Europe Wants Apple and Google to Fix In-App Payments Problem

F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely. Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill has zero bearing on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon-building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive barriers as a lever to get you to spend money.

Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion.

In comparison, F2P games are designed around the assumption that players will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who do pay, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.

I encountered an arcade machine once on vacation in Spain. Bubble Bobble. The differences: I paid before playing. The coin let me play for as long as my skills could keep up with the game. The game was entirely skill-based, not a long-term strategy game designed to maximize my retention.

Can't they just play on consoles?

I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids but you can prevent it without any government intervention with a little responsibility on your part. You wouldn't give your child a credit card and let them loose in a toy store either.

I have been annoyed by upgrades to apps that litter screen with triggers to buy new stuff. For example flightradar24 I bought a full version of the app. In an update they positioned tiggers on every city to get me to buy upgrade for every city to view departure and arrival time. Suddenly my app is visually broken and I have to pay for the upgrade to fix it. And I can't even downgrade. I really don't care about departure/arrival schedules for airports... this does not seem right to me.

I guess that breaks one of the core rules of the interface design - of least surprise. (or recurring one that turns into a severe irritation).

An open market fixes an awful lot of things - as long as it is an open market. I will add that this mobile app market is massively dominated by two players and that if mobile comms is as important to the next decade as we think it is, that is bad for everyone.

Apple should not have a lock on the software that runs the lives of half the western world. No one should.

I however despair - film studios and game studios regularly go bankrupt yet there is no shortage of subsidy for the next

Quality mechanisms are a viable function of markets - whatever checks apple does could be done by any other body that can be paid for it. A label of "safe to download" is valuable. A simple central registry and hashes would be one way to do it.

Overall I think In app purchases are shit, in the way paying people in company money to spend in company store was shit. In some cases an in app purchase is convenient but in the vast majority of cases (read games) half the game time is geared towards "buy more". It poisons the game, the trust between gamer and game writer and adds no value to the world.

This is not the manufacturing base we can build a prosperous new society on.

The way startup funding for the cowboy end of the games business works allows the well funded companies to give much more away. What has occurred is the stakes are now out of control. Admittedly a hit game can bring in hundreds of millions, but to make or market it you'll need to spend a very significant fraction of that. This has the side effect of encouraging wild conservatism of design and price gouging as risk minimisation strategies.

The mobile part of the industry at this point needs someone to do what Nintendo did in the 80s, but it's totally unclear who or how that could possibly happen.

But if there was not just one or two portals, then the normal mechanisms of product discovery would take place in which advertising, quality, reputation and luck would differentiate products and allow prices to reflect costs.