also knew a lot about our player-base; we had community forums, regular meetups, bought gifts for "high rollers" as if we were a casino with attached hotel, etc.
Those Saudi trust-funders aren't made up examples; they're real people — high-touch "tier 1" users, that would regularly request features from the dev team to cater to their ability to better screw with one-another.
> I guess most of them would be a person working a regular office job who has $1000 dollars to spend per month and throws it at the game since they are bad at managing money / say no.
That's not a whale. Whales — at least for us — were people spending at least $10k/mo on the game — with a few spending $100k/mo or more. You can't even do that without being disgustingly rich. It's like collecting F1 cars as a hobby; there are only certain people in the world who can even start down that road, and none of them are going to go bankrupt doing it.
Maybe our games were an exception in the industry, in that there were effectively ways to spend as much as you want, as fast as you want in the games, with money directly translating to a marginal increase in relative "power", without any rate-limiting bottleneck of needing to serially buy and open lootboxes, and especially no bottleneck of there being lootboxes that don't actually get you anything. Because of that, our whales were so profitable in aggregate that we really didn't need to care about making a single dollar from our non-whale users.
But like I said, we did made almost all of our money from the whales, and then basically discouraged anyone else from giving us more than the bare minimum amount of money. If a player was spending trivial (for us—which even included $1000/mo) amounts of money, as a series of smaller, high frequency transactions, we then considered that to be a profile of "an addict spending whenever they get money", and set up our backend infrastructure to detect such players and degrade their gameplay experience over time to suck all the reward-feeling out of the game for them, without actually cutting them off cold-turkey (which we believed would just have them switch over to another addictive game.)
The whole thing was a scheme to bilk the rich, rather than a scheme to make as much money as possible. Sort of like a product that's free for individuals and a million dollars per month for companies.
> Seeding rewards early to a person/group is a common way to trigger gambling addiction. So to me it seems like you are doing the worst of the worst kind of gambling addiction scheme here, since you admitted to not having fair chances per try but instead seed out items to trigger gambling addiction in people.
I don't know why you're focusing so much on gambling; we had some lootbox-like elements, but they weren't the money-makers (this was 2012; lootboxes weren't the same all-encompassing front-and-center business model they are today.) Our "games" were essentially continuous auctions for leaderboard positions. People could still get addicted to them—but not for anything like the reasons people get addicted to gambling.
It's a pretty good illustration of how MTX crappifies game design.
Gambling away income so poor stays poor: Fuck yeah! snorts 30 % cut in coke
So many of their devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, now MacBook) seem like such obvious decent gaming machines, far overshadowing something like a Nintendo Switch in specs, that it's really sad we can't get much worth playing on them (personal opinion).
Apple allows this: they are a company of bad taste!
If there's a walled garden to begin with, it's fine to criticize the way it is being run.