I have really mixed feelings about this. On the other hand I dislike this method of selling games but I also understand that it is rather difficult to make money selling $1 games. And a $5 price tag in the market doesn't work for most games (the exceptions seem to be ones that are coming from PC/consoles: Grand Theft Auto games, Minecraft and Final Fantasy games sell for $5-$15). But this micro transaction trend has been getting out of hand, this is already the second article on the subject on HN this week.
I play a lot of simulator games, which have a lot of after market content. Flight simulators have a lot of 3rd party vendors who create additional aircraft and scenery (an aircraft may cost around $30 or more). The most popular train simulator has additional 1st party content, trains and routes which total up to $2000 even after discounts in Steam x-mas sales. The racing simulator I play has a subscription model and cars and tracks cost extra ($50 a year + $12 per car + $15 per track). But these pieces of extra content are very high quality and are accurate visually, historically and performance wise. I have no problem spending $10 to $30 every now and then on this.
But there's a stark difference between additional content in simulators (which obviously costs money to create) and a pay-to-win IAP gaming model. In p2w games, there's a hidden subscription fee because you essentially have to pay every now and then to stay in the game and not have to wait for ages (e.g. real racing android game requires you to buy new tires every few races, or wait for hours) and a price on additional content which is usually nothing but a piece of artwork (which is cheap to create in contrast to the accurate simulator content). The biggest problem with this is that these games are labelled as "free" while in reality you pay subscription + extra for additional content.
I would actually like to pay for games on my mobile, but I don't want to play games that where the whole game design is optimized for maximum IAP profit rather than maximum fun. But when browsing the Android market for games, you just can't find any interesting games that do not employ this IAP pricing model.
> Apple, as gatekeeper had (has?) the opportunity to fix this.
Why would it be in Apple's interests to prohibit micro transactions in games? On the contrary, they do make a 30% cut of the sales, don't they?
Even if Apple did change their policy, there's still Google, Amazon, Russian Yandex and Chinese app stores that do allow this. If Apple (or anyone else) disallows this, the game publishers will release their stuff on the markets that do allow IAPs.
> Apple has a noose of very bad karma around it's neck because of this.
Only some gamers complain, this isn't really hurting Apple's image as a whole enough to make them take action.
I'm guessing this phenomenon will die by itself given some time. Gamers and parents are already revolting. When more parents will prevent their kids from using their credit cards, a (major?) part of the money supply will run dry and the game publishers will have to come up with other business models.
"Essentially, we're back to where we were with video arcades, before consoles at home gave us unlimited play."
you just nailed it... most of these companies executives were alive in the time of arcades... they all LOVED the play per quarter model. Most of the big companies have backdoors into Vegas gambling as well... keep you pulling that lever.. that's their BUSINESS. The idea that you played the games for just one bit of money was always a temporary thing.
$30 for an accurate aircraft simulation seems like a better deal than $120 for speeding up digging of 56 tiles. Not sure if this is a good comparison :)
This is a natural outcrop of the everything is free/cheap zeitgeist. The demands from users for game quality far outstrips what they expect to pay for them, so if you charge high they will just not buy it or find a loss leader and play their game - they are all almost perfect replacements for the average user after all. If a small amount of people want to pony up $100+ per title then it might work, but there is something to be said for high volume low cost.
At the risk of being crass, the online porn industry has gone to this model as well. They give a significant amount of free teaser video leading up to what would be the climax of the scene, only to cut away to an ad or just outright end.
I would assume it is working the same as with freemium games.
The thing that ultimately limits this strategy is people get far more excited about paying up-front for a "thing" that is play-oriented, whether it's marketed as a professional tool or a game. When you lead with monetization, you have to actively cut out regions of play so that feedback loops related to monetization can dominate.
With F2P microtransactions in the context of a single player game(multiplayer adds social value effects), the hope is, essentially, that people are too uninformed to take control of their own play experiences. Everyone who would consider themselves a games enthusiast essentially lives in a different world - even if they're addicts, they know how to satisfy their addiction at lower cost, and often with more ability to customize the experience.
Isn't this kind of a supply and demand thing? There is plenty of demand for indie games and fantastic indie games get created frequently enough (e.g. Hyper Light Drifter, Dustforce, FEZ [I know, I know]). If you want to change the medium for the better, the most permanent solution under Capitalism is to change what people will pay for.
This article harks on mobile games a lot. Why do you need games on your phone? More artistic, less crass games appear on systems like the 3DS, and PCs. If I really wanted an art piece of a game on my hypothetical iPhone, I would try to make one myself.
I do disagree with micropurchases in children's games. They just don't have the thinking power yet to realize what they're dealing with. That's a more pertinent moral question, I think.
Here is the sticking point for me, if its suicide then great these things will fail and like the original DivX idea it will be some cautionary tale in the past.
But what is really the rant? Is the rant it costs me more to play this game? Is that it? Your $5 game is not as entertaining for as long as your $50 game? I agree that the nickel and diming is annoying but they offer the "big bag of tokens" for some big price $50 - $70. If you buy that you can whiz right through things, and they don't "re-lock" so in the case of the racing game the cars are there forever, except you had to pay $50 for that game instead of the $1 - $5 you thought it cost.
'if it's suicide then great these things will fail' is missing the point.
These strategies are dramatically revenue-positive in the short term, where short term is defined as say 6-36 months. Nobody is thinking long term, so these practices thrive in the industry, they make investors happy, they make executives happy. Everyone is doing them.
The problem is that eventually these practices scorch the earth, just like how Zynga's fabulous success was built on completely destroying the effectiveness of viral pathways on Facebook.
I agree with everything you say, except I miss the 'scorch the earth' part. There is infinite demand for "games" type entertainment. So this technique ends up making a lot of companies short term wealthy until they shrivel up and die. Then they go away and it is hard to get investment to build another one. But the demand for games is still out there, and someone will fill it with some other plan.
I completely get that if you're trying to sell a game on one of these platforms for $20 and getting no traction at all because all your money is being sucked out by Candy Crush it feels like the end of the world but look at World of Warcraft, that sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the PC space and now its off dying. Opening up once again opportunities.
Infinite demand is absolutely false and the example I cited is really blatant: Eventually there is a backlash against destructive practices and they either get banned or die out. Nobody can leverage the acquisition/retention techniques Zynga used to get big because they don't work anymore.
The idea of infinite demand for entertainment is trivial to disprove anyway: Gamers only have so much time in the day that they can devote to games, and only so much money they can afford to spend on games every month. If someone already plays multiple games, you're competing to either grab an increasingly tiny slice of their time or convince them to replace one of the games they're playing with yours.
Note that this is compensated for by the traditional model because the up-front payment provides an incentive for the player to finish the games they've already bought; for F2P/subscription games there's no incentive to stick with a single title unless they find ways to keep you there.
Also, the claim that either WoW or the PC space are dying is blatantly false. PC games are doing fine and WoW still brings in tons of money (even if its subscription numbers are way down). It is true that the nature of the MMO and PC industries has changed but it's not as if WoW killed anything.
What does "scorch the earth" mean? Are you saying that people will stop playing games? If so, I'm interested in seeing some numbers that demonstrate a correlation between the rise of IAP and some kind of decline in number of participating gamers.
A fundamental issue in this discussion is that one side believes there's a finite amount of "resource" - be it gamer "good will", attention or money. So far I've seen zero evidence to prove this.
As for Zynga: they would have eventually sunk Facebook, but can you truly say their strategy was bad? You have to grab the money while you can.
Scorch the earth in the sense that nobody can ever use those mechanics again, because they don't work. Zynga overused them. It's equivalent to the idea that overworking the land while farming makes the land impossible to use for years in the future.
Zynga's strategy was bad because it undermined their ability to continue delivering growth in the future. In the short term they grabbed all the money they could, but it wasn't by itself enough to guarantee long-term success.
For reference, actual mid-to-high level Zynga employees have been quoted in the past on this subject - they agree with the idea that they overused viral pathways and that hurt their long term success.
Is overuse in the digital realm, when there is no "earth" to speak of, truly so bad?
If IAP becomes unviable, companies will move to other business models. If none exist with a good fit, then we'll see a gaming drought that will reset consumer expectations.
I'm neither a fan nor a defender of IAP, but I fail to see much of a problem in this situation. Instead, I see it as a herd of wild gazelles multiplying to the point where their habitat can't support them. At this point man can interfere and provide artificial care for the animals (along with forced population control, would be my guess) or man can stand back and let mature run its course (ie: most of the herd die out until equilibrium is reached again).
As a personal anecdote, I bought hundreds of apps/games from 2008-2011, before IAP took over, and can probably count on my fingers the ones I've bought since (Angry Birds, Edge, S&S, Infinity Blade...). IIRC the only IAP-based app I've actually used is Paper. Most of my friends also have very few games on their mobile phones.
That's a fair observation, however consider: are you spending less time or money on game or game-like entertainment now then you were in 2008?
My hypothesis would be: "No". Instead, I would theorize you shifted your attention and money to either other games. Therefore your money isn't lost, it just has to be warned elsewhere by developers.
That "big bag of tokens" is never, in any of these games, enough to just "buy the whole game". At best it's 25% cheaper than the "normal" price, which in every case still runs in the thousands.
Anyhow, the question you ask, what is really the rant, is this:
A large portion of human effort in the game producing industry is spent on an activity that can honestly only be described in one manner:
Legally defrauding customers.
This will in the long term breed distrust to the entire industry and wastes talent that could be used in furthering the art.
And while, yes, eventually this will die out, the problem is that in the western world it will take about half a generation and in the eastern world might never happen due to certain cultural differences.
How is offering a few extra lives, extra moves, a powerup, or another set of levels for a buck or two apiece at all fraudulent? Do you think users don't understand what they're buying?
Or is your issue just with the fact that some games offer unlimited opportunities to spend money? There are many areas of the economy where you can blow as much cash as you desire, I hardly think that alone should qualify something as "defrauding customers".
> How is offering a few extra lives, extra moves, a powerup, or another set of levels for a buck or two apiece at all fraudulent? Do you think users don't understand what they're buying?
Because the audience is kids who don't understand the value of money and whose parents aren't tech savvy enough to turn off IAPs in the kids' gaming tablet. Kids go and download these "free" games from the market, then play for some time and get the offer of buying some in-game diamonds with real money and either do the purchase without knowing what their up to or get their parents to pay for it.
In many countries there are regulations about marketing stuff for kids, but these games do not fall under the regulation.
There's no doubt that the execs of gaming companies know that a lot of the money they are getting is from kids who do not understand the value of what they are getting.
The short of it is: Games who rely on IAP invariably have this progression: They start out as games where player skill determines progress, which has the two-fold effect of causing players to invest time in the game (and become emotionally attached) AND generating favourable reviews from journos who only have limited time to test a game. Then they gradually begin to slow progress of the player by increasing difficulty, and in especially cruel cases prevent the player from playing by introducing longer and longer timers; both of which can be circumvented with IAP to make the game at least superficially resemble its beginning state again.
And this is a bait-and-switch, pure and simple.
The player, having invested time, having become emotionally attached, and having memories of an enjoyable game have then these three choices: Walk away, force themselves to endure pain and uphold their investment, invest more to make the game resemble their memories again. And none of this is obvious from the outset.
> Do you think users don't understand what they're buying?
As i summarized above, they likely understand it, but have several pressures on them causing them to make an emotional choice, not a rational one.
The difference is a matter of degree driven by differences in technical capability. It's not that there weren't ruthless and sociopathic people around in the days of the arcades, it's that arcade machines couldn't store persistent state. That sufficed to render them mostly harmless, because it put tight limits on the extent to which they could be tuned to exploit security vulnerabilities in the human motivation system. It's a bit like the way in principle a plain HTML webpage might be able to exploit a security vulnerability in your browser, but in practice it's much safer than a Java applet.
The arcade machines were real upfront about what's going on. You paid a coin to play, and you paid a coin to cheat. There was no pretension of free and no obfuscation of the transaction. further arcade machines were made at a time when the hardware was not affordable for the home.
I get the exploitive accusation, but don't quite understand the emotional argument yet.
Las Vegas is the town of exploitation and yet people go there all the time and have a good time. My sister plays Candy Crush and thinks it is lots of fun. My neighbor goes to movies in 3D. All various ways to be exploited and get more cash out of you. I choose not to be exploited in those ways but I am not mad or sad that some people enjoy it. That is where I'm struggling to understand.
When I think how much money I spent sinking quarters into Galaga at the local diner as a child, I just can't feel that bad when people complain about Candy Crush charging $0.99 for another 5 lives to people that are too impatient to wait a couple hours for the free set. Is that really so exploitative? Meh. I played past level 100 on Candy Crush without spending a cent, which is probably dozens of hours of gameplay.
The market is speaking pretty clearly: it is not even close to profitable to make premium casual games, the group of hardcore people that are willing to pay up front is way too small to make it worthwhile. IAP lets you get many more people enjoying your game, and you make a lot more money doing it, which is IMO a win on both ends. I get that a lot of gamers hope these games will fail, but as of right now, this is the most profitable and fast growing sector in the games industry, so I'd be hesitant to predict its downfall yet.
If there was some magical way to get the same number of mass market users to pay a fair $5 up front for games (hell, even $1 would be great), every one of us in the game industry would be thrilled to hear it, because it's much easier to make premium games than freemium. I'm open to ideas, but I haven't heard many realistic ones.
Disclaimer: I work on F2P games (not for King), so take all of this with a grain of salt based on self-interest.
How many people/kids were willing/allowed to sink that much money into Galaga? It was not mainstream hobby.
At least, my parents taught me it is not wise investment and I plan to teach my kids the same about level ups in seemingly free games.
Speaking about exploitation, I recall one especially ugly example. A game with kiddy graphics and story had crying Bambi 10 minutes into play. You came there and Bambi told you that he is dying and the only way to save him is to pay money. If this is not emotional manipulation I do not know what is.
Frankly, at this point i have to assume that you're either shilling, or are simply unaware of the psychological effects at work because you only work with the technology.
Not unaware, so I very well may be a shill. I get the psychology behind all of this, I just don't find it particularly problematic, at least the bits that I interact with.
As I've said, the model I support within F2P games is mostly equivalent to the coin-op arcade game: you died but want another move? A quarter to continue. You ran out of lives? A quarter to continue (or wait a little while for free lives). You want to cheat? A quarter, please. There's psychology there, but I don't think it's anything very new or sinister - charge people straightforwardly for playing, in an amount that seems fair for the amount of entertainment they're getting out of it. Give them something for free with the realization that most customers will never actually pay, and try to please everyone because word of mouth is the best advertising.
Sure. The profit motive requires that we design games so that people have incentives to spend quarters (or rather, dollars for packs of whatever we're selling, since you can't charge a quarter on the app store, but it works out to about a quarter per "unit" - I'm totally against in-game currencies because they make purchases less transparent, and that's bad). That means making difficult levels, more or less. But we'd make ridiculously difficult levels anyways for design reasons, and our greater incentive is to make sure that people stay in the game for as long as possible, so we primarily worry about crafting compelling experiences that people enjoy, and don't feel cheated by. Freemium just means that we place the "pinch" levels more carefully than we would otherwise.
In my current project, skill still reigns supreme - while we do present increasingly difficult challenges to the player, we specifically avoid the type of RNG-based difficulty that Candy Crush leans on. If you fail, it's not because you got an impossible seed (which is often the case in Candy Crush, as I know all too well, as an avid player), it's because you could have done something better but didn't. Internally, we make sure that we are all able to beat every level without using boosts or any such nonsense; those are there merely to accelerate progress for the impatient, never a requirement.
Granted, we're all really good at our game at this point, so the difficult levels might be very difficult for normal people even if we can beat them, but forcing people to either get really good or pay money to progress is fair, IMO, and much less abusive than leaving it to randomness.
Maybe that's just rationalization, maybe we're actually doing better than other people, I'm not sure, that'll be for you to decide when we release, and it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing...either way, F2P is here to stay, and believe it or not, some of us really do want to make it as fair to players as we can while still working profitably within the model (we need to make enough money to stay afloat, and premium casual games do not do that). I'm 100% open to suggestions, as long as you realize that "go premium" isn't a realistic one, because we've tried, and it doesn't work anymore.
Ok, so here's a little story for you: My earliest memories of arcade machines are such which played motorbike racing games or bubble bobble. As far as i remember the machines allowed you to play as far as you could and when you failed the machine reset and you had to pay to have another attempt. Now i was just informed that apparently it was the norm in the USA for arcade machines to offer you to continue from where you were for more cash.
Now why did i need to be informed of this? Because i live in germany where arcade machines, along with slot machines and similar, are banned from public establishments; because yes, this stuff is exploitative.
Now, that said, there are also some real differences between software for your home and arcade machines: The arcade machines were real upfront about what's going on. You paid a coin to play, and you paid a coin to cheat. There was no pretension of free and no obfuscation of the transaction. further arcade machines were made at a time when the hardware was not affordable for the home.
> In my current project, skill still reigns supreme
That's a tall order. Please do me a favor and go through the article and make a list of techniques you see that your game does NOT employ versus those it DOES employ.
Also, a question. I play a game because the gameplay is enjoyable. Is there ever any point where the game says "no, you cannot play unless you wait or pay"? Note, i did not say progress, i said play.
> it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing
That is the entire problem. Just like arcade machines back then you are extracting money from those who are either not mentally capable of or lack the experience to make a fully rational decision.
As for suggestions, really damn simple:
1. Don't sell cheats.
2. Allow me to make a down payment to purchase the entire game, in two possible modes:
2.a) if most of the calculation involved in a game happens on a customer machine, just allow me put down a single lump sum (guild wars, roaming fortress)
2.b) if most of the calculation involved happens on a company server, allow me to pay a regular fee (eve online, and i'm really fucking sure there is NO f2p game that even approaches the amount of computation their servers do)
You can stack on all kinds of naff f2p bullshit you like, but plenty of games which were made with more effort than any f2p game are profitable on these models, even in the mobile space.
I had a look. There's nothing I can see that suggests they are centrally computing anything like 1920x1080x24 bits of data at 60Hz, that's 360MB of brand-new data per second per user, which is what our graphics cards are doing for us client-side.
I won't. And neither are they. Perhaps a very, very sparse approximation taking advantage of diagonal and/or block structure that actually computes a miniscule fraction of that.
Has anyone looked at applying this to the non-gaming market? I'm guessing the emotional attachment isn't as much but you are still attached from the time you have invested.
Let's take Word for example. You write a three page document, you want to save it? That's $1 please. Printing? That's another dollar. Oh you don't like Cambria? You can unlock Times New Roman for $10, or our Business Serif Pack for $49!
I guess it's similar to shareware, but more annoying...
As much as I also dislike how some IAP game developers base all their gameplay mechanisms purely on maximizing the user likeliness to keep spending without even noticing, I recognize that they get the very basics of video game design very right.
Because they have to.
The goal for any game developer who treats its creation not only as an artistic piece but also has a product, is to design software that offers a positive feedback loop to the user in order to keep her engaged.
Consider how Nintendo, for instance, considers the Mario platformer franchise as an instrument (see Ask Iwata interviews). During development, designers are focused on getting the timing (rhythm) right between challenge (say ennemies or holes) and corresponding rewards (powerups or secret exits). This ultimately plays/tricks how our brains are wired (effort needs reward) in order to engage users and ultimately enjoy the game... and pay again (and again) for the sequels/updates when they need their fix.
Imho IAP is an interesting return to the origins of video gaming (and coin-based arcades) and refocuses the industry on getting the core ingredient right, the feedback loop, rather than betting it all on graphics, story, feature-creep... and marketing.
Marketing is important when you need to convince your game is worth paying upfront, even in a seemingly minimal amount, as mobile gaming is a very "dispensable" expense in the general public.
There is no ROI in marketing an IAP game that does not engage enough of its users (enough). On the other hand, marketing heavily an upfront-cost game can draw sales, sometimes thanks to the franchise name as well, despite providing no to little entertainent to most of its users as the feedback loop is just not good enough to engage them.
For good or bad, I think IAP is accelerating adoption of data-driven practices for video game design. As an engineer/scientist, this is very interesting.
Last but not least, IAP probably helps expand the (mobile) gaming audience to people who would have otherwise either not played game(s) at all or would have downloaded illegally.
In the long term, I believe this can only be good for the industry.
The bad parts of IAP will be regulated by better consumer protections for the worst "abuses" and more naturally over time by the users themselves as they get more familiar with the model and more "meaningful" IAP titles become available.
I play a lot of simulator games, which have a lot of after market content. Flight simulators have a lot of 3rd party vendors who create additional aircraft and scenery (an aircraft may cost around $30 or more). The most popular train simulator has additional 1st party content, trains and routes which total up to $2000 even after discounts in Steam x-mas sales. The racing simulator I play has a subscription model and cars and tracks cost extra ($50 a year + $12 per car + $15 per track). But these pieces of extra content are very high quality and are accurate visually, historically and performance wise. I have no problem spending $10 to $30 every now and then on this.
But there's a stark difference between additional content in simulators (which obviously costs money to create) and a pay-to-win IAP gaming model. In p2w games, there's a hidden subscription fee because you essentially have to pay every now and then to stay in the game and not have to wait for ages (e.g. real racing android game requires you to buy new tires every few races, or wait for hours) and a price on additional content which is usually nothing but a piece of artwork (which is cheap to create in contrast to the accurate simulator content). The biggest problem with this is that these games are labelled as "free" while in reality you pay subscription + extra for additional content.
I would actually like to pay for games on my mobile, but I don't want to play games that where the whole game design is optimized for maximum IAP profit rather than maximum fun. But when browsing the Android market for games, you just can't find any interesting games that do not employ this IAP pricing model.