If it does I look at the in-app purchases.
If the in-app purchases are "x00 Special In-Game Currency Units" then I don't install the game.
Not sure we need legislation to avoid being ripped off...
Which is the definition of 'free' that is used.
No. If a player has to at any time in the game spend in order to unlock, extend or access an area or feature then the game is not "free to play" it's "maybe free to play".
It's deceptive to label it as free.
To me this is a natural supplement to the EU unfair business practices legislation.
Sure we all know the type of game this is targeted at. The time-sink freemium farmville clone that makes it just a little too easy to buy those gems/coins/cash/whatever that makes the timer tick down faster.
What if the IAP in my game is just to remove ads? What if it's solely cosmetic?
Governments do not have the best track record when it comes to comprehension of nuance and basic reality.
I'd like to think that a person is smart enough to tell when their OS pops up the payment dialog that they are under no obligation to click "yes".
More nuanced, according to their first position, you should be able to market game with removable ads as free (unless they cover whole screen or make game unplayable). You would be able call the game free with cosmetic in app purchases too, but you probably would have to make it clear to customer prior downloading eg. "you have to use default avatar unless you pay 1$" somewhere in description.
You could even lock content unless money are paid and still call it free, as long as customer was clearly told what parts are available and what parts are not available. (Hard to understand one liner in the middle of 20 pages long terms of services does not count).
Yes, I also first read reviews to know if the game requires regular payments etc, and it is reasonable to expect this from consumers. But the law should be there to protect those who do not.
"If you don't want to be mugged, don't go down dark alleys" is sound advice, but that doesn't mean that mugging doesn't need to be labelled "illegal"
I don't know if the solution to that is regulation, but it can't be reliance on the uninformed to know what's good for them. The exploitative industry moves faster than any but the most well-informed and most jaded.
Each time somebody tells me that we shouldn't protect stupid people, I remember not feeling very smart in front of pages of legalese in insurance and banking contracts. I keep thinking, yes they are probably going to screw me, but somebody is working to prevent them from screwing me too overtly.
If the public is this bad with something as simple as in-app purchases, why should we ever legalize drugs? This is a serious question.
Because enforcing strong anti-drug laws causes even more damage. It's not that most people want drugs to be legal, it banning them does not work.
On the other hand a legislation like this is easy to enforce, because you pretty much only have to get Apple, Google and Microsoft to comply in their stores.
But if you think people are smart enough to vote and to discuss public matters and to make right decisions for themselves - then there's no reason why decisions about what to eat and what to drink and what to inhale should be any different.
Now, don't know if selfish irresponsible use of intoxicants rises to that level, but the argument can be made. E.g. alcohol laws are everywhere, and its not even a very good intoxicant.
I think if you go out and make a poll you will find intense disagreement on whether there is a right to [severe] self-harm. Please don't strawman into the idea of abandoning all rights.
The drug question is difficult precisely because the balance kf protection and rights is complicated by the fact that prohibition creates massive problems of its own.
This is why there is no simple fix that makes all the harm go away and we should focus on trying to mitigate as much as possible. To me it seems that legalisation and regulation woukd help, but we'll always need services to pick up the people who get into trouble with it.
Maybe in-app purchase can be categorized as one-time or recurring?
I say we boycott applications that do this. But if it's easier to legislate, then by all means.
So, you're right that we probably don't need legislation now to avoid being ripped off, but it would have been preferable to have it when people were being ripped off. That does require consumer legislation to keep up with technology, though.
Can people self-regulate and avoid behaving like that? Yes. Do they? I doubt it.
In the second place, the concept of "we need to prevent people from doing anything negative to themselves" is not distinguishable from the concept of "where there are multiple ways for people to behave, all but one must be prohibited". In fact, it's not even distinguishable from the concept of "where there are ways for people to behave, all must be prohibited".
It's like getting a "free" train ticket, but then when you want to travel you're asked to pay for boarding the train.
That's sensible to false-positives though, a number of games are perfectly playable (with no roadblock) without getting special currency units, e.g. jetpack joyride (a fairly standard infinite runner) or Solomon's Boneyard. The currency units are mostly there for developer support and if you can't be arsed to play the game (for some reason).
You probably meant to write "sensitive" or "susceptible" or something like that. (Just a well-meaning remark especially if you, like me, are not a native speaker).
Which is something I find interesting: people talk about "discovery" and reviews of apps being difficult. You're on a device that's sole purpose is internet connectivity! Use the browser, Luke!
I wanted to play (and buy) a game the other day. It turned out that unless friend brought and recommended, there is no way to learn about gameplay, difficulty, length, whether there are in app purchases or not etc. The only way to learn those things is to buy and then find out you do not like the game or that it is very short.
It was not big deal for me, I googled for couple of hours and them brought nothing.
There are hundreds of games being published every day and only maybe 1% of them are any good. That IS discovery problem and it is problem mainly for game developers. Since customers like me have no way to distinguish between those good games and bad games, we buy something random and then see.
The result is that good and bad games earn the same, since they are largely brought on random. The main losers are here good games developers.
I wonder if there is a solution for that then? The same way as things like Polygon keep on top of standard games, a mobile focused review site that has far higher quality than regular "review sites" (that yeah, most of which are pretty terrible).