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Comment by Tohhou | Hacker News Reader

You cannot win. All of the self righteous people here calling monetization evil... There are people who legitimately think you are evil if you charge any money. Have ads? You're evil. Charge more than $1? Scumbag! Free game with with no ads and no monetization? Either.. Wow, you're such a nice guy for making this game! It's too bad you don't have any money to make more! Or... it's probably a shit game that's why it's free. No matter what you do there will be people calling for your head.

Let people make their own choices. If people "fall" for "tactics" and say they are "happy" then who is anyone to tell them that can't like and support what they like.

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This is way off base. We have seen that games with pure ad revenue models can become extremely popular just like games that are pay to win via lots of IAPs. We have also seen that some games do well with simple pay once models, whether its on the store directly or via a single IAP.

The fact of the matter is some forms of monetization are unethical and sacrifice gameplay and enjoyment in order to make more money from players. There are true dark patterns for game design and development. Nobody is saying games have to be free and without ads.

>There are true dark patterns

Which can only be defined subjectively. Something dark to you is not to others.

> some forms of monetization are unethical

Only ones which are fraud, which is illegal.

>Nobody is saying games have to be free and without ads.

Yes, actually plenty of people are. Subscriptions are dark. Premium games are dark. Skill games are dark. Gambling games are dark. Ads are dark. Freemium is dark. Everyone can call anything dark.

> Only ones which are fraud, which is illegal.

There are plenty of things that are legal but unethical. It's impractical to ban every unethical thing, and it would generally not be a good idea to try. Therefore some people can get away with being nasty, but the fact that they are not violating the laws of some particular nation isn't really a defense.

An alternative is to lobby your Congressperson to ban these unethical strategies, or otherwise regulate them. The EU is taking an in-between step by discussing whether false-advertising statutes should apply to labeling games "free" when they're actually designed to pull money out of you within the game. That has pros and cons too.

> Which can only be defined subjectively. Something dark to you is not to others.

Not true. Some of them can have proven statistical effectiveness, which is why they are using them in the first place.

That they are effective doesn't make them dark or evil!

Makeup is effective at making people look more attractive than they would look without it that doesn't make makeup evil or dark.

> Which can only be defined subjectively. Something dark to you is not to others.

Dark patterns aren't patterns that you don't personally like, they are those that are designed to have a significant effect in getting users to take actions or behaviors that the users did not intend to have in the first place, such as leaking personal information or making unintended purchases.

> Only ones which are fraud, which is illegal.

Fraud is certainly unethical, but there are things that are legal and also unethical, this is just being obtuse.

> Yes, actually plenty of people are. Subscriptions are dark. Premium games are dark. Skill games are dark. Gambling games are dark. Ads are dark. Freemium is dark. Everyone can call anything dark.

You are diluting what is even meant by a dark pattern here to make it meet a definition of "I don't like it". Calling a skill game dark is absurd, a user playing a game would wholly expect that their playing skill may affect their gaming outcomes.

That's not a helpful attitude. I'm of the opinion that the current state of IAP is terrible, and as a gamer I hope that it dies.

What would I like to see change? Keep IAP, but limit IAP to things that you can only buy once, and limit the # of IAP items to some reasonable number (say, 10, with permission to increase with human oversight). This retains the ability for developers to offer add-ons and demo play, but removes the capability for freemium developers to milk customers.

Does it destroy the freemium game model? Sure, that's the point.

I still trying to understand how IAP are bad when I am obviously millions of others saw no need to make them. Its not a forced purchase.

Now I am all for not being able to obfuscate the actual costs of IAP. This method is used a lot by supposedly free to play MMOs. You don't buy items/upgrades/boosts with real money, you buy another currency to buy these IAPs. Worst, most purchase quantities are set to purposefully keep you from getting the exact amount you need.

Apps are merely doing what has been happening in full on computer games for years. The difference is that many purchases are made by children because insufficient parent oversight. So instead of putting the blame where it belongs we go after those who sell it?

> I still trying to understand how IAP are bad when I am obviously millions of others saw no need to make them. Its not a forced purchase.

They are bad because someone is purposefully exploiting known cognitive biases to trick a significant part of players to give out their money. On an individual level it might feel that you have a freedom of choice, but it's an illusion - game authors still know very well that a calculated percentage of players will fall for their tricks, they just don't know (and don't care) who in particular.

Why can't you accept that some people like what you don't like and they are not just dumb fools getting tricked into giving their money away?

I accept that, but were the producers targeting such people, they wouldn't have to resort to methods that are designed to tricking people into giving their money away.

For the same reason I wouldn't accept the rationalizations about the victim in any other kind of abusive relationship.

Is every situation where money exchanges hands an abusive relationship? If the same gameplay mechanics existed but there was zero way to pay money and instead only spend time is it suddenly no longer abusive?

I doubt there would be games like that (same as now, but where spending time is the only option). The whole mechanic of spending a long time waiting is there to encourage paying to not wait.

But yes, it would not be abusive if there is no way to pay. If the mechanic exists solely for gameplay reasons, rather than for manipulating the player, it's not taking advantage of anyone.

People's time is worth nothing and money is the only thing which matters and people who value their time more than some small amount of money don't deserve to be able to enjoy any games?

>If the mechanic exists solely for gameplay reasons, rather than for manipulating the player, it's not taking advantage of anyone.

If a person spends 100 hours in a game which requires ridiculous grind that's less evil than if they spend 5 hours in a game and spend $2 to unlock extra turns sooner than just waiting while having equal amounts of enjoyment?

Time is money. You may not value your own time but I and others do. Even in "pure" experiences if elements of play are there for gameplay reasons (every game having different goals) it can cost a person a lot of money just by playing it for a long time.

The point is that games require you to spend 100 hours for "ridiculous grind" for no other reason than to motivate you to pay to not grind. If paying was not an option, the game would be designed to not require any non-enjoyable grinding/waiting (even if there is grinding, it would be an enjoyable part of the gameplay, not just "wait 5 minutes and you can click something again").

Imagine a game where you build a village. You need gold to build something. The game gives you X gold every 5 minutes, and you can pay to get more. Sounds reasonable, right? Except that there is no gameplay reason for you to wait 5 minutes to get more gold. They could just as well give you more every 30 seconds and the gameplay would became 10 times faster and more enjoyable.

If there is no option to pay with money, there would not be any need to pay with time either.

> Apps are merely doing what has been happening in full on computer games for years.

[Citation Needed]

I have never seen IAP in any computer game until the rise of micro-transactions. Even then IAP has been restricted to MMOs and other niches. The prevalence of IAP on mobile is several, several orders magnitude different than on PC.

> The difference is that many purchases are made by children because insufficient parent oversight. So instead of putting the blame where it belongs we go after those who sell it?

Saying "the user is to blame" again is not helpful. To be clear I would like my platform of preference to be free of "bad IAP" altogether, because it encourages a style of game design that is distasteful to me.

I'm cognizant that some people love this type of game. That's fine with me, I'd just rather they go somewhere else.

> I have never seen IAP in any computer game until the rise of micro-transactions.

IAP is, arguably, no different than "expansion pack" + "purchase online". But for the online purchase part, computer games have been doing that before most people had even heard of the internet. Even the "free-2-play (but play for full experience)" model goes back to at least the 1980s (in the form of shareware).

Sure, the reduction in transaction processing costs and latency of the modern online world have facilitated adapting those models to ones with more, smaller, and more frequent purchases, but the essential characteristics of the models are, in computing terms, ancient.

Maybe we have to agree to disagree on this point, but where IAP is different today is the existence of consumable IAP.

Only until recently was it possible to spend money on a game and, at some point later, have game content and state be identical to before you spent that money.

"Paying for the full version of Doom" vs "buying some gems in Dungeon Keeper" may be conceptually the same, but the long term result is vastly different.

I'd argue that the value you receive from the former utterly blows away the latter, but customer and developer trends are sadly proving me wrong.

> where IAP is different today is the existence of consumable IAP.

Sure, consumable IAP is a different thing than mini-expansion style IAP. I think that its at least as old as the MMO world an may have earlier precedents, but its certainly taken off.

> I'd argue that the value you receive from the former utterly blows away the latter, but customer and developer trends are sadly proving me wrong.

Consumable IAP is, in a sense, a highly efficient rental scheme that takes from each user according to their willingness to pay.

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