How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry
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1) People seem to balk at paying >$5 for a mobile or tablet game. (With some notable exceptions.)
2) The $0.99 or $1.99 price point is not financially viable for most games.
3) People do seem willing to purchase coins or lives or more daily playtime via in-app purchases. Some spend tens or hundreds of dollars on a single game.
If you're building a game for a large company like EA, you're probably forced to take the most lucrative path. EA's not an atelier for starving artists. And if you're a small, struggling game studio, you probably can't afford to leave money on the table.
So what's the solution? If people are unwilling to pay reasonable prices up-front for games, how besides in-app purchases does a game company profit from their work?
This is an honest question, because I also generally hate how IAP is integrated into most games. I'd much rather pay up-front.
You mean like getting a NYT subscription for $200 dollars, instead of paying for the 10-20 articles I want to read all year for like $1 or $.5 a piece?
I generally find in-app purchases on iOS games to be scummy as hell, though, so the big problem is probably that it's a Wild West for dark user patterns in games on the App Store.
When the game is entirely offline, though, it's just nuts to require the player to put in more money.
We can accept sports where players and teams spends millions of dollars of on training, equipment, etc. What if instead the team just paid the money to buy additional points from the referee?
Yeah, that is not a game.
The appropriate way to do this is to make premium/paid items cosmetic only with zero influence on game play. If your game blows, this model doesn't work.
On the other hand, in the game market, most games are a one-off experience with a very short lifetime (excluding MMO games). So there is no way they could be constructed through subsequent donations and evolutions.
Add to this the fact that open source communities are only made of programmers (because they are the ones benefiting most from the network effect and from incremental integration of software components), while games require other kind of professionals. Eg: volunteer designers in OSS world are mostly non existent; most of them are on the payroll of some sponsor.
This sounds like: I want to sell for $5 but customers won't buy my product at that price.
Well, in that case your product, however much your toiled and however much you spend to make it, is not viable?
Exactly, it's not viable. Only IAP driven games are. That is the problem being discussed here.
I'd much prefer the free demo + paid full version to be honest as I'd like to see if a game is worth it. If it is, I'm happy to pay a decent price. Then again, I might be a minority.
It defies simplistic supply-and-demand analysis because there is no longer just one price, but many; the customer has to make a constant series of decisions about the value of instant gratification. Some people hate this.
Dan Ariely noted that the mobile app industry has done this to itself by ... well better read in his own words: http://danariely.com/2011/12/25/the-oatmeal-this-is-how-i-fe...
It is not a pay-to-win type of scenario because it is a single player game (with one minor PVP minigame element). It also never feels scummy because you can do basically everything in the game without ever paying a single cent. Even 'premium' content that is unlocked by purchasable items is generally tradable and purchasable with the in-game currency (meat) that drops from the monsters.
Thus you don't have to pay up front... But you do end up donating some money for interesting items at some point due to the game being great, current, funny, having a great community, etc.
The business model probably wouldn't work for most, but in the case of Kingdom of Loathing it works really well.
What I do know is that it was enough for the two initial guys to now do it full-time and they now also employ something like 4 additional people full-time (I think its 4 additional).
KoL's donation revenue is currently sufficient to support a full-time staff and a second team working on a new game. I feel like we were extremely fortunate to have launched when we did and to have gotten the critical mass in the beginning that makes it possible for this to be a career instead of just a hobby.
As far as choosing the business model, I'm not sure there was ever a moment when I made a choice about it. A couple of months in, the hosting bills were starting to cost more than I was comfortable paying out of pocket, so I put up a link to ask for donations to offset the cost. A player suggested, "Hey, why don't you give donators an in-game reward?" and I figured "Hey, why not, it couldn't hurt." To my surprise and delight, it was pretty much instantly profitable. I was still processing the donations by hand for quite a while -- the revenue model was really kind of an afterthought.
After it got to the point where I was able to comfortably and safely quit my day job (and finally start paying Josh, who had been diligently working for free for several months), I started offering the monthly specials, which caused another surge in income and allowed me to hire an office manager, another writer/designer, and another programmer. Since then we've added a full-time customer service/abuse-tracking position and part-time forum and chat-moderation supervisors.
For more complex games that require more work (and possibly investment), it's questionable that this model could be relied upon. Still, as an old-timer who seldom plays anymore (#53596), I have huge admiration for the Asymmetric team for carving out an awesome niche gaming community with non-exploitive business model.
Nothing even close to a major studio adapting an old hit to mobile platforms to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
When I found out that there was a mandatory quest at the altar of literacy to gain access to the chat channels of kingdom of loathing, I knew I was hooked. I even learned haiku to be able to chat on the haiku chan. http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/The_Altar_of_L...
Unfortunately, that won't happen because it's much more lucrative to raise a generation of "gamers" who don't know any better than to provide a continuous revenue stream in exchange for the occasional dopamine hit.
You would probably get a lot of people who would download the game free, try it out, maybe make some in game purchases, then decide to upgrade to the $5 version, so you would make $5 + whatever they spend on in game items before upgrading. (Or whatever price you decide to charge). You won't be making hundreds off anyone, but you'll probably get more bites overall.
Then you'd be able to see easily that more than 50% spend more than $10 on that 99¢ app and factor that in to your purchase decision.
That's the solution of someone thinking one quarter ahead.
If a game company cannot find a way to be profitable without IAPs it might want to find something else to do besides make games.
Las Vegas begs to disagree with you.
casinos fail all the time.
i'm not talking about keeping what casinos have right now and "tweaking" that. I'm talking about a reimagining.
Casinos don't generally fail because they don't know how to tweak the odds.
I think you and girvo are talking about different things.
As a simple example, slot machines are actually implemented as raffle tickets, not mechanical random generators. But not losing plays are deceptively displayed as being "almost" winners. You get a "star star (half star, half bar)" far more often than if the machine behaved the way it appeared.
Then of course you have free alcohol during bad decisions, no clocks, upsells for crap like "insurance" at blackjack....
Similarly, even though a player may lose asymptotically to the house, they can be quite annoying in the short run.
I'd say undertaking such a massive clandestine effort to liberate you from your cash is pretty customer-hostile.
As far as I know, handbag addiction is not a serious problem. Gambling addiction is.
That seems to be the most lucrative path by far. There are always more whales that make serving the 99% of players worthwhile.
On the PC/console side, you of course have ports of popular mobile games. In addition, however, you have AAA games like Diablo 3 that are reasonably complex, yet seem to have been intentionally ruined by IAP and the real money sale of items that affect performance.
I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price.
Mobile games can have great depth. Just like PC/console games can be extremely simple and trivial.
(Depth doesn't come from complex mechanics or controls, btw. In fact, those things are often used to mask how shallow a game really is.)
Perhaps you are also right that most developers won't even try to make a real game, due to the difficulty in getting customers to pay for them. Now that its more profitable to milk small amounts of money out of non-gamers, I think the rest of us are going to eventually get stuck playing the kick starter lottery in order to see real games hit the market.
> I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price.
Chicken, meet egg. :(
This is why I hate the mobile space for gaming.
With mobile touch-screen controls the game has to somehow register a button-press as soon as a button-press is made.
But it must also never (to a first approximation) register a button-press when a button-press was not requested (e.g. an accidental brush of a finger against the screen).
It's hard enough to do this anyways, but the "input device" does no favors for the game developer either. There's a reason that input devices on consoles and computers have evolved over the years into the shapes they have, they are meant to be easy to hold in a certain position (so that you always know where the buttons are) and perhaps more important, they have tactile features that allow your finger to quickly find and stay near the buttons. It's the reason that buttons and the D-pad are not fully-flush with the shell, even though that might have been more stylish.
Imagine trying to play Super Mario World with a NES-shaped rectangular controller where there are no tactile buttons. This might have worked if you only needed Left, Right, Jump, but even that game required all of the following for the best gameplay: Left/Right, Up/Down (for pipes and to literally scroll the screen up), Jump, Run/Hold/Fireball, Spin Jump, Pause, Drop Stored Item and Shoulder Left/Right (to scroll the screen). And if the input wasn't right you'd either jump into a spike you had meant to run under or accidentally run off a cliff you'd meant to jump past.
The controls on Mario seem complex only because they were so completely intuitive when you were actually playing them but I assure you they were far more difficult to implement than you think. It's not until you start playing platformer games with horrible controls that you can realize the great job done by the development teams at Sega (for Sonic) and Nintendo.
The concept of an on-screen virtual analog stick is great in theory. I practice, its always going to be terrible in comparison to its physical counterpart. Games like Modern Combat 4 are pretty impressive when you first see them, but 5 minutes in you realize two things: The controls are bad, and the entire game has been dumbed-down because the developers know that the controls are bad. Its not even their fault. They did as good of a job as anyone has, but a capacitive touchscreen just isn't going to offer the user a pleasant experience in a 3d fps.
Certain genres are well-suited to touch controls. Many genres are not. Board games and card games work very well.
I'd agree that board-game style strategy/war games would work, and also quite a few turn-based strategy games.
Its also possible to make certain types of real-time strategy games. Unfortunately, complex RTS games like Starcraft probably can't be done well without extreme oversimplification.
What wrecked Diablo 3 was the enormous power discrepancy between what a player could reasonably find on their own and what was readily available on the auction market. The game had to be balanced around the latter to avoid auction buyers god-moding over everything, which left solo players completely screwed. With a tighter power balance between common and rare items, Diablo 3 would have continued to be playable just fine.
Yes there is. Diablo 3 would have been much better if buying gear was the exception to the rule. By legitimizing it and as you mentioned, failing to provide balance, Blizzard unintentionally made the purchase of gear the only viable method of progression for most players.
With World of Warcraft, Blizzard made tons of money off of cosmetic items. If they wanted to increase revenue, they should have gone this route instead of ruining the best action-rpg franchise in the world.
For others, like myself & Phaus, apparently, we'll just play a different damn game. I think the disconnect here is that people are like "well look its still working, isnt it?" but the idea of "ruining" a game isnt that the thing is broken now, its that casual players dont wanna get involved cuz its an all-or-nothing shitshow where youre not sure exactly when the menu is gonna pop up saying "give us more money or your time invested is now a complete waste".
i only play single-player story titles now for the most part because i know that pretty much anything else is gonna try to mess with my mind & prey on the consumer. COD & Battlefield are the best examples i can think of. They keep game prices high, get players addicted to repetitive mindless multiplayer, then charge $15 for a change of scenery (should 3 or 4 maps cost 1/4 the price of the game itself?)
If you buy, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're being ripped off & it makes you resent the gamemakers. If you don't buy, you're left with a limited set of maps that is getting duller by the second, lol
I'm avoiding by just buying downloadable PC games for between $1 - $10 each & then when its over its over. its the skinner box games that overprice DLC and this alone should be a trigger that makes people see them for what they are & have the willpower to opt out
Now they are a massive corporation with nothing moddable & the balls to sell simple gun skins in like $15 packs :D
I think valve has done the best job out of anyone when it comes to monetization in Counterstrike:GO. You can purchase custom maps and skins to use on official matchmaking servers, or you get all of the same content for free plus a wide variety of mods and use them on custom servers. They get paid, and the customers still have freedom of choice.
its nice to be back in the PC world. my friend gave me an xbox360 & i was playing that for a bit but now instead of a console i have geforce 770... hadn't even realized the notion of "custom servers" still existed, hah :D
Buying gear in WoW is easy and a given up to a point, but limited to in-game currency. To buy some of the best gear, you just have to be the owner of enough gold to buy something from one of the two auction houses if it shows up. That meant you were active in your server's economy (helpful) or you were buying gold from scammers (which a lot of people are scared to do) - or you were raiding at a point where that gear was equivalent to what you can get, so you just ignored it (a small minority of raiders, not just WoW players overall). If real money was involved, it'd probably turn into something worse than D3's AH fiasco where people would quit playing since everyone playing for non-RP/solo reasons would eventually be forced to spend a bunch of money on top of in-game time to be on an even footing.
Not that I think D3 should have followed the same exact footsteps as WoW in terms of how to make money, but I'm looking forward to next month to maybe get around to start playing D3 again now that the AH will be gone there.
Current-tier raid and PVP gear can show up on the Black Market Auction House, sold by NPCs. The BMAH sells a very small number of pieces during the few months it takes people to clear content. When I played in a top 20 US 25 man guild in T14-15, our BMAH was usually camped by the other faction, so we couldn't buy stuff anyway. It didn't make any noticeable difference.
Valve also gives the cosmetic items as random drops after matches or from spectating competetive games. The players are then able to sell these items to other players trough Valve's market. From the trades Valve takes a procentual fee (or margin, that is), which can raise quite high as some knives in CS cost over $300 and some couriers in Dota have been sold as high as $9000 a pop.
Even though the cosmetic business model sounds like a golden road, I've yet to across any mobile game which would have used it.
Valve is incredibly unique yet people keep telling tiny companies making mobile games that they should be like Valve.
The problem is that good game design is hard, and not particularly repeatable. Having a single simple mechanic, surrounded by a reusable monetization platform is much more formulaic and repeatable. Formulaic is bad for players, but good for businesses.
I guess I'm just gonna play Carcassonne on iOS 6 forever :)
Given Apple & Google take a flat 30% of money coming in, if they get less money, that means developers are also getting less money. So I don't know how that would increase developer options.
I'm an indie developer and my paid games have done very poorly. It's just so much easier to convince someone to download my apps for free, and then try to upsell them later on. I've also resisted bags of coins, but probably to my own detriment.
Sadly I find myself feeling the same way (as a consumer). I don't really want to pay > $5 for a game. Yet, I don't like microtransactions... so I generally just play the free part of a game until I get bored and move on.
PS: i recently ran in to a game for people like you and me. They give you the premium stuff for unlocking a few (surprisingly achievable) achievements. Yay devs! (Its BADLAND)
The Apogee shareware model was extremely successful in its day but was predicated on certain assumptions about marketing and distribution that are no longer true. A standard scenario is that you'd read about the game in a magazine, play the demo episode on the accompanying disk, order the full version by fax or telephone and then have it within a few days.
Games based on the Apogee model were designed from the ground up to demo well and hence monetize well.
i.e. You can play through all of the Doom shareware episode and enjoy the entire experience of playing a complete game.
It's hard to say it didn't work, when it did work very well for many years. Today, games just aren't produced like that I guess. But I guess the equivalent would be say, a Grand Theft Auto Game set in NYC, with what's just the part of the game where you're locked onto one borough/island, and where you complete enough of the game the episode has a logical "conclusion" or "finish". If you want to play more missions and see more story arcs that include other boroughs you can buy episodes 2 and 3. (this is also different than the DLC approach in some important ways).
The desktop game CrossFire did $1bn revenue last year through micro-transactions:
http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/us-digital-games-marke...
The dotcom bubble of the 90's taught people to expect everything they do on a computer to be free. We're still digging ourselves out of the very deep psychological hole that VCs of that time dug.
One could argue, and perhaps somewhat convincingly, that the mobile gaming space is in its chaotic adolescence. It started off as an undifferentiated mass market, but making games for the mass market is extremely challenging unless you're a big publisher with economies of scale. Enter IAP, the best way to bootstrap a game and maintain cash flow over the lifetime of a given gamer.
So now IAP has been exploited to the hilt. It's everywhere. It's the new mass-market model.
Don't want to do IAP? In that case, you should find a lucrative niche. Differentiate. Certain developers are doing fairly well charging large (by iOS & Android standards) up-front prices for deep games in hardcore categories. Square-Enix, for instance, routinely charges upwards of $15 for its Final Fantasy releases, and by all accounts, it's doing just fine with them. (S-E is a fairly big publisher, but I see no reason why a small RPG shop couldn't attempt the same, provided it got itself in front of the right initial audience.)
Devs and publishers who don't have $10M+ in venture funding in the bank are going to have to make their peace with freemium, with niche pricing, or with IAP. Any of these things can be done well. IAP can be done well, for that matter. It's not, in and of itself, an unalloyed evil. De facto-forced IAP, of the sort you need to opt into in order to pass a roadblock, is the dickish (if lucrative) way to go. But IAP that is a fun add-on to an already awesome gaming experience is a bird of a different feather.
Part of the reason for this is that the games suck. When a game is good, word of mouth tends to spread it.
If you think in app purchases are bad, you haven't seen skylanders (activision) or infinity (Disney). These games require action figures to experience the game...wouldn't be so bad if each action figure wasn't over $10!
1. Release games for "pay what you want, whenever, as many times as you want".
2. Educate people that if they don't pay voluntarily for things they want to support/see more of, they will end up living in a world where they're forced to pay for crappy non-games (e.g., the micro-transactions above).
It won't happen cuz most people aren't smart enough to see the benefits of paying for things they want to see more of/support voluntarily. I wish they'd be, but it doesn't seem so.
You get what you pay for is pretty applicable here.
The problem is, there are hundreds games coming out for Android every month. I might like maybe five of them, many are of them are crap and many many more are good games - for someone entirely else then me.
Tell me, how do I find those five I might like? Useful reviews are practically non existent. I'm not willing to pay 5$ for something I will probably play for 10 minutes.
In order to find 1 game you will like, you have to buy maybe 10. So, basically, those games I do not like count into my games budget. They are partly reason why I'm not willing to pay much for one game.
If there were a way (maybe curated storefront) for me to know in advance I will be playing this game for hours next two months, I would gladly pay those 5$. I would see it as cheap. As it is now, it is 5$ for something I will likely not play at all.
What am I missing here? Is this hard to do? Or prohibited somehow?
Disclosure: I'm not a mobile game developer, so maybe I'm missing something here about the rules of the app stores.
For instance, imagine a game listed as free:
- a freemium model let you play 15 levels and asks for 4.99 to unleash 500 more levels, maybe let a 1.99 option for 100 levels; this should convert 3-5% with a million testing players; v.s.
- free-to-play with locking levels every 10 levels that are so hard you have to use bonus, that would convert 1% to pay for either a Golden Orb for 1.99, or a Golden Blast for 5.99, etc. each who may or may not make a difference, and appease your frustration, and work only once. You get a couple of whales (desperate, clueless players) who pay 50$ a month, but even with a larger distribution (two to three millions players) you don't break even.
The idea in the original comment is not that a price twice higher will double sales, but more that having a price tag (which free-to-play games deny having) makes sense for good games.
Like literally the only example of paid games I can think of to do one on phones in recent year are Minecraft, Final Fantasy and GTA.
"already established reputation" is overrated in the age of the internet. Lets hope the internet is still around these days.
If prices had kept up with inflation, 'budget' games would be about £12; blockbusters, over £100. Games are well undervalued on app stores, and exploitative rubbish is the result. I've personally paid reasonable small amounts for some of the classic games (e.g. Monkey Island) and am on the lookout for good modern games at about the same price point.
The problem new devs face isn't even really that people won't pay for the game. It's that no one knows about the game.
It's all good and well that 100 of your friends and acquaintances will pay $20 for your game, but you really need 10000 people to buy it.
I think it's better for players to enjoy a game fully for free (if you're doing IAP), and then provide ways to monetize that enhance their experience. Ramin Shokrizade has lots of amazing blogs about this: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/914048/
No pay to win, no timers, no paywalls that ruin the experience: we need to go back to building games as entertainment experiences, and find ways to monetize with things like skins (purely aesthetic so they don't disrupt gameplay, but can make you look cool when you play with your friends).
Unfortunately the sad truth is that for the majority of mobile games if you charge up front you will not have enough sales volume. And a single $1.99 IAP has the same problem because while you might get 10x downloads from being free initially, you'll still only get your $2 from <10% of them, and $2 LTV is not nearly enough to support a game (+ some gamers like those here might be willing to support a great game with more than $2 but won't have the option to do so in this setup).
At the end of the day, when people invest in an entertainment experience they want to be entertained. And thinking about money and waiting for timers during the experience only reduces the amount of entertainment we get out of it. So we need to find ways to design IAP that is separate enough from the core experience, and yet still works well enough to fund the games we want to play.
This is pretty much what id Software did in the 90s with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and most people in the industry thought they were nuts and it would never work. Obviously it worked extremely well (the difference being it was levels that were gated instead of features, but same concept).
Games used to do this somewhat frequently, they just don't anymore because it leaves so much on the table.
Also the much lower RPUs will make paid acquisition unprofitable, and paid acquisition is the only reliable method. App stores are great if you get featured or by some fluke work your way to the top of the charts, but for 99.9% of developers, you're either doing paid acquisition or getting no substantial amount of customers.
I hate these glorified slot machines, I hate the companies that make them, and I do think it's unethical to prey upon children and regular people with bad judgment, but my guess is that the average "whale" is far too wealthy to deserve your sympathy. As a different example of the same idea, do you feel bad for the celebrities that spend hundreds of dollars for a drink at an exclusive club?
Good article that got passed around in my office on Friday. People who are 'gamers' and by extension people who make games tend to look at "whales" as gullible stupid people but a lot of us tend to exhibit the same behaviour about other things all while congratulating ourselves for not pay 5 bucks to support a game we've played for 50 hours.
That said I think there is a really really fine line you have to walk to keep your IAPs "ethical" and it's very temping (and profitable) to fall on the Candy Crush side of things.
If someone spent $30,000 on my digital cards, I'd look him up so that I could sleep at night and not worry that his kids are going hungry because of this.
(I'm not someone who sells these kinds of things, so I'm fully aware this is largely armchair quarterbacking.)
Creepy. I can't understand why anyone on HN thinks it's acceptable.
Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.
Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.
It gets "unsavory" when you're focusing more on designing the perfect skinner box than actually creating a game. I think games are all about the feelings and mental states you get into when you play them. An action game gets your adrenaline pumping, competitive ones especially so. Strategy games require incredibly deep thought to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Puzzle games really stretch your brain to the limits of logic (or maybe they're just bullshit). From my experience, the games that people malign when they talk about mobile games and "social games," on the other hand, promote nothing but anxiety, and use it as a tool to wedge themselves into your subconscious so that you will fork over more cash into their creator's pockets. See the common practice of games based around waiting for something to happen, and bugging you with an alert whenever it does. I don't think very well of people that create things (I won't dignify them by calling them games) that do nothing but prey on anxiety, compulsion, and our attractions to flashing lights.
It's the difference between creating something that people will pay $50 to experience, and creating something that is engineered to repeatedly exploit our basest negative emotions. These games are in some senses worse than heroin, because at least heroin is fun while it lasts.
Jonathan Blow does the topic far more justice than I can at the moment (what am I doing, it's way too late to be drink posting on HN...) in his talk "Video Games and the Human Condition"[1], if you're interested. It's nearly two hours long, but I believe it's very much worth your time.
As for "why do other startups not get shit for this," I think there's a big difference between A/B testing different versions of your game's site to see which version results in more "conversions" or whatever it's called, and designing your entire "game" around frisking people at every turn and being the best darn frisker you can. Not to mention the ones obviously marketed to children, which reasonable people agree is one step removed from turning up at your local elementary school with a trenchcoat full of free samples.
(I have no idea who you are or what games you make, so don't take these comments personally, this is just my general opinion of the mobile games I've tried. If it (or especially Jonathan Blow's talk, because he's much more eloquent than tired, drunken me) rings close to home, however, it might not be a bad idea to download a pack of the 1000+ NES games and try a few at random for a reminder of what playing a real game is like)
I don't know if MBAs have different jargon, but the term in economics is "price discrimination"/
The same sort of thing happened so mid-90s pay-per-second or pay-for-items games on what we now call dumbphones (ie. java games). They were regulated, essentially demanding up-front information about what they charge and an option to disable it on the telco contract (effectively giving parents a way to disable it for kids, and everyone a way to disable it for themselves), and their market completely dried up. This happened after several high-profile court cases where the telco was preventing from charging large amounts to kids (think $30k-40k). You can't find them anymore at all.
And that's just fine by me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba!
And the last link on the page goes to:
Which is a site for people who have been fraudulently charged, with comments from within the last few months.
The main reason it's different for game developers is that in most instances, in-app purchases will undermine the integrity of the game more significantly than for other kinds of apps. Indeed that is the main point of the OP ("There is no game here.")
If you add a rule to chess where you can pay cash to put a taken piece back on the board, you don't have chess anymore. Additionally, consider that videogames are often escapist entertainment that people play specifically to get away from real-life financial pressures or wealth-based status sorting.
It was very interesting to introspect on the self-rationalization, etc, all the while understanding that I was BS'ing myself and also understanding the tricks they were using. It was addiction, pure and simple.
Now, part of the reason I didn't stop sooner was that I can afford that, although it's not a good use of my funds. That was actually built into the rationalizations: Oh, if I'd taken the car to work today I'd have spent $20 on parking, and $15 on lunch, so I'll just take the subway and bring my lunch tomorrow ...
In both cases, I initially considered the games vapid, but my friends got into it, and I wanted to have stuff that was as good / better.
It is simply not your place to decide for others how they should get their dopamine, or how much they should be paying for it.
It is clear that they are undertaken with free will, and ended similarly thereby. All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence.
The ones who actually want to quit, do.
It's unfathomable to someone who hasn't smoked.
Should we factor this in, or is public health department a nanny state intervention?
Playing the "no one's pointing a gun to your head" card and claiming it is therefore "non-coersive" in defense of targeting and manipulating addictive behavior may very well be profitable but it's delusional and downright dishonest to everyone, including yourself, to think it isn't exploitive and conducive to serious personal and social issues. You need look no further in the historical record to see how this plays out than the tobacco and alcohol industry.
That is not accurate.
If you're really interested in continuing to debate whether your perspective of addiction should be adopted by others feel free to search Google for "addiction" or "is addiction a lifelong problem" or if that's something you don't have time for start with the first Google result I pulled up: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/subabuse99/chap2.htm
There are plenty of other, better, sources that will provide more thorough descriptions of both the physical and psychological characteristics of addition. Practically all of them acknowledge that addiction, once attained, does not grant an individual the luxury of choice as you entertain it. One can certainly choose to seek the tools to control the impulses of addiction through willpower (be it internally or externally inspired), but that will never mean they can choose to make the underlying addiction go away and never bother them again at any point for the rest of their lives.
Have you ever met a "former" addict? Plenty will tell you it's not as simple as that, unless you're using your own novel definition of "choice," "free will," and given studies generally show genetic predisposition is a factor, "born with."
The lines of free will and accountability are blurred by things like mental illness, addictions, childhood naivety, etc.
If you want to make your business about manipulation of the customer, don't pretend to be morally pure. You are scum.
That's not the case. People choose to stop being addicted to things all the time.
I think every time I hear "you should eb ashamed" the free market guy SHOULD stand up and say NO, morality is actually whining that someone should be coerced into doing something they wouldnt want to selfishly do. If there is a market for your thing then caveat emptor.
Screwing your clients? The market will decide whether you can keep operating.
All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.
Whether software contracts include that same kind of verbiage, I don't know.
Both transactions were consentual and noncoercive. There were no threats of violence. An adult business owner signed a contract for services which were provided exactly as specified. The customer didn't have to agree to the first, poorly negotiated contract. And they don't have to pay extra for the extra services later on - it's entirely their choice.
It's no more extortion than if you need a new ink cartridge for your printer and you find they're expensive.
I put it to you that the situation I've outlined is unethical, even though it's consensual and non-coercive.
Another example is the phone scammers offering 'virus fixes'. These are generally in violation of different laws.
A half-way competent attempt to examine this issue would need to dig deeper into the meaning of "consensual", "non-coercive", and the fact that we are engineering these products, knowing that these cognitive biases (defects) exists.
Your dogmatic quote meets none of these criteria, and is frankly a pathetic attempt to address this complex and well-studied problem.
How the hell would this be ethical, no matter how consensual and non-coercive it is?
The money is not a college fund. Your customer's previously-held inaccurate predictions of the future turned out to be false. He changed his mind. Your assertion that it "is intended for paying for college" is false. It is intended for paying for roulette.
It is not your right to choose for others how they spend their money.
Stop trying to control other people because of your certainty in the belief that you know what's best for them.
It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
No, this is false. You're incapable of guessing what other people may or may not regret with enough accuracy to use it as a justification for infringing upon the rights of others.
Furthermore, most are heavily influenced by societal norms and customs, making this even more dangerous a justification when used against the rights of those with eccentricities or nonstandard tastes or lifestyles.
It's never ok to infringe upon someone's rights.
A question: how do people find themselves "in the clutches of an addiction"? How do they escape? Could it possibly be their own free will to decide to smoke the first cigarette, or their individual decision to walk past the bar without going in, on their way home from AA?
Do you agree that it's right to have age restrictions for buying and selling alcohol?
You realise that many alcoholics start drinking when they're children?
People are social creatures. Trying to ignore that and treat everybody as isolated individuals ignores those.
Clearly it would be immoral for you to intentionally provide a source of liquidity for stolen goods. How does that show anything about your gambler?
Often legality and morality do align (but really not as often as you'd think), and this is fortunate, because it allows good people an easy mental short-cut for weighing one's actions based on legality (and punishment), as well as protecting the weaker-willed parts of society that often end up on the wrong end of moral decisions by people like sneak, who'd let people drink themselves to death because if everybody was completely free they'd surely decide out of their own free will to do what's best for them and nobody would ever prey on the weak-willed like that, ever.
Convince my girlfriend of that.
Seriously, though, it doesn't even pass the laugh test. People control their own circumstances. Making those circumstances available to be chosen does not alter the source or responsibility of those decisions.
Smokers choose to smoke. Gamblers choose to gamble.
Proof lies in those who subsequently choose to stop.
You always have free will, even if you aren't using it at the moment.
You are assuming that what one person can do, the rest of the population can do with a similar amount of effort. This should be self-evidently false.
Some people can stop addictive behavior with relatively little effort, other people need external help and tons of effort, and other people will literally prefer to die before stopping.
The only way to say that the latter two groups "don't actually want to quit" is to redefine "wanting to" in terms of "being able to", which makes your argument circular.
Where did you get this view on ethics? It certainly isn't most peoples view, for sure.
Remember that there is a lot of money out there. If you're a millionaire, a billionare has 1000x more money than you. His $30,000 is your $30.
> It would cost us nothing, all virtual bits anyway.
I see a contradiction here.
I don't have any essential ethical problems with the question. I have two concerns.
(1) They're called "games" when they're not really "games."
(2) The socio-economic implications of a system where it's easier and more profitable to sell to 50 people willing to pay $30,000+ than to 1.5 million people willing to pay $2.
What about someone who spends $30k to get their Aston Martin repainted in chrome paint?
People have to be careful here - this is clearly consensual behaviour as long as they know how much they are spending as they purchase. Everyone wants to compare to gambling - I detest gambling and never do it - I would cautiously support moves to rein in an ever-expanding gambling industry - but at the same time if people want to spend money on entertainment, even all of their money, I find it hard to come up with a suitable argument. People can spend all their money on all sorts of weird obsessions, but these shouldn't be reasons for outlawing the behaviour for the majority of people who get along just fine.
Right. Many apps are designed to be effective Skinner boxes bypassing the brains logic to push at the base responses in order to initiate a "player" to want to continue without engaging their executive functions. Games like Candy Crush and Bejeweled play ever trick possible to part users from their cash.
It's more like having a bar and when the mark is drunk you waft a cheeseburger under their nose, flash subliminal messages on the video screens, pay beautiful people to sit eating cheeseburgers, tell them all their friends ordered one and finally selling it for 3 tokens [$1000] because you know they won't then notice the cost. Oh plus wash that burger down with a beer that's suddenly $500 because arbitraryTimeLimit just ran out.
Most obsessions that people spend silly money on aren't carefully designed to be obsessions. Those that are - smoking, gambling, drinking - are often tightly controlled.
Nightclubs, so far as I know, don't have systems of their own currency specially designed to hide the dollar amounts of their drinks, for example. They also, where I am at least, have to post prices and are by law required to stop serving people who're drunk [though I hesitate to guess how often that law is flouted].
Your position on gambling seems contrary to your position on other for money gaming.
This is the strategy of the Ouya - games on the market have to have a free, playable demo of some type in order to be included. I think it's great, and I'd like it even more on a mobile device since my phone isn't brand new and this would let me quickly find out whether the game will even be playable.
One other great example i recently experienced was BADLAND. Its a really cool game in which they give you a level pack called "Day I" for free which has 40 levels. If you want the second set of 40 levels (which are way cooler btw), you have to purchase those. Also, they let you purchase multiplayer levels (6 of those are free btw). So just as you said, they let you demo their game and if you love it, you buy the rest of the game.
But one thing i REALLY loved about the devs was that that they you EARN the extra levels. If you unlock a certain achievement, you get the Day II pack for free! So that's like the devs rewarding their biggest fans. (I unlocked those levels for free btw).
Disclosure: BADLAND is also powered by video ads. You can pay a little to turn them off. There's also the option of a small fee that's not enough to buy the levels, but it lets you turn off the ads.
Some developers do do this, but it's much rarer than P2W.
1) They become hitman, even if its socially unacceptable
2) They become mercenaries even if it is for enemies of USA
3) They commit suicide
So what's the solution? If people is unwilling to let them kill everyone in sight how does a soldier profit from their work?
This is a honest question, I generally hate mass shooting and soldier suicides.
/s
I'm thinking specifically of Hero Academy here. A really neat little turn-based strategy game which cost a few bucks when it came out, and had (I think) 3 teams to choose from the beginning. More teams or different skins for your team cost extra. This was the best use of IAP I've seen, and facilitated the devs getting what was essentially a proof of concept out, then building on it.
For gamers it gave you the freedom to just buy the base game, or only pay for the additional features/teams etc that you felt were interesting. I would never have paid $20 for that game off the bat, but because I had the freedom to choose what I DID buy, I probably ended up spending a lot more, and happily so.
So IAP is not inherently bad, it's just frequently (and intentionally) misused to turn games into cash generating slot machines via intentionally bad game design. It doesn't have to, and isn't, always that way.
I did half to laugh that the reviewer clearly never played games like farmville. That worked out really well with it's timers and everybody checking in a few times a day to manage their items. so he's a little overreacting. That said, this new game looked really nice but I won't be buying...and I was already skeptical because it's EA. EA has plugged $50 games with this kind of stuff. I wasn't really holding my breath here. I don't want to play "dungeon-ville" I want to play an RTS.
The problem is that somebody could probably put this together for say $20 without using servers at all. But the App store buyers are so stingy with expensive games, only really established games like Final Fantasy can get away with more than $10. So they have to have some other way to get the $20 or even $10 or they can't make ANY GAME to sell you because they have bosses.
To limit addiction, I refuse all in-app purchases for games. As such, games suck for me, and I now hate them.
Since in the 1980s in addition to retail and digital sales the business models we've seen have included:
* Pay-to-play arcade games
* Premium hint lines
* Add-on content sales
* In-game sponsorship (Zool, sports games)
* Shareware
* Advertorial games (McDonalds Land)
* Subscription fees
* Peripheral sales
* Real money betting
* UGC Rev shares
* Membership clubs
* Game rental
* In game ads
* IAP
* Virtual items
Minus the rebate thing this is the traditional curve for IP price discrimination: you pay more to get faster access.
Gamers thought both $60 or waiting one day, to say nothing of 6 months, were monstrously unfair, so they pirated the games. So the industry did a rethink, and figured out a way to give them what they want. Enter Free To Play.
You are framing it in a way that makes Free To Play the only valid response to piracy.
In reality, the vast majority of people won't pay unless they absolutely have to, with "absolutely have to" meaning "you'll go to jail on criminal charges if you don't." So assuming you're in a situation where people really must pay, the question becomes "How seamlessly can you integrate payment extraction into your providence of value?" In the case of airline tickets, groceries, and auto repairs, the answer is "Pretty easily, actually". As a result, payment extraction is a solved problem.
With the non-negotiable inevitability of payment accepted, and the means to pay made as frictionless as possible, people don't think twice about handing over their credit cards the moment a demand is made. When people expect to pay, producers can expect to get paid. It's just that simple. Businesses compete for the custom of those who accept the system and it call the cops on the tiny minority who don't.
The problem with IP is that the legal system that protects every other viable business has imploded. And it's not about "just inventing another business model" since the unsolved problem of human nature means having to produce a new law enforcement structure to back that model up. Devolving to private enforcement (e.g. the Mafia) is an obviously unacceptable outcome, so instead of telling IP producers that it's up to them to "just invent new models" it's really time for people to recognize that law and law enforcement are the responsibility of citizens, not corporations.
If you want a smooth and efficient market then come up with the laws and enforcement mechanisms that (a) this kind of market requires and (b) you can live with as a society. In the meantime, expect suboptimal solutions from producers who have been left to squeeze whatever cash they can from the teeming hordes of assholes who think payment is debatable.
Re: "widespread hate for IAP among gamers", that only applies to gamers, who compose a negligible part of the overall population. Any company that's trying to target the wider market ("people" instead of "gamers") is right to ignore what gamers think, because gamers are not the ones playing Candy Crush, Bejeweled, Farmville, etc.
IAP can be done well, IMO, but it requires game designers to accept and embrace the model. If they view their target market as exploitable simpletons, they'll neither make a good game nor make much money, and this happens too often (as I'm sure you're aware). This doesn't need to be the case, though it does require some care to do it well and make sure that the free experience is valuable to players while still providing compelling opportunities for people willing to pay to do so.
Re: updating games in response to telemetry, why is that any worse than when a website A/B tests different calls to action? Or do you think games should not optimize to be the most profitable businesses that they can be?
If it turns out for games (as it did for journalism) that people just aren't willing to pay as much as they used to for good content then we'll see a smaller market. Whatever audience there is of folks that are willing to pay up-front for a good game (sans manipulative bullshit) and the developers able and willing to make those games seem likely to find that crowd-funding is their best option - publishers not required. Game-as-a-service (MMOs) have shown that they work well, and will need publishers if they're to have high budgets and quality that players expect but players demand there to be some amount of service (you can't pull a SimCity without pissing them off). There will always be some amount of this IAP model, but it'll have to become tasteful enough to be sustainable in a world where the available audience of fresh unalienated suckers is exhausted (Valve's use of IAP is a good example of what this is likely to look like). I think (or at least hope) there's not enough gamers willing to be repeatedly abused to sustain a whole market of abusive IAP games forever.
With regards to the sustainability of IAP: As I've told people for a few years now, take a look at China/Korea to see where the American companies will be in ten years. They were doing IAP and free-clients-with-content-controlled-by-server back in the late 90s. They're still doing it.
Anyway, truly, it may seem like the end of the world, but I don't think it will be. It'll just be the new normal, and you'll always have those devs that don't take advantage of pay-to-win, and everyone has fun, and developers make money. Seems like a good trade off to me.
Heck even paid some that THEN required microtransactions, that sucked... in these cases i mailed the authors to tell them to go to hell.
I play a few recent games on pc/consoles, and quite a few old games which seems to still be fun. DungeonKeeper actually is one of those good games ;-)
The last game i enjoyed on mobile was carmageedon, which happens to be the exact same game as on PC (which i also bought a long, long time ago). It was fun and i completed it in a couple of days, having fun. Probably my best mobile game ever, and i fear, the only one too.
The dynamics of App Store discovery exacerbates FTP, but it clearly didn't uniquely create the viability.
Usually, such games are still lower quality than the equivalent game with a shrink-wrap or subscription model, but the IAP infection is more like a festering sore than the terminal cancer described in the OP.
This is a popular shared delusion. It is such a great intuitive and false truth, that when George Akerlof informed us about this about 50 years ago he got an Nobel price for his effort.
"The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" inform us how the bad drives out the good when there is an information asymmetry between the buyer and the seller. It uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty, but software (games) is several order worse in this aspect. Even a game software developer can not assess the value of a product through examination before purchase, so the only hint available to customers are reviews (such as those provided in this HN linked article). Sadly, reviews are not enough to reverse the information asymmetry, as proven by the article point, so the lemon games are driving out the good games from the market.
However, contrary to the article I do think we can escape. Strong reputation systems can combat it if used correctly, but for-profit gatekeepers like Nintendo, Steam, and Apple has shown to be affected by short-term thinking and corruption. Thus, we need better reputation systems that the customer can trust long-term for the lemon market to reverse. That or better customer protection laws to increase the risk of selling a lemon game vs the scam of "free to bleed money to play".
The key part of Akerlof's used-car market is the information asymmetry that exists for every instance of a car. Two caryards may have the exact same year/model/colour of Toyota camry. One has no serious flaws and is priced at $1000. The other is priced at $500 but has lots of hidden problems and is a real lemon. To the consumer they look the same, and the logical choice is the $500 car. The $1000 car never gets sold. This is the lemon market in action.
Software is different because when you sell 100k units of software, its a reasonable assumption to believe that all of these 100k units are the same piece of software[1]. A game being reviewed, or upvoted on reddit, or aggregated on metacritic - this is the same software I will recieve if I choose to purchase it. Thus there is no information asymmetry.
If anything, the market has become better in this regard. It is easier now to choose a high quality game. When I was a kid, and lucky enough to have enough dollars in my hand to purchase a video game - I had to make my decision based on the cover art of the SEGA cartridge. Perhaps if I was lucky I would have some entirely objective (cough) information from the Official SEGA Magazine.
[1] Yes, some people will experience the game differently because of device compatibility issues, but that information is also shared (ie Google Play filters reviews by people with the same device as you).
If the customer collects the critical information about the product from other buyers before purchase, information asymmetry can always (even with used cars) be removed. However, the buyer must also in practice be able to assess the value of a product through examination before purchase. If consumers in the general case do not inform themselves by reviews and shared customer experience, information asymmetry will happen.
So when a game is released with horrible user reviews or below working condition, they still tend to sell perfectly well. Even in cases where the developers themselves has admitted the poor state and given refunds, the games sell perfectly well. In a world with information asymmetry in games, Simcity and Rome 2 can be commercial successes, and even Ride to hell sells copies.
If you believe that there is no information asymmetry in games, how do you explain the discrepancy between reality and theory?
This seems backwards or insufficient to me. It seems to me that what's happened with the wallet-votes is that IAP is a way to maximize exposure among people unwilling to pay and maximize revenue from people willing to pay a lot, while mostly ignoring everyone in the middle who want a quality game at a reasonable price (the traditional core videogame audience).
It's not really price discrimination because PD is usually about getting people to pay more for the same product. In this case, "free-to-play" is not getting the same product as the users spending yachtloads of money.
It's not a lemon market, it's a cleverly-disguised luxury market.
I remember having this discussion on forums like Slashdot a few years ago. I argued that although pirating games was easy in the Internet age, if people kept doing it then the only surviving game developers would be those who adapted to models that prevented it. The usual response was mumbled with the eloquence of a five year old, and said something about copyright infringement not being the same as theft and whatever the developers did someone would just crack it so why should anyone pay for games?
Fast forward a few years, and almost all the AAA games are heavily linked with some on-line element and the most successful games tend to be either multiplayer subscription models or rely heavily on in-app purchases and DLC. If you actually wanted to make a good standalone, single-player, one-time-purchase game today, I wonder how hard it would be to make real money on it. It seems like the only winning options along that path are to make a relatively low-budget game like a puzzler and sell it for an order of magnitude less so it's attractive to a long tail of customers and/or to be hit-it-out-of-the-park successful. Of course, for every Minecraft or Angry Birds there are probably thousands more titles that never quite made it.
I have some hope that crowd-funding models will help to end this kind of stand-off, because they tap into a genuine desire many gamers have for good and original titles to play but they also bridge that reality gap and illustrate in concrete terms why money is needed to make them. I've seen several very promising games get funded far beyond their original goals on Kickstarter, including RPG, RTS and even space combat titles. Whether any of them will actually be able to pull off what they promised with slimmed down teams remains to be seen, as I don't think any of the really big ones have actually launched yet, but this is a field where I'm optimistic about an alternative model to the old copyright vs. piracy conflict.
Who pirates iPad and iPhone games? Approximately nobody. But the problem describe in the article is acute for game publishers regardless of platform.
The public has brought this upon themselves, sure, but more by being cheapskates. And I think Apple has contributed to this as well; their app store design isn't helping.
There is a HUGE amount of people who pirate iOS apps.
The approach you describe requires a jailbroken phone, plus going through a lot of shenanigans. Even most of the nerds I know haven't bothered to jailbreak their iPhones. I'm very skeptical that a significant number of civilians do it. Certainly not a significant number of civilians who would otherwise pay for games.
I've talked a lot with friends who started an iPhone games company two years back. They have mentioned a ton of issues in the marketplace, but worrying about piracy has never come up. Ever.
Lots of people pay some kid to do it and install N amount of apps.
I've seen no data on "lots of people". Even if it happens, I've seen no evidence that it's a significant concern of people writing iPhone games. And if it were a significant concern, I'd still be skeptical that there's a real financial impact, as opposed to the erhmagerd school of "they are stealing my precious things" freak-out. And if there were a measurable financial impact, which I don't think there is, then I'd expect it to be an order of magnitude smaller than the concerns raised in the article.
Just because it doesn't happen here in the US, doesn't mean it's the same everywhere.
The fact that people in Asia (who did not buy games 20 years ago and do not buy games now) pirate them is completely irrelevant for the actions of the US market. Unless the argument is "Americans don't buy games anymore because Asians pirate them".
I know no one with a jailbroken iOS 7 device, and it's enough of a pain in the ass to get Cydia onto iOS 7 that very few people have bothered.
Piracy claims are often inflated through the intended operations of the Android and iOS app stores -- with my single iOS purchase I can have it on my iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. A single Google Play purchase might be on my two Nexus 7s, and then n variants of phone that I've bought over the years. I've heard complainants in such cases compare installs to purchases, using that as the foundation for their piracy claims, when I alone might have installed the app I legitimately purchased 20 times over new and varied devices, and not one of those installs was piracy.
Remember when Dead Trigger did the whole bullshit "piracy is so bad on Android we're going free to play". They then quietly did the same thing on iOS, hilariously justifying their change as some sort of reward for iOS users, instead of the reality that IAP is far more lucrative than upfront purchases.
However supposedly iOS piracy is overwhelming in China.
However, it's still really different from piracy on the PC, because the piracy is still limited. With the exception of per-user costs like above, it doesn't matter how many people pirate your game. What matters is only how many people pirate it instead of buying it, and the high barrier to piracy on iOS means that most of your potential buyers won't pirate.
How many AAA titles with nine-figure budgets and $50-100 up-front price tags are there on the iPad and iPhone? Approximately none. In the world of $1 iFart applications, no-one is even trying to make the kind of large scale, high production value, big budget games we (used to) see on consoles and PC.
Isn't this largely mitigated on iOS with code signing? Unless you jailbreak, which most won't bother with, it doesn't matter if it is cracked, you won't be able to load it.
I'd say the new pricing models are a consequence of digital distribution, no more and no less. In app purchases were simply impossible with physical media games, why would we assume piracy has anything to do with it? (It doesn't)
https://web.archive.org/web/20131211185745/http://penny-arca...
>I’m finding it increasingly difficult to enjoy free-to-play games, even those that are designed well.
>Hitting a difficulty spike can make you unsure of whether the game has simply gotten more difficult and you must try harder to succeed, or if this is where you’re supposed to be putting coins into the slot in order to move forward. It’s hard to focus on the story of the puppet show when you’re straining to see the strings, and that’s how many of us feel when we play these titles.
>Playing free-to-play games is often a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Until it does, it's hard to relax. I don't want to have to figure out where the stress of the purchasing decision will be, and having to be faced with that stress on an ongoing basis is a major turn off.
Thank god for PC gaming. So far it has remained immune from so much of this.
The top 2 selling games on Steam for the last 2 months, even over the Steam Sale, are Rust and DayZ, which couldn't be farther from this model.
The closest you get are F2P games like LoL which are not nearly as bad as this, and Dota 2 a competitor doesn't let you purchase a single thing that has an effect on gameplay.
Just to put this in perspective, LoL has more (by 400,000 users) concurrent players than the entire Steam platform.[1][2] I would also put forth the argument that you do gain an advantage by paying for stuff like new heroes which are almost always OP. I think the only element of PC gaming that is keeping more major studios out of the F2P models are dedicated server and p2p gaming where it doesn't make sense and is probably hard to accomplish in any meaningful way.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Legends (para. 1)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software) (para. 3)
The following quote more or less summarizes the piece:
>[...] “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
There is also an accompanying review of The Sims Social [2].
[1] http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g...
But it's also spot on for this discussion.
(I'm also very happy the domain is no longer on google's shitlist for serving malware. Not long after that article was published, the site startede to trigger a big fat warning if your browser used safesurfing.)
I'm probably just old, I guess.
Most that I've seen seem to require purchases to unbreak the game or make it so that progress isn't artificially restricted by time. I think this effects some people more than others (WoW, farmville, clash of clans players who pour thousands of hours/dollars into the game).
Hold on for a minute. WoW is almost the exact opposite of this model, and for that reason I still respect it as an MMO compared to others I've seen.
In WoW, at least when I played it heavily during the Lich King expansion, you pay for the game and for a monthly subscription fee and that's it -- there was no other use for real money other than maybe buying a faster computer or a vent server, but that's outside of the game environment. Buying gold, while possible, was heavily discouraged and bannable.
This policy made WoW feel very fair to teenage me and I ended up putting a considerable amount of time into the game as a result. I realized that it was plausible for me to be the best simply by putting enough time into it.
Additionally, WoW's social environment is typically what keeps the long-term players going (as opposed to ingame objectives, although objectives are important for keeping players engaged), and that's another story entirely.
I don't personally have an issue with it, but their IAP is encroaching subtly on the gameplay, and it might not stop there.
IAP is open-ended. It targets certain types of personalities. It is exploitative in that you can respond to calls to "help" other players. Addicted "whales" dominate revenue.
I've played demos in the past and sometimes that has led to a purchase of a full game, and sometimes not. A difference/problem with this newer model is that paying could lead me to being asked for more payments: I don't necessarily know.
If the game was advertised at free, but then charged me after a point (i.e. if I didn't know in advance that it was a demo), that would be an immediate deal-breaker.
Unless it was clear exactly what I was paying for, I would be unwilling. Will I have to pay for level 16? If it was possible I would be asked repeatedly for more money later, I would be unwilling.
When you had to physically get your software out there and into people's hands, that was perhaps a good model.
Now, it's more awkward. Asking me for payment for partial content is a dangerous indicator that you might ask me for more, later.
There's also reasonable evidence that demos reduce sales figures (i.e. that demos act as negative indicators):
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/02/11/jesse-schell-releasing...
Up-front, I have no way to know which exploitative model is going to be used. Just seeing IAPs are involved is enough to turn me off. It's not worth the effort to investigate.
If however, they called it the full game, then yes, it is a deal breaker.
There are too many things out there that don't do that to waste time on a computer game that plays mindgames.
EDIT: I should add the caveat that if it's clear about what the IAPs do—i.e. they're clear addons or a shareware model of an otherwise good game, rather than "this game will progress untolerably slowly unless you pay"—I'm not a stickler on principle. Without more information, though, the presence of IAP is a strong negative signal.
There is a big difference between in-app purchases for extra content (paid DLC, basically) and the model that Candy Crush is such a despicable example of, i.e. pay for access.
Although you could even argue that pay for access IAP is no different than the coin-operated arcade games from last century.
If CCS you pay 1 cent per play it is ok. but they should charge it directly and transparently.
Comparing that to IAPs is like justifying a coffee maker that makes me put in $4 for every cup because that's what it costs at Starbucks.
IAP can be "pay for more content", or "pay for useless shit to support the developers" and that's fine. It's not fine when it's "pay to actually play" with the intent that having downloaded the software, having a foot through the door, is sufficient an investment to get people to pay.
For example, the Carcassonne app on iOS is the base game (a board game), but you can buy expansions through IAPs. That mirrors how the physical game is sold (you buy the base game and add expansions as you want).
Expansions are basically new tiles and figures that add new game mechanics.
It’s fair for both buyer (they only buy the expansions they actually want but still don’t have to buy the game multiple times in different permutations) and the developer (they make money for the additional time they put in adding expansions).
Actually, I think IAPs are the only way to correctly solve this problem (short of the ridiculous expectation that developers should not make money from expansions), especially since it’s also possible to combine expansions (something not possible if you were to sell different Carcassonne+River, Carcassonne+Princess, etc., apps).
It’s really a shame that stupid smurfberries are ruining the fun for everyone.
How can you tell whether a game with IAPs has "good" IAPs -- and the critical path of the game remains free -- or "bad" IAPs, paywalls/gating/pay-to-win? Also, how do you decide whether a content gate is a "bad" IAP or a "good" one?
I'm coming at it from a value-for-money angle at the moment, but I've learnt that people's definitions of "value" vary wildly. Some folks are more than happy to boast about completing Candy Crush without giving a cent to the developer.
IAP of extendable resources is a sham.
IAP of shortcuts and powerups is a sham.
IAP of extra game levels, something that extends existing game universe without changing the rules (and that also maps onto a non-trivial work on developer's end) is NOT a sham.
Easy-peasy.
I would add that IAP that are have no effect on gameplay (skins, announcer packs, etc) are not a sham.
I've never actually played the game, so I don't know how well it works for them, but it's always seemed like an interesting idea to me, and EVE has a lot of hardcore fans that don't seem bothered by it.
What about currencies/powerups that I can either get via IAP vs social obligation? I'd rather pay than bug my friends.
(Of course, one argument is that none of these mechanics should exist in the first place. But they do.)
They are to us, but the average movie goer would need restraints to sit and watch them.
With the BS emphasis we had for over 2 decades on special effects, fast editing, CGI, and teenage-fantasy kind of material, the adult oriented movies of yesteryear are only left for cinephilles.
For the average 15-25 year old today, they'd be unbearable to watch, whereas back in the day they watched them just fine.
Well, since we were talking about old movies, people who value them, and who would have liked to see them being watched by newer generations and surviving into the future, do.
>The average 15-25 y/o may not visit a museum, attend an orchestra, or have a tenured professorship, but all those things still exist.
Just barely.
For example, I've grown to really enjoy old classic radio shows, decades after they've stopped being commonplace.
Sure, a bunch of the games produced today are semi-glorified slot machines, but most movies of 60 years ago were crap. Most Baroque music was crap. Most Elizabethan drama was crap. Most Renaissance Art was crap.
Quality lasts, and if quality managed to survive a time when conveying information across the world took decades and when literacy rates were basically nil, then given modern literacy, and storage and communication technology, it's crazy to say the quality media of the present day isn't going to last.
It's going to require some work, but if the media matters to people, people will do what it takes to make it last.
Same for games, in that 10% we get everything from Super Mario World to Skyrim.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just thinking that it'd be better to keep everything and let the future decide.
Most of these mobile games are continuously upgraded, and more importantly, reliant on an external service to implement purchases and access restrictions and such. You cannot just load such a game up in an emulator if the server containing half the code (yes that's hyperbole, it's a smaller but no less important amount) no longer exists.
People have reimplemented the servers for very important online games in the past. Off the top of my head, Phantasy Star Online (one of the first MMOs) and Vanilla World of Warcraft both have fanmade reverse-engineered recreations of their server software that allow people to play the original game as it was when they were released, even though Sega and Blizzard respectively have long since shut down their official servers. To reiterate, they did this with only information from the game client, neither the source nor binaries of these games' server software were ever made available. I can only imagine how tremendous of an effort this must have been for the fans, but they did it out of love for these games and the time they spent playing them.
Now imagine that one of the various free to play IAP games gets shut down tomorrow. Game binaries that worked fine yesterday are now useless. Chances are, no one cares nearly as much as the aforementioned MMO fans (it's a hell of a lot of work, and I'm going out on a limb and saying that skilled reverse engineers are more likely to be interested in MMOs than cow clickers), and the reverse engineered replacement never gets started. The game disappears from history, except as a Youtube video and a memory.
I've had some friends complain that he takes too long to get to the point, but I would argue the comparison to TV is pretty important. I wouldn't skip it.
His comments on game industry, I find, are usually very on point. One of his last ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803844
So there's in app purchase, okay. That's another way some games are going, but it's not the only way and it probably won't be. You can't make a AAA title like Halo or Call of Duty as a F2P with IAP. that's not going to happen anytime soon. However, some devs might try and nickel and dime players more because they can, but maybe just maybe this means that game developers will have a more sustainable business and won't be going bankrupt every few years as many seem to.
As for AAA with IAP, look at Planetside 2. Free to play, IAP, AAA by any measure.
In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs:
- Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. - Anything difficult can be "spent" out of.
While both are working theses, I feel that there are far too many games that will fall away if this becomes permanent.
EDIT: as pointed out below, Dark Souls is a JRPG.
http://playism-games.com/games/onewayheroics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty http://stoicstudio.com/game-overview/ http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/21 http://roguelegacy.com/ http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/avadon2/ http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/soul-sacrifi... http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/toukiden-the...
While the mobile market is flooded with manipulative crap, both the PC and console markets have plenty of good RPGs available, even and especially when you look outside of big studio stuff like Mass Effect.
(I don't mean that as an invective against fun, I just mean that the rewards from fun are mostly fleeting)
Working in f2p games, I've thought about this quite a bit. From my observation, you have causality reversed. There's a new audience that is demanding progress-based games and that new market is pushing a lot of game designs away from skill-based challenges.
Going back to the pac-man era, games had to be extremely challenging because they couldn't have enough content to stay interesting otherwise. That selected for gamers who enjoyed overcoming great challenges and pretty much defined "what games are" for 30+ years. Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery.
That huge, newly discovered audience pushes back /hard/ when the games they play swing towards rewarding mastery. They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. For them, it's not about winning the gold at the Olympics. It's about tending a garden/getting fit/going on a hike. Imagine going on a hike and some weird old man stops you to say "No. That guy hiked better than you. You must go back down the mountain and start over from the beginning until you hike better than someone else." You'd never come back.
Meanwhile, the classic, challenge-oriented audience is still there and games are still being made for them. But, a lot of them are discovering that sometimes they just want a nice hike as well. Thus more and more products are responding to that new demand.
Gaming is a bigger world now. After 30+ years, the focus has shifted from being laser-locked on catering to hardcore gamers like you and me. Now there are not just different genres of fun challenges, there are different genres of fun.
> They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress.
That rather handily explains degree inflation, too.
That seems to short circuit the reward for playing.
Example: Angry Birds is has their Eagle that beats a map for you. Beating a map unlocks another map. Assuming a steady progression, being able to buy your way past a map removes any requirement that the game designer creates a steadily ramping progression, and instead encourages them to put up as many "little roadblocks" as possible.
Why do companies chase this market? They're very fickle, and rarely appreciate any sort of gameplay mechanics. These sorts of games devalue the medium to themed Skinner boxes, essentially. I play games to be competitive, and employ creative problem-solving strategies. Meanwhile, loads of companies seem hellbent on removing all nuances from their games to pursue ever-more-mainstream sensibilities.
It's disgusting and patronizing.
Because they spend money.
It might sound a bit dull when I put it that way, but the series is enormously popular in Japan amongst all kinds of people that you wouldn't ever consider to be interested in video games. Each game is far lengthier an experience than you would expect out of a "casual" game, but the fact that you can make a little progress every time you play, no matter how frequently you do so or how bad you are at video games, really appeals to people.
I obviously see the difference between that style of play, and paying for progress, but I just wanted to throw out there that games that are more about progress than skill or strategy have existed almost since the beginning, and they're not necessarily a bad idea.
That's because Blizzard is a very slow developer, which is not unheard in the industry. People were(are) also waiting for HL3, Prey 1 and 2 or Duke Nukem: Forever.
> How about a new Elder Scrolls game?
Skyrim came out in 2011, it's unlikely there'll be another one before 2015-2016, Morrowind came out in 2002 and Oblivion in 2006.
Though I'm fairly confident with my prediction about Warcraft 4. There are probably a lot of people at Blizzard, right now, thinking about how to make "the next WOW" work. A Warcraft strategy title just feels like small fry compared to that.
Also, there might actually be brand dilution, since it is quite likely that many WOW players don't know about the old RTS games.
I was rummaging around looking for a modern (post 2010? 2012?) AAA MMO the other night and couldn't find it.
Guild Wars 2 has an initial purchase fee (usually on sale for $30), but no monthly fee. New content is subsidized through both functional and cosmetic IAP, although neither is game-breaking.
Elder Scrolls Online, however, is $60 + $15/mo, with no IAP. Everyone is expecting it to die a horrible death.
Because it's $15/mo with no IAP...?
A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this as the best sample she could possibly find as a way to try to change my mind about them. It was a major boss battle, something that should've been the highlight of what the game had to offer.
There was no gameplay. The boss monster was rendered as a hundred foot tall demon, but it didn't fight in any meaningful sense of the word. It stepped back and forth over and over again, executing some canned move the same way every time. The two dozen players did the same thing, wasting half an hour of their lives mindlessly pressing the same buttons over and over again until the boss monster 'died' (scare quotes because obviously it popped up again later for the next batch of victims).
MMORPGs aren't games. They're Skinner boxes, exploits for security flaws in the human motivation system. The real challenge is at the meta-game level: the developers win if they successfully exploit you, and you win if you successfully prevent yourself being exploited. And the way to achieve the latter is to stop playing.
With mmorpgs they have to have these time sinks simply to have content for the hours people actually want to put in.
Then I saw their IAP strategy and dropped the game.
I would happily have payed $19.99 (the price of XCOM for iOS) for a decent DK on my iPhone.
On the other hand I see myself paying for cosmetic items in DotA 2. They don't change gameplay, but my characters look cool. It sounds stupid, and it probably is, but Valve have really designed it well.
Instead, they use IAP. Some users buy nothing, some buy the $69.99 game, and on average everyone pays $20.
1: http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g...
Then I played through the tutorial, and saw it would take four hours to dig through a single block of dirt. I went to the store screen and would happily have paid $20 for a full unlock.
Instead I was faced with multiple gem purchase options, including a "BEST VALUE - $100!".
You have got to be kidding. And while I could make smaller purchases, I have no way of knowing how fast they would be depleted. As the article notes, the game is clearly focused on scamming the money out of you as fast as possible.
So I've uninstalled it without spending anything and am left with further disgust for EA. There's got to be a happier medium ($10 game with cosmetic unlocks?) than this pay-for-every-move methodology. Valve certainly seems to be making it work.
But with the in-app gems, I can play at a slower pace for free. If I wanted to play faster, I could spend $5 on gems and do pretty good for about a month. So in some ways it's a pay-per-usage system.
The problem is that it can be easily abused and the dungeon game he describes sounds much more socially engineered. The handicap applied in the dungeon game sounds a lot worse than it is in Clash of Clans.
This could also all be a result of the downfall of LAN-centered games. Clash of Clans could have taken the decentralized host-your-own-server route and it would still be just as good, if not more interesting. That actually would be ideal setup because I do find myself wishing I could just play the game underneath the gem-fishing strategy.
I think Minecraft should remind us that it's the host-your-own-server strategy is a really good one, and I hope that doesn't die. It probably doesn't make as much money, so we need to figure out a way to balance the economic force which will eventually extinguish it.
Honestly, I don't know why they haven't, because this is one of the biggest dark user patterns that exist outside of outright illegalities.
We - and I - are used to giving companies like Facebook and LinkedIn shit for similar things, so why are Apple tacitly supporting this abomination. They don't even make that much from games anyway.
What would the coverage be like, if the FCC fined either of those two $35.5M, as they recently did Apple[1][2]?
If we believe that the App Store is a Big Deal, we should care that this is the new normal in handheld videogames.
[1]: http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/01/apple-...
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/technology/government-and-...
I think the reason for this push of freemium games (in particular mobile games) is that people (who aren't usually gamers) tend to play them for very short periods as a way of passing the time. (while waiting, or while they are sitting on the toilet)
And since most game companies were unable to sell full priced games to this demographic they adopted this business model to make money.
Would you pay $30 for a game on a mobile phone with all its limitations? (touchscreen controls, small screen, crappy audio, battery drain)
If I'm paying that kind of money (or more) for a game I expect at least solid 15 hours of immersive gameplay. (which is impossible for me on a phone - I have my consoles&PC for that)
This is why I think it's silly to compare older games to mobile games. With the mobile market, you can do all sorts of disgusting slimy things and the consumer won't give a damn because they spend at max - 20 minutes on your game at a time. As long as people view mobile games as a way to blow some time rather than an interactive experience, I doubt nearly enough people will become involved with them enough to even care about in-app purchases.
It does not amaze me that this level of depravity was tried; I always considered it a forgone conclusion that the companies would do anything that worked. It does sort of amaze me that this is working. Though I suspect rather than being the long-term future of gaming that this is the equivalent of slash&burn development. Yes, there's a huge bunch of people right now who haven't quite cottened to how nasty this can be, but they're learning fast, and while another one is born every minute, it's never quite the same as the first time the new scam goes raging through an unprepared population.
I did hear a game developer mention that IAP is really a form of copy protection, in the sense that if you made a copy of a game that can only effectively be played by buying additional tokens, then it is more difficult to pirate.
I agree with the author that it has made for a very different sort of industry. But given the income these companies are making I don't think the industry is being "destroyed" any more than the extortionate seat prices the NFL charges to see a game in person are "destroying" football.
Needling the shit out of your customers like Dungeon Keeper is doing is killing the system. Unless a game ends up on the Humble Bundle, I almost refuse to get it because I'm worried about IAPs.
"So this is the old days: Full game price + expansion packs included: $5.99 [...] Just remember that."
That's a complete and utter lie.
I also don't understand the sense of in-app purchases in some games. For instance, in Candy Crush I believe you can make in-app purchases to skip ahead, not have to play quests to clear levels etc. Reason I don't get it is because the whole point of playing the game is surely to play the levels and not skip them!
It leads me to believe that the only reason in-app purchases happen is because they pray on the weak: people who genuinely get addicted. I may be wrong about it since I don't have data to back up my claims, but I'm assuming that instead of a lot of people making up the industry, that the whole concept is powered by a few people making massive payments in the form of tonnes of purchases; people who I can only imagine get addicted in the sense that anyone can get addicted to drinking, smoking, gambling etc.
Perhaps someone can shed light on the nature of the in-app payment industry for gaming and perhaps explain to me what I'm missing.
Disclaimer: I'm not a big gamer, so that might explain all of the above.
PS: I find it somewhat amusing that the author's blog site offers a premium content purchase link: in-blog purchase?
The old model (for devs who don't like ads) normally went like this:
* Free Version: Limited Feature Set
* Paid Version: $0.99 or $1.99, full features
There were a lot of problems with this model, such as:
1) People didn't know the paid version exist, leave bad ratings on the free version for lack of features.
2) It was hard to gain traction since your downloads were split over multiple apps, meaning each would rank lower individually.
3) When people made the free-to-paid conversion, you had to worry about data migration including all preferences, etc.
4) Some apps just don't have a meaningful feature set for a free version.
5) Maintaining separate code.
IAP fixes this and allows be to be a more "lean" operation. Now I publish a free app with a minimum viable feature set. I watch what features people ask for in reviews, and if one seems like a non-bug feature that people really want I'll introduce it as a $0.99 IAP. In the meantime, my free app can keep gaining users which means putting the opportunity to buy my product in front of more people and not splitting my popularity across two app store listings. I also make sure to add features for free to keep moving up the charts and make most users happy. Also, people are much more likely to want to pay for a feature after they've used the rest of the app than pay up front.
1. Game developers aren't shooting themselves in the foot. They're catering to customers. IAP works because customers want to get a game for free, and the people who really love a game are willing to spend thousands (sometimes even tens or hundreds thereof) on it.
2. The old-school game model was struggling anyway. Console game sales haven't been doing well for a long time.
3. You can't rent an app, and you mostly don't play it on someone else's device. Both of these were ways of testing out a new franchise on consoles that no longer exist. It makes sense that something filled the void.
4. The platforms now (mobile devices) have a vested interest in you playing as many games as possible, moreso than you paying for them. Apple/Samsung etc. make their money by your buying a new $650+ phone every two years, and if you get a bunch of apps you love on one, you're more likely to get another from the same OEM later. Why try to sell you a few $10 games off of which they make $3 (minus carrier fees) when they can give you a ton of free games and hope you love a few enough of them to plunk down another $650 a year from now? Until content is no longer gated by app stores that have incentives very different from those of game devs, this business model is a natural fit.
Don't get me wrong, I don't love it either, and I make the damn things for a living. I don't think all IAP-monetized games suck. But I do think that plenty of them do, and the misaligned incentives make it hard to make a game that is both profitable and genuinely fun that way.
I just don't think the fault lies with game developers.
There you were circa 2009, a mobile game player, presented with games you need to pay for, upfront, with no demo or trial, needing a credit card. You don't like what you bought? That's a shame.
On the other hand, there was Free category, install it, play it, see few ads, or options for in-app purchases, and for the the most part, it matched the quality of premium up-front-charged games. But even if it didn't, who cares. It's free.
My point here is that in-apps were reasonable evolution of money-hungry marketplaces, not developers. Developers just sort of got shoved on that path.
Your point of argument might be - "Well, aren't developers money-hungry too?" Let me explain to you why game developers are paid way below the average compared to their IT fellows in spite of doing arguably much more complex work (you say web site - i say 3d world, you say RoR backend - i say real-time MMO-powering beast, you say web design - i say asset-friggin'-pipeline) and why game market is so cutthroat...
It's because we love what we do and will take shit in order to do it. We're very oppinionated about it, and for the most of us, it's not a job - it's life, a quest, a mission.
And even if this doesn't resonate with you, how about - there's nothing wrong with in-apps? Go to any international/interstate retailer. Check the shelving, check the products, the design, the smell. The sheer amount of science to get you to purchase that particular box of razor blades, removing any rationality you might have for your purchase, is towering over anything you might encounter in mobile game in-apps infrastructure.
What we ARE decrying is the negative affect on the GAME itself for this monetization. The gameplay element should remain unaffected from this. So IAP that gives you extra levels, extra maps, extra skins, are the perfect way to monetize on it. In contrast charging per turn (or for speeding up turns), or for lives, or even things that make your game "pay-to-win" are not only unethical but ruin the GAME. SO doesn't that ruin your " it's life, a quest, a mission" philosophy.
PS: My most hated line on play store or appstore is "greedy devs charging me money for content"
If you at the current crop of Steam games or console games there are a ton of popular games that have no IAP or IAP which are for only for cosmetic items or expanding game content.
http://youtu.be/GpdoBwezFVA?t=5m6s
1. Few things in life are more enjoyable than an angry British guy having a good rant.
2. Coincidentally I just yesterday (re)read the part of Hackers talking about the founding of EA. Times have changed.
The in-app purchase got to this way because of gamer purchase behaviors. If the majority of the gamers are willing to pay upfront, you won't see in-app purchase. This is just like most people (at least in US) unwilling to pay the full price to buy the phone upfront but rather to pay for it with smaller monthly charges via the long term contract.
Gamers change their purchase behaviors and in-app purchases will go away.
In this case, I think it's notable that the mobile Dungeon Keeper is both less playable and more expensive than its predecessor.
Subscribe for $9/month Baekdal PLUS: Premium content that helps you make the right decisions, take the right actions, and focus on what really matters.
Really?
Having said that, I do think this concept ruins games. Personally I never play 'free to play'. I prefer ad supported ones, where if you like the game you can then pay a one off price to get rid of the adverts, or ones where you can pay to get more levels (and remove adverts).
Their "pay to try again" model created the perverse incentive to kill the player off quickly in unpredictable ways to give the impression that it wasn't really their fault. Coin eating machines.
They're great examples of how business models color the nature of a game deeply.
What's really funny is that the author's blog itself follows the same freemium model as the games he's decrying. Free to read, but $9/month to subscribe per the end of the article:
"Baekdal PLUS: Premium content that helps you make the right decisions, take the right actions, and focus on what really matters."
How is it possible that he's overlooking this irony?
It's the culture.
First off, I hate, hate, the practice of slowing down the game or crippling it, and then allowing the user to use an IAP to get the game back to a normal pace.
I vow never to do that.
However, a some users (and anecdotally, quite a few of my friends) won't download my app if it costs $1. The barrier to entry is too high, and they don't know if they are going to get a good experience. They can't pick up my app and hold it, feel it, rub their hands over it's quality. They have 5 screenshots (and any reviews online) to go by. Okay, so I'll make it free to lower that barrier.
But now how do I make money? I think the best thing to do is to simply have users pay for content that they have already proved they love. Let them play through 50 levels, or the first "area" of the game. Let them buy more levels or unlock more content. This way they can play the game and decide if they like it, and if so, buy more.
I think the two rules of thumb about this sort of IAP is: 1: Don't be a asshole. Give the user a lot of completely unaltered content up front, and really let them dive into the game. Ensure they know that buying the rest of the game later will cost some money, but don't take away features because they haven't bought the game yet. Let them fall in love with it. 2: Price it fairly. Let users buy "All Levels Forever" for $5, or each level pack for $2. Allow them to unlock all the content at once. If they bought 2 levels packs, and want to buy all the rest later, give them a discount.
Make a game you'd want to play.
Before moving to gaming, I worked at Skype. No one ever accused Skype of exploiting people, or of facilitating addiction, or of polluting the purity of telephony. Skype made money by, essentially, up-selling people to paid phone calls. Those phone calls might have been to people's sick parents in foreign countries, or their kids. Imagine that! By charging for phone calls, Skype might have been prevented someone from speaking to their sick mother!
Freemium is a business model; it's not a moral framework or an ethos. Some people make terrible games with the freemium model; they likely would have made terrible games had they gone with an upfront payment model. The difference between the terrible freemium game and the terrible paid game is that people got to choose whether or not they contributed money to the terrible freemium version after playing it. They got more information before making a purchase, kind of like a test drive. Isn't that a good thing -- more information?
If freemium were generally just a demo for a better game, you would be right that there's nothing wrong with it, but optimizing a game for freemium means a worse game. Watch the second video in the article; the "best value" gem cart is in the ballpark of just straight up buying a game. Except you don't get the entire game.
It's not, and no one ever said it was. The demo analogy isn't valid; a free-to-play game is a fully functional game. IAPs may unlock additional functionality, or help bypass time gates, or whatever, but the "core loop" of a game shouldn't (under the guise of freemium, anyway) be restricted by payments.
This isn't to say that it doesn't happen -- not every developer really understands freemium, and some bastardize it. But can you really argue with consumer preference for freemium? If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.
I suspect my definition for "fully functional" is different from yours, but I have high standards.
> If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.
Actually it's entirely possible for something hated to also be the most profitable course of action given things like information asymmetry. For instance, if people would be happier with good $20 apps, but it's so hard to tell which $20 apps are good that no one is willing to risk buying them, then you end up with the current situation.
I'm not necessarily saying that this is the case (much as I hope it is), but I would love nothing more than for reviews like this to bring people around to how exploitative this model is, and how much it encourages bad game design.
Also, isn't your argument re: information asymmetry an argument in favor of F2P? In the case where a developer has made a great game, it behooves them to release it for free, not only because that's obviously what consumers prefer (see the App Store), but because it allows the app to be more widely distributed and critiqued (and thus the worst apps would be quickly identified as bad and not downloaded -- perfect information).
It's an argument that developers and consumers can both be correct to gravitate toward F2P. It's not an argument that this is the happiest equilibrium for either. It's the same rationale behind lemon laws; the absence of such laws pushes the market toward a position where buyers have to assume all cars are secretly busted, sellers have to price their cars accordingly, and the market ultimately gravitates toward people selling busted cars because nothing else is profitable.
Investors have selected what they believe to be the optimal strategy for looting the games market. Time will tell whether the approach remains profitable or whether they're going to run their companies into the ground in the long term.
DK is clearly a Clash of Clans clone. Apart from being a clone, this means that it's supposed to be primarily multiplayer. Persistent-state, massive multiplayer. And a day of real time in this games IS NOT a lot of time. Similarly to Eve Online (which I draw as an example as the "nerdiest" game to have this kind of mechanics), this kind of games have a LOT of stuff that take hours, days and sometime even months of real time to unlock or produce. This mechanics first started as a variation from traditional PBEM on BBSes; their primary purpose was not to draw money from players, but so that regular playing would yearn a greater, or at least similar reward, to hours of grinding, that only a tiny fraction of players can afford.
There are a lot of horrible games that are basically pay to play at any fun pace. They have one of two or three very stupid mechanics that proved to be most efficient extortion schemes dressed in some graphics and story.
Good thing is you can just install them, play ten minutes, recognize what kind of beast you are dealing with, uninstall and forget.
Bad thing is, thers no one place where you can go to check if the game is pay or wait scheme. Gamers basically get nohelp from noone when they try to decide what to play next.
Good freemium is when you pay for game to be easier. Pay or wait is insane but pay or play some more on the current level before advancing is reasonable enough if it's balanced so that you can advance faster if you are more skilled.
IAP hurt game design and result is less-fun games. The only use I can swallow is in cosmetic-only IAP, and even then I'm iffy.
I don't even mind that such games exist. But I do mind that I can't know if a game is like that before I try it out myself.
When I play a traditional "pay" game, I trust that the developer want me to finish the entire game. After all, the team slaved away creating all that content and the player should damn well appreciate their effort.
As a result, when I get stuck at some point in a game (Dead Space 2 being a recent example), I trust that there's a way forward and with a little more effort or practice, or perhaps if I retrace my steps, I'll become unstuck and move along the path toward completion.
Because the developer and I are working with a common goal in mind -- get Eric to the end of the game -- I am confident that at any point in the game I will be capable of completing the challenges set forth (no matter how stingy the Dead Space guys are with ammo).
With freemium games, that trust is obliterated. When I can't progress, I am forced to ask a fun-sucking question -- is the developer trying to extort money from me in order to continue? Am I unable to continue because I just haven't mastered some in-game skill or is this simply the point at which I'm supposed to hand over my tithe?
Candy Crush is an obvious (if extreme) example. When you can't complete a level after the 20th try, the player begins to feel that the developer is expressly barring their passage. And at that point, the game ceases to be fun, at least for the generations of gamers who saved the princess.
Then again, my kids (eight and six) just assume that buying gems is how one progresses in a game. It's not unlike when I was eight and pumping quarters into Gauntlet in order to reach the next level -- Blue Warrior's health dropped whether or not you were taking damage.
Everything old is new again.
> With freemium games, that trust is obliterated. When I can't progress, I am forced to ask a fun-sucking question -- is the developer trying to extort money from me in order to continue? Am I unable to continue because I just haven't mastered some in-game skill or is this simply the point at which I'm supposed to hand over my tithe?
I'd much rather have the paywall be honest like buying levels like the oldschool shareware method or subscriptions like mmorpgs.
I'm actually surprised there are so few subscription based games, this should be ideal for both parties. The user don't have to pay the up front $60 for an unknown game and the vendor gets a constant revenue stream.
You certainly could play arcade games that way, but the good ones could generally be beaten on one credit if you were skilled enough at the game. Plenty of modern enthusiasts still consider this the only "legitimate" way to play such games.
The difference between this and most freemium games is that it's your skill being tested and not your tolerance for pain, and many of us find the former a far more palatable thing to test.
I think that people who pay for these guys are miserable. It's up to them to choose what's "fun" for them. If playing this kind of game is "fun" for them, then it's fine for me. I'll play a different game. As long as there will be people like me, there will be indie games and a lot of fun for us.
I can only go by personal experience as I cannot find any consumer surveys, but I've spent about a grand total of 5 dollars on mobile games, all for expanded content, not consumables, but I've spent hundreds on my 3DS alone. I strongly suspect the audiences for in game purchases and the audience for deeper games hardly overlap at all.
Are kids just not going to know that real gaming exists? I'm simply not convinced that the existence of mobile non-games means that the discoverability of real games is hampered. Console gaming isn't exactly a niche market that few people know exists and never end up experiencing.
You play it. You want to go on to level 2? Pay. Level 3? Pay. Not have to wait 20 minutes to start a new game? Pay. No ads? Pay. Start from level 2 or 3 with accomplishments you achieved? Well, it claimed to be free, but restore-from-save doesn't work, so you pay. Play it on your iPhone, Kindle, Android, and Chrome? Pay four times.
It was a great game, and I would have gladly bought the rest of the games, but it's both not fun to know I can either waste hours or get blackmailed into paying, and terrifying to see where they'll try to skin me next time...
I moved on, but I haven't found any really good games that don't do this.
* The game isn't actually reviewed. Maybe you can play the game perfectly well without paying for gems. Maybe the game is actually more interesting to play for the fact that you have to manage your resources according to the time cost/gem count. Maybe there's a genuine reason why thousands of people have given five stars.
* There's no reason to believe that we are supposed to pay for the £70 bundle. Maybe the £70 bundle is just for the IAP 'whales' who are paying for everyone else to play. When I go to a coffee shop, I don't have to buy a triple-cream, triple-chocolate mocha latte for £8, but I also don't need to get annoyed that this is on the menu.
It is a model pioneered by the MMO industry, but taken to an even greater extreme, where some of the worst psychological traps that people get stuck in are used against their customers to extend their profits.
That said, from what he did review, it seems pretty clear that this new game is up there with the worst of the freemium/IAP model. I think your advocacy veers a little towards being willfully obtuse. I would say there has never been a single game that has been made more fun or interesting by the "wait a few hours or pay money to continue" mechanic. Resource and time management is certainly a valid mechanic but that assumes that the player can continue doing other things (as in actual "gameplay") while the time-intensive operation is happening. Even failing that, if we assume there is some game that is fun to not-play while you sit there waiting, the fact that you can pay money to advance invalidates it as a gameplay mechanic. At that point it can be nothing but a business decision.
On the coffee shop example, you are paying for the intrinsic value of the coffee, so no, other offerings should not affect you. But with the "bag-o-coins" type of IAP, you are not paying for the image of your character holding the coins (i.e. a cosmetic item, which is considered somewhat less evil), you are paying for a means to an end, to continue playing the game.
It would be more like this: the coffee shop advertises free wi-fi, which is one of the main reasons you went there. But by default your bandwidth is crippled to the point of near uselessness, and you have to buy the ridiculous mocha to unlock a decent speed. Now are you annoyed about it?
I don't see how bad games full of microtransactions and fake reviews would be able to destroy the industry. They will not prevent the next Minecraft.
Shocked to discover I still had to buy bats if I wanted to advance in the game, the bats for sale offered more spin to compete in harder levels. I'm not even sure what my $1.99 bought me.
If I spend money on a game, I don't want to find things "locked" such as table tennis bats in a bloody table tennis game. I left a 1 star review for that. Will avoid SenseDevil Games in future.
All their "buy coins" crap "visit the store" crap in the game. Who do they think they are? A bloody table tennis virtual economy? Obnoxious game developers, that's what it is.
You know all those old games that are so great that you wish they'd make now? They're still there! You can still play them! Go grab Dungeon Keeper and relive those days. So many amazing games to play, so many new technologies to make new ones with. Quit complaining and be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.
I would gladly spend $5.00 on a mobile game if I really like it.
But, too many times I have spent money on a game and then not really liked it.
The reason in-app or in-game purchases work is because you don't mind spending money on something you really like.
If Apple or Google Play allowed for a testing period of a few hours, then this might solve the problem.
If I have a money back time limit of say 2 hours, then I can get my money back anytime before I spend a total of 2 hours playing the game.
This would allow me to only spend money on games I really like without the fear of spending money on games I don't like.
I've been playing Scurvy Scallywags recently. I really like it. They deserve more money than the small amount I paid for the game. There is a tiny IAP, which I've bought, but I wish there was a way to give them more money.
It doesn't have to give me any advantage in the game either.
That usually irks me. The free bundle should have enough to get me hooked. Few (possibly) really good games only gave me the most basic of levels for free without any of the complexity the rest of the game had. So obviously, it wasn't enough to get me to buy the rest.
Dont get me wrong, i LOVE this model. Give me free levels, make me love it. Promise me far cooler stuff awaits me beyond the pay wall (offer a video trailer) and i'd love to pay for the rest.
One great example i ran into (and yes i am probably mentioning this like the third time here) is BADLAND. I am honestly not a dev of it :P but am in love with their model!
I don't even mind their existing so much if they are a simple 'cheat' (and the game isn't impossibly slow to progress without them), but what bothers me is when they are the only way to get or do something (especially if the 'thing' is to progress any further in the game). I have quit games at this point when they no longer became fun for me, and I don't just mean fb/mobile games, but even proper (read: PC) games that used to be fun before that element came into them (e.g. Star Trek Online).
Seems that people love these games. I don't know why either but I still burn through quarters playing Area 51 whenever I find it.
Go figure.
It was surrreal. For one, a lot of the drama and challenged vanished. For two, it made me wonder how I sent god knows how many quarters as a kid.
Now I am playing Crystal Castles, where falling causes a partial start over (there are some warp/checkpoints later) and it is addicting me again, still fun.
Also, we rented the full game for a weekend from Blockbuster before buying.
I think another problem is scarcity - there isn't any anymore, making it hard for me as a customer to focus on a few higher quality products. Now there are just too many apps.
The price they should have quoted for the original Dungeon Keeper game is $49.99.
Yes, free to play games with in app purchases dominate the mobile market. For now. The mobile gaming is just 6 years old. We're in the 'Space Invaders' era. The quality of the top-grossing games is, how I shall put it, not great.
I think eventually the quality will grow to a level where paying up front for a mobile game will not be the stupidest thing on the face of the Earth.
Game developers have access to over thirty years of video gaming knowledge when designing a game. People have access to multi-platform SDKs, etc. Today, anyone with a computer can produce and publish a game.
When Space Invaders was around, this was not even remotely the case.
The expectations for quality on a 6 year old platform today should be much higher than it was in the 80s.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949...
Wow. I absolutely detest the kind of games talked about in this article but I believe more great games are being made now than anytime in history. The whole gaming space has grown so much that every single niche is better served now. Not in the AAA space but indy game quality is so high now, they can easily best games from 15 year ago.
Look at the Steam top 10, it's not bad at all. DayZ and Rust are both extremely interesting game designs that like of which had only been seen in MUDs before.
If morality is valued higher than profitability, game studios wouldn't enter into the market. That's the choice they have.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/1vu3gy/sick_o...
This is not sustainable as an industry practice. People will eventually get wise.
Too many cheaters destroys a market. Too many thiefs destroys a country.
Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs probably also seemed like the optimal strategy at the time, too.
As much as I also dislike how some IAP game developers base all their gameplay mechanisms purely on maximizing the user likeliness to keep spending without even noticing, I recognize that they get the very basics of video game design very right.
Because they have to.
The goal for any game developer who treats its creation not only as an artistic piece but also has a product, is to design software that offers a positive feedback loop to the user in order to keep her engaged.
Consider how Nintendo, for instance, considers the Mario platformer franchise as an instrument (see Ask Iwata interviews). During development, designers are focused on getting the timing (rhythm) right between challenge (say ennemies or holes) and corresponding rewards (powerups or secret exits). This ultimately plays/tricks how our brains are wired (effort needs reward) in order to engage users and ultimately enjoy the game... and pay again (and again) for the sequels/updates when they need their fix.
Imho IAP is an interesting return to the origins of video gaming (and coin-based arcades) and refocuses the industry on getting the core ingredient right, the feedback loop, rather than betting it all on graphics, story, feature-creep... and marketing.
Marketing is disproportionally important when you need to convince your game is worth paying upfront, even in a seemingly minimal amount, as mobile gaming is a very "dispensable" expense in the general public.
There is no ROI in marketing an IAP game that does not engage enough of its users (enough). On the other hand, marketing heavily an upfront-cost game can draw sales, sometimes thanks to the franchise name as well, despite providing no to little entertainent to most of its users as the feedback loop is just not good enough to engage them.
For good or bad, I think IAP is accelerating adoption of data-driven practices for video game design. As an engineer/scientist, this is very interesting.
Last but not least, IAP probably helps expand the (mobile) gaming audience to people who would have otherwise either not played game(s) at all or would have downloaded illegally.
In the long term, I believe this can only be good for the industry. The bad apples of IAP will be regulated by better consumer protections for the worst "abuses" and more naturally over time by the users themselves as they get more familiar with the model and more "meaningful" IAP titles become available.
On the technical side, wasn't there something in giving a game away and in-app charging that made it harder to pirate on iOS / Mac App Store?
Changed.
So now there's this uncomfortable tension in the air, where lots of employees think it's a potentially company-destroying mistake, while the execs are pushing it as the type of propaganda that you either shut up and get behind, or 'perhaps this is no longer the right company for you.' And if it fails, it'll be because those employees didn't believe in the vision, not because freemium fucking sucks and core customers hate it.
Why are they doing this? Basically because of the success of Candy Crush and Puzzles and Dragons. The execs want so badly to be them. They want that money. It's revenue envy. Never mind that the company has always been wildly successful doing its own thing, these other companies are printing money doing this other thing. We gotta get that money. We gotta do whatever they're doing over there.
I just think money inside games distorts the game and is distasteful, like money in politics, or money in your esophagus.
Perhaps they are right. As an entirely serious suggestion, if you've got a solid development team who know how to make good games and it's the leadership that is letting you down, maybe some of you should move to another company.
Maybe there is an existing competitor that would benefit from hiring a ready-made team with a good track record, and you could collectively negotiate a mutually beneficial deal.
Alternatively, in true HN style, maybe you could start your own company. Either learn the management skills you need personally, if that's achievable with your group, or hire in management staff whose views are more compatible with how you want that company to behave.
You'll have to get a lawyer to look over your existing contracts for anything that might interfere with these ideas, and of course it can be a scary move to break away from an established job. On the other hand, if you're seeing the writing on the wall already, it might be a good idea to start thinking about your options.
The guys that started Activision did this already 30 years ago. Do we have a catchy name for them, too?
PvZ 2 was a total waste on me. I hesitated a long time before downloading it, and only did so because the reviews said you could play through the whole thing without buying anything. I played it until I got bored, and spent nothing. Throughout, I retained a vague sense of annoyance at the purchasable upgrades.
I would happily have shelled out £10, maybe £15 to play it (and my wife and my mom would both have done so too), and would have played it through without any sense of annoyance. Result? Popcap game annoyed me despite all the effort they put into building a great game, and left £45 on the table.
If their conclusion from that is to double down on IAPs, then quite simply they are saying they don't want users like me and my family, but want, as the second "Dungeon Keeper" iPad review from TFA, "fuckwits". Sorry, I don't buy games for fuckwits.
I look forward, with little hope, to a PvZ 3 with no IAPs but a good upfront price.
On a side note that Dungeons Keeper game is simply, mind blowingly ahead of it's time. It looks insanely fun. Thought it was just another RTS but wow, you can play as any of the minions in FPS mode. It was on DOS too. Why can't games be like this more? Focus on fun instead of graphics and wallet grabbing?
Only the lowest common denominator has suffered