Times change. Converting demos into premium purchases used to be a viable business model, but it's not anymore. Selling premium games on the app store used to be viable. It's not anymore. You've got access to balance sheets - would you disagree?
Re: "widespread hate for IAP among gamers", that only applies to gamers, who compose a negligible part of the overall population. Any company that's trying to target the wider market ("people" instead of "gamers") is right to ignore what gamers think, because gamers are not the ones playing Candy Crush, Bejeweled, Farmville, etc.
IAP can be done well, IMO, but it requires game designers to accept and embrace the model. If they view their target market as exploitable simpletons, they'll neither make a good game nor make much money, and this happens too often (as I'm sure you're aware). This doesn't need to be the case, though it does require some care to do it well and make sure that the free experience is valuable to players while still providing compelling opportunities for people willing to pay to do so.
Re: updating games in response to telemetry, why is that any worse than when a website A/B tests different calls to action? Or do you think games should not optimize to be the most profitable businesses that they can be?
I'm almost out of energy for repeating myself on this point. Every good game that I can think of offhand made plenty of money. Right up to the present day. Selling a game for money is still a plenty viable business model. Now, ok, yes these freemium Skinner box things are not games in the same sense I and other gamers are used to. Just like slot machines have nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto, this new breed of F2P 'games' have nothing to do with Portal. What's unfortunate is that companies that used to make good games are selling out, in the very essence of the phrase. In my opinion, it's not because what they were doing before isn't viable, it's because their management is that admirable combination of greedy and risk-averse.
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.
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.
Re: "widespread hate for IAP among gamers", that only applies to gamers, who compose a negligible part of the overall population. Any company that's trying to target the wider market ("people" instead of "gamers") is right to ignore what gamers think, because gamers are not the ones playing Candy Crush, Bejeweled, Farmville, etc.
IAP can be done well, IMO, but it requires game designers to accept and embrace the model. If they view their target market as exploitable simpletons, they'll neither make a good game nor make much money, and this happens too often (as I'm sure you're aware). This doesn't need to be the case, though it does require some care to do it well and make sure that the free experience is valuable to players while still providing compelling opportunities for people willing to pay to do so.
Re: updating games in response to telemetry, why is that any worse than when a website A/B tests different calls to action? Or do you think games should not optimize to be the most profitable businesses that they can be?