Hacker News Reader

Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if when given the choice people prefer games without microtransactions, even if they're older and have fewer features/powerups etc.

View on HN

I won't play any iOS game with either ads or with a "free but micro-transaction model." If you look in the pay up front category on the app store, there are very very few games. It's too bad.

I think we should really call out Apple and Google for mismanagement here. Imagine if there was the option to play a game for an hour as a free trial, and then buy the game instead of having to plunk down $4.99 sight-unseen - or having your game in the Free category with the microtransaction shovelware around it.

If I'm the developer who wants users to have any semblance of try-before-you-buy, the free category (with an IAP for "Premium") is the only option. Which is a real shame.

Games could still do this (via a single one-time "microtransaction"), and some do this. But standard microtransactions are stupidly profitable, enough to tempt most devs.

And, frankly, the gaming industry at large has proven that paying up front does not prevent microtransactions. Even in mobile games.

But the pool has been poisoned already. If I see that an app uses microtransactions, I won't install that app -- so I'd never even know that the microtransaction was to purchase the game outright.

I get that. But you can preview what micro transactions are offered prior to purchasing, which is progress.

Is that an Apple thing? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the android Play Store. That would be useful.

I thought it was both stores, but yes, I'm referring to the Apple app store.

I just checked. I don't see anything like this in the Play Store, sadly.

They don't even need to do much, just add a category for developers who want to have a free + single-IAP-to-unlock-the-whole-thing version, and let people search that category specifically. No need for Apple to enforce time limits or anything. The trouble now isn't that demos can't exist, but that it's hard to tell which IAP-bearing apps are just full version unlocks and which are whale-chasing bullshit.

For that matter, just segregating games with any "consumable" IAP from those without would probably help a lot.

It still wouldn’t help. There is nothing stopping a developer from releasing a free game with a single in app purchase that unlocks everything.

I always wondered why Apple can't implement something similar to Steam refunds.

Quote from https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds:

You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.

It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.

For all their faults (Steam is glorified DRM), the people at Valve seem to actually understand gamers and have gaming in their own blood. Apple has never understood gaming and I doubt they ever will.

I mean, even Google has a policy like this (with a tighter time limit).

It's not a well-supported/advertised path, but you can always download a pay-for game for an hour and then get a refund if you don't like it.

Google at least used to do automatic refunds if you uninstalled a pay-for app very quickly - I once had that happen with a utility app that I used to convert some stuff - since it worked exactly like I wanted, I re-purchased and left it installed for a few days.

Mismanagement? Do you realize some people spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on in-game micro transactions? Yes I do mean individual people. These people are basically the entire revenue stream for the Play Store. Of course they're not going to discourage that business model.

On a less discouraging note, there is a "try now" button in the Play store that games can implement. You can upload a lightweight version of the game for people to play without installing / paying for the game.

The "Top Paid" category isn't really the whole story, since there's no official "free demo" system in the app store. Instead, games are set up as a "free + microtransactions" and then the only in app purchase is "buy the whole game." But unless you look closely down at the bottom of the store page, you can't distinguish games like this from the microtransaction trash.

PinOut comes to mind as an example, I'm sure there are many others: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinout/id1108417718

  In-App Purchases
  PinOut Premium $2.99

I'm sure there are app devs that use this to offer a "free demo", but I suspect the bulk of them use it because IAPs aren't subject to Family Sharing the way that paid apps are.

Google and Apple aggressively push developers to use IAPs rather than up-front paid games, and often won't feature games & apps costing more than 99c. They incentivized the current market.

I think the demo/trial model is still very reasonable. You get to download the game for free and play a level or two and then you need to purchase the full game to continue.

Of course the problem is that it's sometimes a bit hard to tell apart games like this from the P2W micro-transaction shovelware junk

On the app store page for the game, you can see all of the in-app purchases available. If there's only one for the full game, you're safe. If there's a bunch of different coin/whatever purchases available, stay away.

I'm right up there with you.

I will admit that paying like $15 four years ago for Stardew Valley on iOS felt a bit weird, but $15 is pretty cheap considering that it's the full game. It doesn't make you buy gems every twenty minutes, or watch an ad every time you plant six crops, or spam your friend to share your status for some extra gold.

It's a full game, and you pay a nominally-high-but-ultimately-reasonable price for it.

Similarly, The Binding of Isaac is also a pretty good iOS game. I don't remember how much I paid, but it was slightly higher than average, but it doesn't spam me with any microtransaction crap.

$15 is a screaming deal for a game like Stardew Valley.

Yeah, honestly, for the amount of content you get in that game, it's insane. That's not even taking into account the fact that it still gets free updates.

It's definitely my go-to recommendation when people ask about good iOS games.

I imagine that a lot of people would retroactively pay $100 (i.e. future-you would be able to easily convince past-you that paying $100 is worth it).

I wonder what mechanisms exist for capitalizing on that retroactive price. You can obviously make the up-front price higher, but this obviously erects a barrier to people experiencing the retroactive value.

Some other ones that come to mind: paid DLC, "remastered" versions released N years later (Skyrim has famously done this. I think I've paid for 3 or 4 $60 versions of Skyrim at this point), and open "tip" jars / patreon style support. Any other ideas?

In regards to Stardew Valley specifically, I ended up purchasing it on multiple other platforms after I bought it on iPhone.

I had a startup that made games in the pay up front model (with variants, like having a free episode and then selling more episodes, or demo + paid version, etc...)

It just doesn't work, people don't want to buy stuff when on mobile, they just don't. The price made no difference in sales either, could be high, low, 99c, whatever, people just ignore your game and get only the free versions.

On Android this is even worse than iOS, my startup could had SOME sales on iOS, on Android we had millions of downloads and literally zero sales.

The fact that most apps are ad-based is what drove me away from the app store entirely on Android. It's impossible to tell what's actually free, and it's hard to find honest apps that you can just pay for instead of dealing with ads or microtransactions.

So I would never have seen your app. I was already driven out of the "ecosystem". I wonder how many others are like me -- fully willing to pay, but so disgusted by the app scene that we aren't even there anymore.

Apple Arcade provides a ton of value in this regard. No ads, no micro transactions, games like they used to be.

Funny enough given this article, they have Angry Birds 1 remastered.

It’s the only games I’ll let my six year old play on her iPad. It’s disgusting to me that her first experiences playing games would be one’s trying to get her to buy stuff or watch ads.

I have no affiliation, but Zoombinis is a nice kids logic game throwback. They have released an IOS port for a few bucks.

Tell me about it. I'm an iOS engineer at FAANG, but I've been shipping my own apps since 2011. It's depressing that there's no longer a market for paid, high quality, ad-free, fully packaged apps and games. I actually interned at a mobile games studio for a summer and it was made clear to me what the profit model was: pander solely to the whales, ignore the free users.

Something like 70% of our revenue came from 2% of our users. Super bleak and helped contribute to my realization that there's just not reliable money to be made as a solo iOS dev anymore. Better to collect a paycheck building someone else's app.

>It's depressing that there's no longer a market for paid, high quality, ad-free, fully packaged apps and games.

I can't tell you how crazy it is on Android, to find a killer app that does something that's exactly what I'm looking for and to see perhaps it has or is a paid version, usually for just a few bucks, and I to go-to the store page and see some ridiculously small number under downloads. People will put up with a lot of cruft for free. Even worse in terms of apps and games is that younger people I know don't bat an eye at most it whether it be ads or IAPs. A younger guy I talk tech with will happily pay to win in games he plays, or expensive cosmetics, and he doesn't consider it at all. It's just how things are and he enjoys it. Sometimes I tactfully ask, where is the game if you just buy X or Y? And I don't think he quite gets what I'm hinting at and he's one of the most tech savvy zoomers I know.

Is that the only conclusion? There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games. They will happily pay for substantial extensions and content upgrades. They will remember your name and see anything you release as worth considering. It's a smaller market of course but a sustainable one.

In terms of video games. I'm personally not a mobile gamer though. Maybe it's quite a bit different from desktop and console.

>There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games. They will happily pay for substantial extensions and content upgrades.

Can you point to someone having this sort of success based on this model in the mobile space?

I have no idea how financially successful they are but the game Dawncaster is great and seems to be faring well.

$5 up front, $5 for each expansion (currently 2) which add a substantial amount of content each.

The devs are active, patching regularly, and planning another content update this year. They just released a free new mode to the game as well.

No ads, no microtransactions just a fun and complete game with lots of replay value - I hope they can sustain it over time

For mobile gaming there might be some creators here or there scratching out a living like that but probably about 0.1% as many as you imagine, or as there seemingly should be considering how much money is in the ecosystem. The vast majority of that money is sucked up by big IP and older established apps and pseudo publishers/install networks that rip off the latest trends and blast them to their audience full of ads etc. Apple Arcade was trying to create a healthier walled garden within App Store but years later feels kind of like a big brand bargain bin the way it's been run. It's just very extreme winner takes all dynamics.

I actually think there is a function of whales, not yet explored. Dont try to milk them with items. Make them gatekeepers. They get to decide who plays the game, who gets to enter, and who gets to stay. Sounds strange, but if they keep the thing afloat, they might aswell have a total say on that.

Wow ... That sounds like a massive power trip.

obnoxious pay to win items in garbage pvp games definitely cater to this

What advantage would that have to anyone? That sounds bad for both the developers and the players

   > There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.

You're right on, here, and it points to a few problems and opportunities. I'm that subset of users yet I have an incredibly hard time finding apps meeting my criteria in the app stores. They are there. I often find them right after purchasing something that isn't as good or using one of a hundred free-but-varying-degrees-of-awful apps because I don't trust that spending even $3.00 isn't going to get me a paid-but-varying-degrees-of-awful app[0].

The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.

[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.

Can't believe this is the story with iOS as well. I thought Apple fared better as compared to Android when it came to paid apps.

Very similar story with iOS as well. Adware and InApp is the standard.

One way around it is Arcade, which has lots of quality games with no ads nor in apps.

you're not an engineer at one of the A's (Apple) if you're shipping your own apps — the employment agreement restricts it.

Those agreements aren't permitted in many countries, where OP might be at.

He can have a Spouse or son that can manage/have the finance side of things -edit: Or husband, whatever be

That's so sad.

I had this pain with my kids a few months ago while "looking to kill some time" in the Android world. I don't play a lot of phone games and was dismayed at the crap that was out there.

I like to introduce the kids to more low-fidelity games -- I started with 2048 -- I want to say probably 5-10 different choices; all I was looking for was "lets me buy away the ads", works offline (one choice was a webview to a URL which was not cached, several were very low quality) and has a small number of features that I like (and mostly sacrificed).

I ended up buying mobile version of The Kittens Game[0]. $2.99, minimally updated[1], and worth every penny. The pollution in the market as it were, I would have spent $9.99 for it.

Your comment kind of got me thinking, though. While searching, I used a "mental sorting method" (after I found a game matching my requirements) best summarized as "price, descending" because -- in a hurry -- I equated price with quality and assumed "a more expensive game in this category is not going to have ads/be a scam." In some spaces (slot machine/casino games), I wouldn't touch an app that wasn't "upfront payment only/no ads/no tokens" or "free without ads"[2], yet would happily pay for any that worked anything like the old Xbox Texas Hold'em (without voice/any casino-style game).

[0] https://kittensgame.com/web/ (I'm sorry for those who have yet to be exposed).

[1] So my kids got hooked which meant I went down that rabbit hole, again. I'm not sure when the last update was, but many bugs mentioned in the Wiki aren't present in the mobile game.

Try FDroid instead of Play Store. FDroid has a clean version of 2048. And Shattered Pixel is pretty good too; a well polished touch-based graphical roguelike, free on FDroid without any ads or IAPs.

Kids love Super Tux Kart!

strangely happy that I grew up with Solitaire

every platform has a free version (hidden beneath the ad-ware ones)

The Netflix Games you can get for being a subscriber are decent quality with no ads. I imagine that will get cut at some point unless they've got a way to measure how much this benefits their subscription numbers.

The Amazon Underground thing they used to incentivize their app store was pretty great also, the "Actually Free" games let you unlock everything in the App. That was discontinued in 2019.

It's interesting how much more effective advertising is than word-of-mouth. Maybe its because I'm not an "active gamer", but it's been hard to find honest recommendations for good paid games by small developers. Trying to research through the Play Store is very difficult though not completely impossible. The store credits from "Google Rewards" certainly lubricate the process of trying things out.

My assumption at first was that netflix would be crappy. Haven't looked at wm since they started appearing, but just the other day saw that Devolver is making games for netflix now. Pair that with seeing recent positive feedback, it made me second guess my wrongly held assumption

I'm guessing it's not a bad platform?

Netflix has been licensing some top indie games for their offering. Some of them are a cut above decent. Just Kentucky Route Zero, Immortality, Spiritfarer and Into the Breach would be worth the subscription by themselves.

The App Store and Play Store are full of ad free and micro transactions free good ports of popular PC games if you are ready to pay the price. Some are strictly targeting the iPad but others can be played on a phone. I have spent an insane amount of time playing Slay The Spire on mine. They are not really put forward by Apple and Google however.

Lots of great games on Apple arcade. All add free and microtransaction free. Pay to rent but pretty low cost, and lots of them are not available on any other platform.

Android is in the same situation.

That's because games where you pay once get dropped so far down in downloads compared to "free" ones. I've had people tell me to my face "your ($1) game costs too much" while sipping their daily $5 latte.

luckily there are still good quality games that can fill in some downtime / waiting.

Highly recommend "Slay the Spire", "Dead Cells" and any of Trese Brothers games. Of the free games "Vampire Survivors" is really good and not intrusive with ads (I think it's some kind of altruistic business model).

Apple Arcade is great for that reason.

No ads, no micro transactions, very high quality games.

I played Star Trek: Legends on Apple Arcade and it was deeply weird. It was a game that was clearly designed for a microtransaction model, with loot boxes, "rare" items, multiple in-game currencies and timers, etc - and in the Apple Arcade edition, exactly zero ways to spend money on any of it. Like a Chuck E Cheese with all the ticket machines set to free play.

There are a couple games like that, they didn’t quite make the transition away from F2P smooth as others.

On the other hand, kinda nice too, provides an interesting perspective.

solution: don't give people that choice... this aligns all corporate-business incentives which are the only ones that matter when considering how to run stores.

I'm really worried since it occurred to me that going forwards the only way to really change what any computer device does/can do is through app stores. No more programming languages; specially not 'open ones' for your own computer hygiene (or safety).

heck, at this moment I'm worried about a future (I hope it stays a future plan forever) agendas against teaching people to read and write. Now that computers can engage in verbal (oral) communication is just a matter of time.

You say that now, but you'll love the Speakwrites. You can just talk into them and they'll write for you, with realtime correction of grammar and misinformation.

what worries me is that it'll realtime correct what I say into what I mean so perfectly that I won't be able to learn to do it on my own.

Once our capacity to 'self-correct' (which is the essence of healing) becomes unused we will begin to lose it.

I guess in such a world we all talk to our personal 'computers' and they communicate us to other humans translating everything automatically. sounds like we will be so free that we won't have to learn to talk to others, 'our' computers will do that for us, and so on until we don't know whether we are ourselves or our computers are us; perfectly assimilating us into the borg.

we will have accomplished a more perfected state of "freedom": we will have become free from having to be alive!!

Yeah but they make more money on the microtransactions in the end.

I mean, that's why they are taking it away, isn't it?

I mean, sure, when given the choice, most people prefer "free" to "costs money".

Just to point out, the game isn't free.

I really, really wish everyone would stop abusing the word "free" in that way. "Free" means "without cost", but money is only one form of cost -- so not charging money does not automatically make the game "free".

I would be just happy to pay for new, interesting and challenging, levels for Angry Birds "the thing" 1.0.

But, when the gameplay is so absurdly easy you can beat everything with one finger, all the levels are pointless, and most of screen real estate is dedicated to selling you gems or ability to resume playing level after losing it, it just does not make any sense. You have to seriously be mentally retarded to play it.

I was really upset with Angry Birds 2 introducing a degree of randomness into the levels. Level 6 might appear different for you, just a little bit, every time you load it.

Just like that, any appearance of craft that went into the levels was shredded and they just feel AI-generated rather than a natural progression. In which case, because AI-generation is basically infinite, do I really care to beat all the levels? (Angry Birds 1 was a big game - 700 levels. Angry Birds 2? 3,080! But it still feels like they could just increase an integer in the code somewhere and get another 1,000.)

I remember playing Angry Birds with friends (not AB Friends) back in ~2012. It was so great when you knew or had figured out the best solution to a level and your friends didn't know how, or vice versa. Also, old Angry Birds was like 10 chapters of ~45 levels each, so if you were stuck in one chapter, you worked on another (and could maybe have the solution for one chapter while your buddy had another), rather than a straight-through "oh, I don't remember how to beat level 308." Randomized levels and the straight-through progression shreds that.

Storing a seed would fix this. Procedural generation was something that made replay great for games like Diablo.

>But, when the gameplay is so absurdly easy you can beat everything with one finger

I haven't played Angry Birds since just after it came out, but couldn't you always beat everything with one finger? The entire control scheme was you dragged a little bird and let go, what would you use the second finger for?

You can play chess and go with one finger...

Go requires at least two fingers. That is what makes it more challenging than chess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com