Tell HN: The thesis against mobile freemium games
This is probably a heavily discussed topic. I'd like to share my 2 cents. Due to character limit I split it into two parts.
PART I
- Freemium games' vicious profit plan:
- Item 1: Use free gifts and socializing to retain players. People like free gifts, even virtual ones. And once they start playing "with their friends", it's difficult to stop.
- Item 2: Grant a generous new player package. The psychology is, once a player spends, even a small amount, he is likely to spend again.
- Item 3: Force players to group into "clans" and compete between each other. This can budge even the most stringent players, because hey do you want to disappoint your clan members by not spending money? Don't you want to have a higher place on the ladder? Some clans are very competitive. They just want to be No.1, and whoever cannot drag along are kicked out and farmed for resources ruthlessly.
- Item 4: Grant deals frequently. Labeling a "XX% off" is an old but still working trick. How about adding some spice into the formula? How about, say, make some quests impossible to complete, UNLESS the player buys a specific package that grants him the right material?
- Item 5: There is always a better soldier or a building after an update. There is always some whale who can outspend you. The more you spend, the more you are forced to spend. It's just some JSON data and a few new skins -- but you either have to spend literally days, weeks to build those buildings, or spend bucks to build them instantly. What do you say?
- Item 6: Grant generous welcome back gifts and deals. Don't you feel a bit guilty about leaving the game, the clan, and your friends for so long?
- Item 7: Many actions require an "energy" item to perform. You can wait hours for auto-generation, or can pay to enjoy limitless amount of energy for a while.
- Item 8: Even if you are not paying, you are part of the product. You help the game in certain ways.
- Freemium games "reward" players with many small gifts. Energy (to perform an action), in-game currency, you call it. But they generate every X minutes/hours. They are begging you to come back for some screen time.
- Freemium games have "challenges" for the players. The players won't be able to complete all of them in one shot, so they have to login from time to time.
- Once players identify this, they believe they can "cheat" by logging back disciplinarily and obtain as much free items as possible, so that they don't have to pay. This also gives them a sense of discipline.
- Other than "Casino" games, many other freemium games have chance-based purchases. They also skew the probability with sort of probability table that they can hot push to clients.
- Casinos at least have to disclose the probability table. Freemium games don't. We know it's not fair, but we don't know how unfair it is.
- What do they do? Some ask the players for their birthdays. Some don't even bother with that.
- Since there are no good ways to check age online, I don't know how we are going to regulate it. Cigarette sellers and alcohol sellers check IDs. Should freemium games do that too? Maybe they should. But they shouldn't store the information.
- Some freemium games are frankly gambling games, such as the ones with dices and slots. But other freemium games, such as the "Strategy" ones, don't require skills as well. A paid player can almost surely beat a F2P player. A whale can almost surely beat a common paid player.
- The data is just there to make sure that, 1) Whoever pay must get the better equipment and soldiers -- so good that F2P players can never hope to win by grinding. and 2) Just a whatever excuse for a new package.