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Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

If you create a 5-star app that has in-app purchases that impact gameplay, congradulations, you have just earned 1-star.

I'll drop $20 dollars on a decent game in the app store, as long as the playing field is level. But when you begin to link performance to bank accounts, you ruin the game. It's way more intrusive than advertisements, because advertisements don't give anyone an unfair advantage.

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You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. These are a distinct class of games--so-called "pay-to-win" games. The playing field isn't uneven; everyone has to pay to win, and those who pay the most, win the most. It's exactly like a grindy MMO-game, but instead of rewarding the people with the most disposable time, the game rewards people with the most disposable money.

Not to say there aren't games that try to make you think they're skill-based and then reveal their pay-to-win nature later on--but the current trend in the market is against this, and moving toward a more bald-faced "yeah, you win this game using your wallet; want to play?"

As far as the concept of a game goes, it's uneven because ultimately, someone is going to have more money than everyone else.

From my experience, games that involve skill are the only ones worth playing.

The thing is, everyone playing those games knows that they're being ranked on how much time they (can) spend on the game. It's part of the social contract of the game. This is why I would dispute saying it's "uneven." Every game ranks people somehow; some people prefer to be ranked given different criteria than others.

- A skill-based game shakes out as a ranking based on skill, so players with high technical aptitude for these sorts of games enjoy participating in skill-based game communities.

- A grind-fest game shakes out as a ranking based on "temporal capital", so people who have a lot of time (and perhaps not a high capacity for skill) enjoy participating in the grind.

- A pay-to-win game, finally, shakes out as a ranking based on, well, money. People who have a lot of money (and perhaps not a high capacity for skill, or time to invest) enjoy paying to win. (I met a "whale" for one of these games, an oil tycoon from a middle-eastern country; he was very happy to be able to basically play a game of fiscal chicken against his tycoon friends/rivals, using the game to prove who was willing to waste more money to get what they want.)

These three game "classes" are each totally sensible on their own, for the players who want to play them. The danger comes almost entirely in trying to sell one class of game as if it were another class, or trying to mix classes of players within a single game.

the problem comes when one class of game vastly outperform financially compared to the others. You end up getting tonnes of pay to win games because it nets the creator/publisher more money, where as skill based games tend to be non-existent anymore because, lets face it, there are way less people who are disciplined enough to play these sorts of games compared to instant-gratification games that gets you to pay for that feeling.

And so you suggest... what? That developers make skill-based games, and then trick pay-to-win players into playing them to make their money? How would that work, exactly? If they can't pay-to-win in the game, they won't be paying at all, and then they'll lose and quit. You'll end up with the same sort of environment you get from a bait-and-switch seems-to-be-skill-but-is-really-pay game: an entrenched upper class who has already "won" the game, and a flow of newbie players who come in expecting to compete on axis X, but end up being exploited on axis Y (in this case, by being beaten to a pulp by those with greater skill.)

And that is why there is more than 1 type of game- because there is more than 1 type of gamer.

$20 games don't make money on the App Store unless it's a known brand. Just look at the top grossing list. I always see anecdotal evidence in these threads where people claim that they would spend money up front, but all evidence points elsewhere. The App Store has been a race to the bottom since day 1.

Ads in aps don't make money. These days they're mostly used for cross promotion.

I know that reality shows that I'm not in the majority, but the majority often has terrible taste. That's why things like Twilight, The Transformer movies, and Justin Beiber are popular.

99.9% of the rest of the players will still give it 5 stars so your 1 star means nothing.

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