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Comment by dmalik | Hacker News Reader

Free-to-play games aren't going away anytime soon and neither are IAPs. Consumers just don't pay for games anymore and a developer has to make money somehow. I like what Apple is doing by forcing developers to make more ethical games.

This Gamasutra article on ethical free-to-play gaming comes to mind and foreshadowed Apples move - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/207779/ethical_freetop...

Edit: I'm referring to mobile - "New research shows free-to-play on mobile isn't slowing down" http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211333/New_research_shows...

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There are good IAPs (like permanent unlocks) and bad IAPs (like consumables).

It's not cut and dry like that.

Why isn't it? It certainly sounds simple.

Perhaps I misunderstood you but not all consumables are bad IAPs.

There's apps that offers "credits" to access features on an ad-hoc basis that would otherwise require a full subscription. That's actually cheaper for some people and allows them to try it out without committing to a full subscription.

You can't be so black and white about IAP.

> Consumers just don't pay for games anymore

This is completely absurd. Look at Steam. Or every game console.

Oh come on. You know the poster was referring to mobile gaming, not gaming in general.

The 3DS XL and PS Vita are also doing quite well.

Now you're just being intentionally obtuse.

Right! But my guess would be that those are purchased for the purpose of playing games by the majority of customers, and that phones are not.

But those games don't run on phones, and we're talking about phones in this discussion today.

Why are phones magically different when we're discussing games? You're going to have to justify that.

Compare the most popular free games on Steam and consoles with mobile devices. Off the top of my head, Candy Crush Saga and multiple free Angry Birds titles have over 100m downloads on Google Play alone.

Number of downloads doesn't matter because they are free and they make no money off of downloads. You need to look at the total amount made.

The competition matters. Even if my competitors are making $0, they still reduce the amount I make.

Have you ever seen the app store?

It is crammed with "free" games that have long lists of IAPs to remove slow-down timers and similar.

1. Market

2. Gaming experience

Steam users or console owners have spent time, money or both just to have the equipment to play games. I'm guessing that the same market that buys consoles buys smartphones, so they may be more likely to buy good phone games. But maybe not! I mean, they have a console at home so if a game they want is cross platform maybe they prefer to play it on that?

The gaming experience is also hugely different. They are converging, but there are still so many differences. That blazing fast new processor doesn't do much for controls, screen size, battery life, multiplayer - all of these are things that stop phones from competing with consoles directly. My guess is this is a reason that the top games are time wasters.

I would say mobile games are viewed as more disposible than PC or Console games.

Developers can pull a game from the Android or iOS markets at any time and unless you somehow made a backup, you'll never get to play it again if you happened to reset your device or get a new one. With steam though, my game library stays there, even if the developer no longer sells the game on Steam (happened with the Wolfenstein game that came out a few years ago). Also, many mobile games also depend on server side resources and won't function without them.

I for some reason can't reply to your other comments but the difference between consoles and phone games is that free games actually exists for phones. You can't buy an XBox and have access to hundreds of the most popular games for free. People buy an XBox knowing that they will have to buy games. People who buy phones, know that the app store or google play contains thousands of free offerings.

Note that Apple's efforts might drive up the prices of games and IAPs. Consider the effect of an app offering rewards to users who share it. What is the economic effect of that? The app developer is driving down their average cost of acquiring more customers. Cut that off, and suddenly the app developer has to spend more to acquire customers through some other method (advertising being the most obvious option). In order to preserve profit, revenue must go up. Consumers get slugged with more costly IAPs and apps, or greater amounts of ads within apps.

I think it's a question of offering some kind of good old demo mode for games. The problem is not that people don't pay for games (they do, see IAP) but that people don't want to pay for things without knowing what they are buying. Apple has pretty much everything in place to offer (usage) time limited demo versions of paid apps. Many IAPs are using dark UX patterns. Claiming "but they don't have a choice!" is at best naive.

Here's a review of a game that offers the first few levels free, with a single IAP to unlock the rest of the game. Everything is clear and above board and seems to follow the Doom (etc) model - playable game and pay to unlock the rest.

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Glyph+Quest/review.asp...

Note that this reviewer calls it "tacky".

Sure, if the game isn't properly up-front about being a limited time demo, it rightfully feels tacky. But if you "bought" it by clicking a "try for a day" button, why would it feel tacky?

Making demos is usually a net loss for developers. There are few scenarios where the extra time and effort put into a demo actually result in increased sales [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QM6LoaqEnY

I wasn't talking about "making demos". I was talking about native support in the platform to limit usage of an app to a certain time. The developer just clicks a checkbox "make 24 usage hour demo available" and that's it.

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