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Comment by prezjordan | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious where most HNers would draw the line between Doom's "Get 3 levels for free, pay us $50 for the rest" and something like Candy Crush's "Play the whole game for free, pay us $x for any x to get more out of it."

I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, because I am very much against in-app purchases. But, when you think about it, you can play Dungeon Keeper Mobile for free, or you can pay something like $20 (or $10, or $5, maybe even $1) to get more out of it (boosts, etc).

So where does the issue lie? I here a lot of people saying "Well they reel you in with a free app and then make you pay for it!" but isn't that exactly how shareware works?

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There's a fundamental difference between shareware / free trial apps and apps that require constant in-app purchases to... well... play. Doom and others use the free trial model, which is what we used to call shareware (before the internet, they wanted people to share the free trial with each other to inspire them to then go buy the full version). As long as these are properly listed as such, there's nothing sleazy about them at all. And it's fine to use an in-app purchase to go from trial to full version. Again, as long as its clear to the user that this is the way it works.

Games that have in-app purchases run the spectrum. Some use in-app purchases to do customizations and other fun things that don't affect gameplay. Then there are those like Dungeon Keeper which are basically unplayable without in-app purchases. Watch the video I linked above for details on why. You have to pay over and over and over just to keep the game playable.

This is very different from a shareware/free trial model. You pay ONE TIME and you own the whole game. It's a classic commercial game scenario except they give you a taste of it... a trial... for free. It's the same thing with 'lite' versions of commercial software that are also free.

The in-app purchasing model is more akin to getting a free version of an FTP client that only allowed you to upload software at 10KB/s. You can then pay $0.99 to upload that one file at full speed. But, your very next upload would again be 10KB/s unless you also paid $0.99 to upload that one at full speed. But wait, for an even better value, you can buy a 20-pack of full-speed uploads for only $9.99 or a 100-pack of full-speed uploads for only $29.99. Once those run out, of course, you're back to 10KB/s. Unless you spend even more money.

Now, it seems silly with the FTP client example above. Who would ever use that software? But this is exactly how many of the free to play games work. And this is the way a lot of people coming in to gaming for the first time think games work.

Great explanations, thanks. I think the biggest difference is that some games (like Dungeon Keeper Mobile IIRC) have IAP into perpetuity - meaning you can essentially never unlock the full game. I like your FTP client example, I'll be using that.

I was surprised to see a review of a game. The review liked the game, but said it used a sleazy tactic. The game was available for free, but after a few levels there was a single IAP to unlock the whole game. No more IAPs and it wasn't a large price. So, that's the Doom model and it was called sleazy. (I don't know of it's okay if they call it $GAME_LITE).

I hate IAPs if they're tied to timing. It just seems a weird way of getting user engagement to slow down he amount that people play with your game.

I found one thing that makes me pay is some kind of timer telling me how many hourS I spent playing. If I spend three hours on a demo I can totally justify paying a few quid on a game.

Dungeon Keeper Mobile uses the worst IAP model of all: pay to reduce the arbitrary timers. As you build out your dungeon, various tasks require time to complete. In no time at all, the game starts asking you to wait a day or more to finish basic, essential tasks. Don't want to wait? Pay up.

As a result, the free player can only spend about five to ten minutes playing every day or two. At that burn rate, it's just not interesting enough to hold the player's attention. It's basically unplayable. That's why everyone is so shocked by Dungeon Keeper Mobile. It's at a new, uncharted level of IAP done wrong.

At risk of turning this into an echo chamber:

In-App Purchases become intrinsic mechanical elements of a player's experience of the game. This results in the design skewing towards encouraging "positive" events, namely making purchases. At this point, the mechanical goals of the game become abstracted, or even split - your game isn't about the mechanics of the puzzle anymore, it's about producing those positive events.

The "free" game sucks. It is intentionally entirely gimped. Playing Dungeon Keeper Mobile "for free" allows you, what, 5 minutes of gameplay per day? The whole game design is centered on making money with IAP. Even if you had unlimited funds, you still have to deal with the in-game store layer (e.g. "click here to spend X to do this thing"...not fun gameplay).

With Doom, they just make a full and complete game without a ton of distractions designed to continually sap money from you.

It's like getting "free Internet!!!" but it's at dial-up speed and you have to jump through a bunch of hoops and layers of microtransactions just to get a decent experience. Most people would rather pay a a simple up-front fee and not deal with that BS.

You can't really play it for free. That's the thing. It's basically unplayable without payments. Why people don't just avoid it, though, that's beyond me.

It's more like Doom being "You can play the whole game for free, but you have to pay $0.50 every time you want to reload your gun."

But why not spend $20 right off the bat and get plenty of gems to enjoy the game? That's the point I'm bringing up.

Because that's not how they sell it. And once that $20 is gone you'll need to spend more. If they had a single IAP of $20 to remove all timers it'd still be stupid and hated, but at least justifiable as a demo / full product model.

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