The Evils and Merits of Free to Play Discussion

In the forums I've been on, the term I've seen used that kind of stuff is "moneyhatting" and while there have been blatant abuses seen on various sites, I still think that most gamers consider far more prevalent than it really is.

Do you know how many times I've been asked if I work for a developer, because I maybe get a bit overzealous in spreading the word about indie games that I think look promising or that I enjoyed? At least once every thread/forum. Sometimes I wonder why people find it so hard to accept that reviewers and passionate gamers just enjoy the game and have no ulterior motives

As for freemium, I've seen games do it well and I've seen games abuse it. Quadropus Rampage is fantastic free game that never feels like the player needs to spend a cent. Deadly Bullet and Beat Leap are free games without any timers or paywalls or IAP

 

I think all the TA bashing and freemium bashing is getting a little out of hand. Here is my take on it as a 45 year old gamer with a full time job and family.

I actually like the concept of a freemium game. It gives me a chance to try out the game before spending money on it. And a good number of them let me play a long time or until I get bored with it before I need to consider spending money.

What really irritates me about some freemium games is the value you get for your purchase. I grew up paying, at most, $60 for a high quality game with hours of play time and high production values. This is my benchmark. If a game offers those same kind of values I'll consider spending money on it.

Take for example Real Racing 3. Initially I loved this game because at launch you could actually play the game for free if you were willing to wait out the timers and plod through the career. This was a good thing because the value of the IAP was (and still is) disgusting. You could literally spend $20 to simply extend your play time 10-20 minutes. As it is now, with the latest version, you can't complete a series unless you buy currency and the prices of the currency are so high you'd be into the game for hundreds of dollars just to complete a few series.

I relate this back to my benchmark. I'd argue that RR3's content is worth good money. I'd consider it console-quality. So with that I'd consider spending up to $60 if doing so I could complete the game. The thing is a $60 purchase will barely buy you one car in the game. And there is no way I'm spending more on the game than I would for a game like Forza 4 which gives me much more content for the same price.

Other EA offerings are the same way. And this trend is now in some of Gamelofts titles as well.

For me, I refuse to spend money on consumable IAP like timer skips and temporary boosts. I will spend money on things that add permanent content like missions, cars, cards etc. And even in-game currency if I can use the currency to buy permanent content. But if the cost to buy the content is so high that I'd need to spend more than $60 (or whatever percent of that I deem the game to be worth) to complete the game I will dismiss the game and move on.

 

About the conspiracy stuff -

I think much of what you see from TA comes from a pro-developer viewpoint - sympathetic to the people who made the game. I've seen the staff lamenting about F2P like everybody else, but they gotta review the games that are released, and those exist within the F2P-dominated ecosystem of the app-store. Rather than brow beat every developer about their use of F2P, which would be a very tiresome thing to hear repeated every day, they accept this as the norm and get on with talking about game content.

Pro-developer does not equal conspiracy.

 

The timers in this game suck. Period. Anyone who says otherwise has only tried the game and even if they liked it a lot, they arent actually playing it. If they are, more power to them. I seriously doubt it though.

Having too many other games to play in the meantime is not really a valid argument. Having too many games to play is the reason I pretty much stopped playing iOS games altogether for a long time. Most of them turn out to be uninteresting (to me) and a waste of time (even the ones highly reviewed by TA and other sites). Now I try to download only those games which I think have a very high chance of me actually liking them. Thanks to TA plays I can do that now more effectively (ie while working or doing something else) without the need to read a 1000 odd words article for a free/99cents game. Even then only a few games end up being a satisfying experience. And once you find such a game, there's nothing more frustrating than not being able to play when you want to.

The game in its current condition, requires you to pay atleast $30 if you actually want to be able to enjoy it without being bothered with the timers. First of all, you need to buy better players or you simply won't be able to advance beyond the second league. It's practically impossible to get better players without buying them. If you try the grinding approach, I doubt anyone can gather enough cash and coins to get a decent list of players without playing it for weeks if not months. So that's 12 bucks minimum (incl the current 40% discount) you need to spend. Even after that you'll need to pony up more dough to actually play the game more than 10 minutes every 2+ hours. Assuming this game will hold my interest for a couple of weeks max, it'd be fair to say I'll need to spend atleast $20-30 if I want to play uninterrupted, ie whenever I have the time and chance to play it. As good as this game is, do you really think its worth $30+? Especially compared to other games which are as good or even better and cost anywhere between 0-10 dollars? Is this comparable to animal crossing on 3ds? Or even the iOS port Phoenix wright (even at its full price of $16)? I'm not against free to play games and certainly have enjoyed a lot of those but mostly coz I never really had to spend more than a couple of bucks on something like a coin doubler or ad-disabler. I doubt there's a single F2P game on iOS worth spending $30 on.

Like I said in the other thread, I'll be lying if I said I have the slightest idea about what's the best business strategy should be for this or any other game. There are games on top of AppStore grossing charts which are a 100 times worse than this game and yet they are so successful. So I don't really blame pikpok nor do I consider them greedy or evil. It's their bread and butter. I personally won't leave any chance I can increase my profit margin and charge the customer a bit more, if I could, at my work. I won't however blame the customer if he's disappointed by this. Same way, I don't understand how anyone could argue against my disappointment with this game. There are so many F2P games with a fair monetisation system. My disappointment is that pikpok while created a great game, they couldn't manage to price it reasonably.

/rant

I still love the game. And I hate it too. Hard to decide which feeling is more powerful.

 

Puzzle & Dragons.

Spent $65~ and don't regret it. Yes, I could've bought 65 different games, a console game even, but I would not get the same level of enjoyment.

 

Awesome stuff? All freemium does is gimp gameplay. Also, it's not being "stuck in old ways", it's maintaining standards.

Also, nice job moving my other posts here. Deleting my truths would have been too obvious so this was a smart move.

 

I just wish we could go back to the days when games came in two versions.

The paid full version with no iap and the light version that was free so you could try the game out.

That was perfect and infinitely better than freemium.

 

That's strange that people ask you if you have ties to devs, never happened to me once, and I try to spread the word too alot.

Probably it's because of having your site in your signature, I think.

 

I don't think it's that you guys are more open-minded, but rather you see the same things devs do... freemium brings in more people and more people equals the chance to make more money. I imagine everyone doing a job wants to make money at the end of the day. The sad reality though is this new bigger changed market has de-evolved into people that don't care about gaming media as they are just going to hit the appstore and see the top free/paid charts and download the next popular free app and play for that 5 minutes or whatever until they find something that addicts them enough to start forking over money and making it a regular part of their day.

Serious gamers read game sites, participate in the forums, and actually try to help other gamers avoid freemium pay-wall/timer whatever games and sometimes help promote games that don't have any of this garbage that are actually fun to play. Sometimes TA tries to help with collecting some of the ways people in the forums avoid IAP in freemium games with a nice tips article... but in a way that actually helps the freemium market out by getting more people to play those games to move them up the charts.

I freely admit, I'm stuck in the past when it comes to paying for in-game crap through IAP... but I'm actually fine with being stuck where I am because I see no value for my dollar at all in buying stuff through IAP. It's like buying fake toy money.

...

As for the Evils & Merits of freemium gaming, it's pretty much all positive in the devs favor for making the largest pay day possible with a game to hire a psychologist and do soft launches & closed betas with people to determine the best way to hook them into both playing daily and getting them to open the wallet to dump more money into the game. Sure many freemium games don't go quite as down the rabbit hole of greed as others, but most are geared towards being as addictive as possible like any drug induces some effect of being happy/mellow/whatever while getting the customer to come back each day to play and buy more and more stuff that often isn't a restorable purchase.

Freemium is the new drug. Which is not too surprising when you hear people talking how the latest game is like crack or some other drug. But to me it's pretty easily to spot these games... avoiding them though is a little harder when a favorite franchise suddenly flips to freemium and there's no cost barrier to try it out. I admit, I've wasted too much time on freemium games in the past and I'm trying to avoid all freemium now and just focus on premium gaming (of which, there's plenty to play). Thankfully I'm tougher with my wallet than I was with being willing to try some of these money traps... and I've grown a little stronger to the amazing amount of peer pressure put on by certain people around here that insist you must try this new latest freemium trap before judging it.

Definitely the best thing anyone can do is not download these games to begin with.