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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

> 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.

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