I don’t like writing negative articles that don’t include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms … but it’s still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.
Why are these gaming studios so intent of killing themselves?
Because massive application stores created a race to the bottom – as well as a huge pile of crap to wade through. Ten to twenty years from now, we won’t look back favourably upon the App Store or Google Play.
Simple: profits. People are stupid and they fall for this stuff. At first you may think “Oh, I’ll pay for this consumable item only this once, I don’t have time right now,” but then later on you buy a 2nd one, then third and eventually you feel you’ve already invested so much money in the game that you’d just be throwing it all away if you quit now — a very clever, profitable loop. And people keep falling for it over and over again.
Since the problem lies between the ears of your Average Janes and Joes there’s little you can actually do about it. You can blame companies and devs all you want, but what they’re doing wouldn’t work if people didn’t let it work.
Exactly. All this comes down to is profit. And the stats are clear. IAP games produce more profit than pre-purchased games. I hate it, and don’t contribute to the IAP profit machine, but that’s the way it is.
Basically: they are gaming user into paying. 🙂
(if that is even proper English)
Edited 2014-02-03 09:08 UTC
It is nothing short of fraud, especially when minors are involved, and should be forbidden by law.
I stop reading any comment that begins “others are stupid but I’m smart”. The standard rejoinder to this inane comment “If you are so smart why aren’t you rich”?
Plenty of smart people are not rich. Plenty of remarkably stupid people are rich. I think you’ll find that this more often comes down to luck or a willingness to step on others rather than intelligence.
Also, by your logic… is no intelligent person ever able to point out the shortcomings of others? It it really your contention that there are no stupid or foolish people out there?
If you’re so rich how come you’re not smart?
If they wanted, app store owners could have enforced some rules like: in app purchases are completely forbidden.
If they confine this to mobile gaming, i have no problem with it. It is if or when they transfer this to real games i would start to get mad.
They already did. It is called downloadable content on console games.
Killer Instinct on the Xbox One is free to play with IAPs for more characters.
Some Steam games already have this.
They can transfer it to other kind of software, too. I mean you want this shiny new web browser, don’t you? Here, take it, it’s free! You’d like to have an address bar? You have to pay. You’d like to have a home button near the address bar? You have to pay.
Season passes as well.
As I titled, “Gamers are no longer the market”.
The market is profit. The market of people willing to put up with this sort of shit is greater than those wanting to pay for a good game. Therefore the popular market caters to these people.
These people are not gamers in the true sense, just people moving into a market that did not cater to them before.
Does not make me happy but there are still good games out there if you look for them. Just don’t expect these neogamers to be there or even care what you actually want.
These “games” more fulfill the same needs that gambling does. Gaming has not become big these days, they are just calling something else gaming.
Please do not think I am being negative here, just realistic. I like games still these days when I can find them!
Edited 2014-02-02 19:17 UTC
This is actually more true that you imagine. I worked in several work for hire projects making games with IAPs.
The bizarre thing is that most people DO NOT invest money in such games, not even a little. Profit comes from few users that invest a lot, and there is not really anything in the middle. It’s either whales or nobody.
Who are the whales exactly? No one knows, is it compulsive players or rich guys with plenty of money to spend? No one really knows.
Meanwhile, Steam is doing the same thing Nintendo did in the early 80s, which is to create a place with a quality bar for publishing, gamers love it and spend fortunes on content that is worth it.
Still, amazingly, investors and publishers ignore this proven formula of creating quality content, ignore the fact that distribution is cheaper than ever, and keep insisting on mobile and facebook with IAPs to a point it’s ridiculous. At some point it’s going to crash.
Edited 2014-02-02 19:21 UTC
It must crash, for the love of god! Crash and burn!
Investors and greed publishers do not really knows the game market, they just want the money and that’s it.
Just take a look at the games made by gameloft: a large chunk of it are just shameless ripoffs of popular PC/console games. Same for Zynga. This gives the whole Android game ecosystem a bad name, and keeps serious studios away.
The very first step to raise smartphone gaming to portable console quality (DS/PSP) is washing away these crappy companies.
IAPs also benefit many small time developers as they are the most convenient purchase method (coupled with pervasive carrier billing).
The mobile gaming market is a bubble. A bubble that will eventually, and likely very soon if it hasn’t happened already, pop. Think the dot com bubble but with hipsters. I give Zynga 5 years until they’re bankrupt.
We’re nearing a new video games crash, just this time there’s no cartridges to bury.
Probably the same nimrods who are ordering Viagra from some drug store they were introduced to via a random spam email. Or else sending money to somebody in Nigeria, to receive cash from a rich relative.
There’s one born every minute …
This general pattern is the same for most addictive behaviours including gambling, alcohol, drugs and collecting beanie babies. Most people spend very little money and a few spend a great deal.
Edited 2014-02-02 23:56 UTC
Same thing is happening with apps. Ever since iOS was introduced, developers have figured out that there’s a whole mass of tech tards out there ready and willing to use and spend money on apps, and you don’t have to put a whole lot of work into making apps for these people. The result is that a lot of high-profile apps have been released that are very polished and slick, but have very little in the way of functionality. Even older apps have been re-released with a lot of their functionality ripped out, and a new coat of paint applied, with the big new feature being, ‘share your activity with your friends!!!’
In other words, the industry has declared war on power users, just as it has done with core gamers. (It certainly does not like introverts either.) Of course, I don’t really blame them… power users and core gamers are picky and expensive to develop for, while tech tards will use whatever you give them, as long as it’s idiot-proof. It just sucks being told constantly that if you want xyz feature, ‘you are in the minority’, which basically means the minority doesn’t matter anymore.
Edited 2014-02-02 21:12 UTC
I think this is a welcome move, the fierce reduction in complexity in both interaction design and feature set has been to the benefit of many.
Features need to be thoughtful, not plentiful. Make something as simple as it can be, but no simpler.
Take multitasking for example, the move to push services exposed a whole host of applications which simply did not NEED background support and where consequently just wasting resources.
Moving to a model where background amplifies functionality instead of defining it has led to much better designed apps and it has also led to platform agnostic services.
I guess it depends on whether the features you wanted were left on the cutting room floor. For example, Chrome doesn’t have a menu bar. Seems simple and elegant, right? After all, who needs a menu bar when you can get to all that functionality with the Chrome menu. Having a menu bar would just be a waste of space, right?
That is, unless you’re visually impaired and run all of your apps maximized. And then when you run it under Remote Desktop (or similar) the RDP ribbon obscures much of the tab bar, making the app a pain in the ass to use in these situations.
In the free software world GNOME is the one doing just that. And they get a lot of annoyed (power)users by doing that. They always end up putting a few things back.
Xfce has done a much better job of being as simple as possible, but no more.
Gnome 3 is a solution looking for an answer, and Gnome has been bad about removing features that are actually useful rather then figuring out an elegant way to expose those features to the end user.
I’m not saying the GNOME developers are right, I’m just saying that is what they believe. 😉
Lennie,
“I’m not saying the GNOME developers are right, I’m just saying that is what they believe. ;-)”
Possibly. It seems Gnome was being designed for the audience they wanted rather than the audience they had, which is why they’ve received so much flack. Given a non-power user demographic Gnome3 may have gone down a lot better. Personally I agree with Flatland_Spider that Xfce does a better job at being simple without ditching features that are useful for us.
Edited 2014-02-03 18:41 UTC
That must be the most abused of the quotations ascribed to Albert Einstein (the more used form been “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”)
First, we have to have on mind that it can be or not true, depending on which human activity it is applied and who is applying it.
On science, specially on physics and math, it has a very powerful appeal and a way to judge it: we should look for a model capable to generate all the “observable” (present and, hopefully, new ones) “phenomena” and yet, it should have the lowest number of fundamental entities. That is what physicists and mathematicians strive to achieve when they establish the bases of their work.
Now, how can it be applied to art and tools (what programs are, after all)? Perhaps, what you see as excess is exactly what makes some app so useful to me, or a music so appealing.
On my view, and I guess to others too, some people are using this “truism” to justify actions that are perceived as unjustifiable to others, i.e., removing previous functionality and/or altering radically the interface. They self-proclaim they are right and follow their goals ignoring how their modifications affect their users.
On FOSS it sometimes goes to radicalism: patches that could restore some functionality (because, after all, if you rewrite the basic blocks you may be forced to rewrite the implementation of the functionalities and you very well, may not have the time) are refused for no other reason than “it is not a fundamental thing”, for who? Luckily, on some cases a fork or the patch goes public.
On binary only apps, we may be forced to look to alternatives, when they exist, and, may the user base be huge and the dissatisfaction big, get the “developer” to surrender and correct course.
I think complexity and managing that complexity is a huge issue for our times in the tech field. Both while engineering software or while designing user interfaces.
The cognitive load we impose on users imo is too much, and a rich feature set is often exposed in a non contextual mess of options. For examples look at KDE or Office 2003s toolbar mess.
Look at Office itself today even, packed to the brim with features of marginal use to the majority, but the majority is exactly who pays the price for these features (in terms of longer release schedules, less intuitive user interfaces, and higher costs).
The fierce reduction in complexity that the mobile revolution has ushered in has distilled applications into their purest functional forms. Features which have had their costs hidden by Moores Law are now seen for what they are, a sometimes superfluous nuisance.
Of course I’m generalizing a bit: Not all features are complex and costly, not all are to the detriment of the users, but discerning this difference is what separates entities like Apple from the wannabes like Samsung.
You need to have taste, you need to know what’s good for your users often before they know what’s good for them. The only reason power users are so obsessed with at times pointless complexity is because they’ve become conditioned to do so.
The one thing this mobile take over of computing has done that I think is most meaningful is force us to reconsider all of the old rules we played by.
Right, so you dumb it down because that is what is good for the majority, and if you happen to be not in the majority, then what? You should go jump off a bridge, or just learn to love not having as much functionality as you used to?
One thing Apple has decided in iOS is that 3rd party apps are not allowed to change their notification tones to use any that are built into the OS. I can understand some of their decisions when they severely gimp the OS of functionality, but other things they do are just retarded.
Yes. Or use a niche product. Power users who should honestly have a sense of awareness towards market realities seem strangely offended when told that they’re not the target audience anymore.
I’m sure over time the feature sets of mobile applications will grow, just in a more thoughtful manner.
Yes, you’re right. When you’re told that you flat-out don’t matter anymore, by a market that you helped create, it tends to rub you the wrong way.
Depends on the user. I, for one, would not have KDE any other way.
Scouring through options and configuration in order to produce a perfectly-tailored interface is actually *fun* to me. You are correct in that it’s too much of a hassle for *most* users, though.
Thankfully, that’s why we have toolbar hiding and discoverable options with sane defaults.
Meeting the needs of 100% of users is impossible, but most of the niche features end up being killer reasons to pick a particular piece of software for different users.
Once you use the term “gamer” you lose me. I won’t touch anything associated with that term. I find it discriminatory, derogatory, demeaning and disturbing.
Endorsing its use and applying it to yourself sets yourself up for terrible treatment by companies.
Not a frequent gamer myself, but I’m sure not a fan this nickle and dime model (boy this expression really hasn’t kept up with the times!). It’s really sad to make the quality of the gaming experience be dependent upon how much real money one is willing/able to pay. Now even your in-game characters get the second-class experience, just like you do in real life! The point of games is to get away from the limitations of real life.
http://www.xboxachievements.com/news-2705-The-Future-is-Apparently-…
It may be a futile fight, however if nothing else I think the very least the industry should do is to properly advertise the fact that they use in-game micropayments. There should be a field at the store level to indicate in-app charges as users are browsing the store.
I think the moment when a game asks you for your credit card details is the time to find another game.
The123king,
I agree, but I still think truth in advertising should require them to be upfront about the in-app expenses to help users make more informed decisions about the apps they want to install. Right now the studios who charge an honest price up front are at a disadvantage against those who use bate & switch pricing.
Like car dealerships who add fees to the advertised prices, I suspect it’s going to become the industry norm since being honest and NOT doing it places the vender at a disadvantage compared to those who advertise lower prices and recoup through fees.
The Google play store puts “IAP” next to the star rating to signal an app that uses in-app purchases.
Apple lists “Offers In-App Purchases” directly below the app name and developer and has a detail dedicated to “In-App Purchases” detailing what the IAPs are and their fees.
Edited 2014-02-03 01:02 UTC
I find the whale hunting aspect of f2p very interesting. These people generate more than enough revenue to offset normal players which just seems insane.
I just can’t fathom why anyone else thinks paying for things like this is a good idea. Even the guilty “Well it was free so I might as well buy something” is only perpetuating it further.
It could be that I’m not an addictive personality but free means you don’t get any money from me. I will play until a paywall then I move on.
I find the whale hunting aspect of f2p very interesting. These people generate more than enough revenue to offset normal players which just seems insane.
I just can’t fathom why anyone else thinks paying for things like this is a good idea. Even the guilty “Well it was free so I might as well buy something” is only perpetuating it further.
It could be that I’m not an addictive personality but free means you don’t get any money from me. I will play until a paywall then I move on.
Actually, you are using a f2p game right now.
It’s called OSNews, it’s payed for by advertising.
I’m a guy partly doing webdevelopment and because of HTML5-based apps I just see it all as one big market.
The reason most smartphone apps don’t use advertising is because of screen real estate. The ads are to annoying on such a small screen.
On the web the screens are bigger (and some just use an adblocker) so advertisements can pay for it. Barely, there is no profit to be made.
It doesn’t matter if you are creating videos on youtube and getting payed by Google for the advertisements or any of the other things mentioned above. It’s all the same market.
People are creating content (games, videos, apps, websites or book authors) and giving it away for free, because that gives you the largest audience. Valve said: free games get 10 times larger audience !
They need to get payed somehow, but Valve also said: that 10 times large audience also got them 3 times larger revenue.
Here is an other example where the book content is available completely for free linked directly from the publisher website:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028048.do
“Read Online for Free >
Enjoy this interactive version, brought to you by the O’Reilly Fluent Conference”
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/index.html
In this case I think the model is so people buy more O’Reilly books.
Edited 2014-02-03 10:42 UTC
Thom’s conclusion completely ignores that Zynga and EA (villainized as the two largest perpetrators of IAP) exist across all platforms and Android and iOS wouldn’t even have been considered their primary platforms at the time that both drew attention for the shift in the market place.
IAP was not uniquely enabled by the dominant smartphone platforms nor is it exclusively endemic to these platforms. Maybe casual, social gaming could be specifically blamed, but, again, there is plenty of evidence against this as well…
Edited 2014-02-02 21:02 UTC
In-application purchasing owes its existence almost exclusively – maybe even just exclusively – to the App Store, Google Play, and similar venues. Not only were these platforms the first venues for IAP, they also provided the race-to-the-bottom in the business of selling (mobile) applications.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft spurred it along by promoting the quantity of applications as the one true metric of success – instead of quality. You may not like the truth, but there it is.
Virtually every word you utter in this comment is completely and utterly wrong and it’s entirely evident to almost everyone who reads it.
Edited 2014-02-02 21:29 UTC
Thom, IAP was popular in online games back when there was nothing like mobile app stores. It grew naturally, and naturally it overtook the newer markets – online casual games, social network games and mobile games first – there simply was no pre-existing tradition there, so users had to accept IAP in such games as market standard.
Sure, app stores have their flaws, but you really shouldn’t attribute every new plague of the day to them simply on basis that the problem is most visible there.
While in-app purchases may have become commonplace thanks to the mobile platforms, they have existed in online PC games for quite some time, probably even longer than Apple’s App Store exists.
I’m pretty sure facebook was the original breeding ground for IAP games.
Thom, Free to play goes back to the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play#History), especially in Korea. Remember Guild Wars back in the mid-2000s. Habbo Hotel had in app purchases back in 1999/2000 (I don’t recall which).
Free to play might have come into its own with IAP’s in the various app stores/facebook; but it was already a viable business model before then. All that happened is that it made these things palatable to (more or less) the “west”.
What we are seeing now is decades of refinement to the business model till the point it has been (for want of a better word) perfected. But it isn’t new, nor a product of the app stores you blamed.
Free to play, or in app purchases don’t have to be a problem. I think Triple Town balances the factors quite well. I played the game for two months before I liked it enough to buy unlimited turns. Considering just how long I have played that game it was a good investment. But the point was that I was able to try out the game and get a good sense of it without committing at first.
The point is you can do free to play well, or you can do it badly, but free to play isn’t the problem. It is predatory applications of it that are. Besides, who doesn’t want to put hats on their sloths…
IAPs bring in the dough, are more convenient (keep in mind iOS has no trial option, it’s either free and high visibility, or paid and low visibility — or free with IAPs)
This is where the money is for right now, but the minute a better monetization strategy catches on then developers will move on much like they did with advertisements.
Agreed. But these games are targeting the casuals. People who actually buy stuff for FarmVille.
I dislike also the prostituting of old games.
Also EA being EA.
This pay to play via IAP has been an ongoing problem for the last few years and is steadily getting worse. The ads are the worst thing yet. Some “games” are nothing but glorified ads to get people to load another game.
My daughter has essentially had a tablet since she was about 2 years old. I would have a set screen with games or other things for her to play. At first these were pretty innocuous, but for the last couple of years, and especially the last 6 months or so, more and more games require “online” connection even for solo game play, try very very hard to get you to pay for IAP goods (which I do not, and have not since Angry Bird Space got $20 by less than ethical means in my opinion) if you want to do anything more than the barest basic game play, and then have forced ads that are hard for little ones to make go away so they can keep playing. Usually it ends up play store pages and my daughter asking to load another game.
In short, my young daughter can’t just play a game on the tablet any more. The games are no longer about play, but about gouging and opening wallets.
And the absolute worst offenders in my opinion is Google. Not because they allow or support IAP, I actually think IAP was a good idea for some things, rather Google is at fault for their policy making. Google will NOT do refunds for any IAPs. This is why everyone has switched to them.
Why would any game maker sell a game for $0.99, $1.99, or more when players could in turn ask for a refund. Instead they get 2, 3 times or MORE from IAP and don’t have to worry about refunds. I wonder how many credit card companies get his with contested charges from IAPs? I imaging it’s got to be quite a few.
Some of it was problematic, but when the two evowles “EA” appeared, it explained everything.
http://consumerist.com/2013/04/09/ea-makes-worst-company-in-america…
With competition like the cable, wireless, and credit card companies, a game company won.
Twice.
Someone needs to start a riot in the prison-farm, oh, I mean “walled garden”. At least Google has the excuse of openness.
The ToS for an app prohibits things “offensive to large numbers of people”, which they apparently suspend when their 30% cut is large enough. The Bernie Madoff app would probably get approval.
An app that cost $100, that only displayed a clock that delayed past the refund interval, and then a “ha ha, pay another $100 to see the real app” would be approved.
The Cryptolocker unlock key access app would probably be approved.
IAP and it’s abuse is a byproduct of the age of digital downloads paid with digital wallets linked to your credit card.
This kind of scam has always existed: years ago there were games distributed in episodes where the total sum of the money spent on the game might very well be close to that of the computer it was running on.
What back then meant quite some work and logistics now is a matter of placing a button somewhere in your app and getting the user addicted enough to fall for the impulse buy.
And it’s not just an IAP issue, same happens with DLCs. What would once have been complete games are now sold in pieces, each at full retail price.
Mobile app stores are the current incubator of the most outrageous IAP scams but that’s just because it’s the single platform where anyone can publish an app and reach millions of potential customers, with the convenience of a payment system that favors impulse buying.
IAPs are now permeating to other platforms, eg. see the money packs you can buy for GTA V online or Forza Motorsport, and there we aren’t even talking about freemium but full retail price titles.
This crap is only going to get worse, and it’s here to stay for as long as there’s enough people falling for it.
It looks crazy, but then again we’ve gone from downloading third party maps built with freely available editors and playing on free public servers to being sold packs of 4 frigging multiplayer maps for over €20 and paying a monthly fee to play online… and all that seems to be perfectly fine and normal now.
The basic principles of an application store are good, but sure there are crap in your ways to get through. But just like in the physical market, you have to pick and choose a trusted store to buy a product. There are bad products that only wants your money, and there are good products. Application stores behave the same way, and the only difference is the convenience of the buyer.
People really love to bash anything when their comfort zone is threatened. I am glad to be corrected though if I miss something.
Edited 2014-02-03 05:12 UTC
In the old days, everyone and their dog released some shareware crap as well and it was also weed out the crap from the good.
At least now with app stores, we have the benefit of user reviews, and malware usually getting weeded out pretty quickly.
Rating is a fake, you don’t have to be a police detective to check user reviews on Google Store, it’s just a click away from 4.6 rating.
There are actual people who wrote them, and they have ABSOLUTELY nothing in common with this:
————————
A hell of a game!
by Reddragoncanada
Great game! Not your typical tower defence game either, graphics are hot and the theme and tutorial is devilishly entertaining!
Absolutily amazing
by Boogabooga5
I love it, now I am addicted
Love this game!
by James Unsworth
Pretty much like the computer based version but now I can play on my iPhone!
————————-
Those are “official” comments about the game in Apple Appstore. Usually I don’t care much about mobile games. I don’t care about sponsored reviews and advertising. But I care about people who will spend 10$ or more, hoping to fix their editor choice 4,6 stars game, only to realize that they were f.up from the start.
It’s like calling you to turn on a fax machine only to send a stupid agreement you never wanted. Or a fake bill and hoping that you pay anyway. Or God damned lottery with prizes that you’ll never win, simply because there aren’t any.
Maybe this game was done by new development team, who need a success to get promoted and get a chance to do something more ambitious. Maybe they were about to get fired and agree to do a s. instead. Maybe they were manipulated, created a fun game and then another team transformed it into cash cow. I don’t blame anyone. But I would be really ashamed to be one of them.
This discussion reminds me of an old adage, when confronted by someone complaining about the difficulty of finding a parking space in their neighbourhood ask them if they really want to live in a neighbourhood where nobody wants to park.
What the App Store software revolution, and it is a revolution, did was change the whole model of what one expects from software whilst enormously expanding it’s user base. Prior to the mobile app market buying software was all about choosing carefully between very expensive and super feature rich programs. Unless very affluent (or willing to use pirated programs) most people only bought a few programs, and in order to justify their cost those programs tended towards feature bloat and function creep, which meant that quite often buying a particular program felt a bit like committing to a platform. Even now if you choose Lightroom over Aperture, say, that feels like a commitment of going down one path in the future instead of another.
What mobile apps have done is establish an entirely new way to consume software. Now the model is small modular apps, very inexpensive, very focussed on a small area of activity. People are used to the notion of perhaps buying several apps with almost overlapping function just so you can get the one that works the way you want when you want to do something specific. Into to photograph on your phone? Then the common model would be to have a dozen of more photography apps in your app library and often just load them when you think you might want them.
The result is an explosion of choice, which is a good thing, but also an intensely competitive market with razor thin margins (although one where billions in revenues are distributed).
The upside is a system that makes more software available to do more interesting, and sometimes quirky, things. More people buying software than ever before, but also a desperate race to leverage that dollar or Euro out of your pocket, and a growing problem of discoverability. I understand the irritation with in app purchases and ads but it seems a small price to pay for the amazing choices I have about software that I carry in my pocket. There is some bad, a bit of ugly but a whole lot of good about the app market.
Tony Swash,
Actually it was much more evolutionary than revolutionary. Centralized software repos have existed forever in FOSS world. Companies like Lindow’s also had commercial software store in 2001. Handango’s mobile store cropped up in 2003, which I believe may have been the first in the context of mobiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handango
“Handango pionereed this on-air business model for smartphones which achieved great success some years later with similar Apple Inc.’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.”
It would be quite some time for the large companies to catch up with their own offerings. The original iphone was a web app platform and Cydia was the first to offer 3rd party software for the iphone (jailbroken of course). Apple’s own store wouldn’t debut until a year later in 2008.
There are lots of evolutionary roots for app stores, they just tend to get overlooked because they live in the shadows of the larger brands with all the market share.
While the emergence of online app stores is generally a good thing, I find it shameful that companies exploit them as a vender locking tool by taking away the owner’s control to get software from competing sources.
Edited 2014-02-03 16:51 UTC
I wasn’t really talking at the Apple App Store but about the rise of mass small inexpensive apps in general. Whoever developed/invented what and when, or how it all started is irrelevant to the point that now the mobile app software market is massive, global and exerting an hegemonic influence over the whole software industry. The global software business is totally different now compared to 10 years ago, the business model is completely different and the pattern of consumption and use of software is completely different. Whether that was an evolutionary process or one taken in significant lurches doesn’t matter, the fact is that the world of software has been transformed.
Why shameful? There are different models of how to get apps, the different models offer different pros and cons (some are more convenient,or secure or offer more choice of alternative routes for app acquisition, etc) and the consumer is free to choose which one they prefer. As far as I can see consumers still have huge freedoms to choose different models of devices and ecosystem, which is great. Where is the shame?
Tony Swash,
I think your timing is off, online software repos were available even before this, however the limiting factor for most people was broadband itself. Dial-up was holding back the adoption of online software distribution models at the time.
Well, on the one hand yes, but on the other hand it’s not really that different. Today we have online app stores, in the past we had the brick and mortar stores. Of course being online brings about some major new convenience aspects like 24×7 access, eliminating physical media, and not having to drive to the store, etc. Certainly the market players are different too: instead of bestbuy/staples/compusa/radioshack brick stores we have apple/ms/google online stores.
However in spite of all these changes, is the software business model truly all that different? In the past, software logistics forced people to buy software at physical software outlets. Consumers would browse the software organized by category on shelves, add them to a cart, and then pay using their credit cards. These days people buy mobile software from an online app store, which is almost a direct synonym for the old physical counterparts.
The internet, by enabling indy developers to self-publish, HAS created a truly different model. However the app store is in many ways a regression to the old days where we’re dependent upon middlemen again. Unlike the past where there were many stores competing to distribute software for each platform, today’s stores are enforced through OS restrictions. Having the device&OS manufacturers and app store operators being one and the same is a dangerous conflict of interest for competition.
It’s a shame that app store has been artificially linked to a restricted walled garden in order to block out competition. Better distribution models are possible, and yet they’re blocked by corporate gatekeepers who lock down the devices to themselves rather than allowing owners to choose other options.
Also known as the Unix philosophy
But what is this? I find myself actually kinda agreeing with you here. Is the sky falling?
Personally I loathe how most games implement IAP but it’s not like I *have* to play them. Just because I think they’re crap doesn’t mean no-one else will enjoy them.
And really, go to any supermarket and you’ll find a load of products that are essentially “crap”.
As long as there are “real” games for me to play that doesn’t have horribly implemented IAP I don’t see a problem. Heck, this might even be a boon for real and indie games when people get fed up with bad IAP.
As with everything else, it is open source versus the world. In 20 years will we be buying games, or buying a subscription to unlimited games, or buying stuff in games, or…
How about this: Which of those business models is killed off by open yet really high-quality clones of simple and traditional games?
Valve makes a lot of money publishing user content and sharing the profit with the creator. What happens when someone creates an open game framework that returns 100% of profit to the content creator? Will open games still have ugly visual design?
More content than ever is free on youtube, meanwhile big movie prices and budgets are bigger than ever. Is the end game state one of free garbage and expensive quality, making Thom’s noted state of expensive garbage a temporary situation?
First you have to choose which version to buy, if you really want to play as Imperial you have to buy the wibbly wobbly special edition. Ka-ching!
Then you pay a monthly subscription. Ka-ching!
Then you can pay to win in the in-game store. Ka-ching!
So you have:
– Normal retail price
– Special edition locked content at a premium price
– A Monthly Sub
– In-game store
All I waiting for now is news that they will advertise in the game for DLC and the in game store. Also a sponsorship by Mountain Dew.
There was 3000+ 5/5 reviews for that game. Who wants to bet that most of those are fake ‘inside’ reviews? 300+ bad reviews is a possible giveaway (however those could also be faked by competition). The bottom line is you can trust online reviews about as much as a political campaigns these days.
John Carmack (ID) warned game makers years ago that it would be in their best interest to self publish. Walled gardens are not good for the world but were advertised as ‘safe’ and ‘convenient’. They’ve been great for their facilitators : you know, the ones actually running the world. We fight over the scraps while they tap into our flow of funds and contribute very little. Controlling the market like a mob.
IAP also destroys the fun of a game for me. There is no skill involved in swiping a credit card, and I don’t have a sense of accomplishment, unlike spending hours killing level 1 creatures until I can kill a level 2 creature without taking too much damage.
Luckily, IAP hasn’t spread outside of the game sector. Imagine if MS did that with Windows or Office. Windows and Office are free, but it’s $5 to unlock IE, metered cut and pastes, the ability to save files is $50, and the ability to install 3rd party software is $100.
Microsoft actually does do this, albeit in a much less extreme version, with Office Starter. You get basic editing functionality for free, but if you want more advanced features (e.g. footnotes), you have to pay for an unlock.
It is oddly creepy the first time you play a game that is not a game. I hadn’t been much of a mobile gamer until I started to play Candy Crush.
For the first little bit, it seemed interesting. The levels were a challenge. There was some new skill involved. Sure, I saw the ability to pay for special items and waiting period every little while, but I didn’t think the game depended on these. So I played… eventually getting higher and higher. Eventually I realized how random the game was and how much it depended on people getting frustrated and maybe buying a special item. So I stopped playing.
Then my manager at work got me played Clan Wars. Again… it looked like a kind of interesting strategy game. Then, like Dungeon Master in the OP, I saw it for what it is. This happened much quicker than Candy Crush. Maybe because it was more blatant.
It’s been a real challenge to find actual games that I like to play. It’s not a problem with app-stores or anything. I love steam and am constantly buying games on there.
I don’t even think it is ‘greed’ or ‘profits’. Let’s face it, most products are done for profits. It’s just a really silly and easy way to make money it seems. It has more in common with ring tones or video poker. It’s too bad it ruins gaming on the mobile device.
In App Purchases are not inherently evil. Comixology, although not a game, is a great example of IAP done right. The main point of IAP is so you don’t have to leave the game to buy something. In the case of Comixology, it completely makes sense: you don’t want to leave the app to buy a new comic. In the case of games, this can be done properly, if it does not try to fool the user. Scurvy Scallywags does this right, it gives you all the tools to finish the game without IAP, if you want to upgrade things more quickly, you can use IAP. It also is a great way to sell expansions or new levels or etc.
So, i am a game developer, and personally don’t like being a target of freemium games, but this is the way i see it. We, as a society, love to pick on the film, music and print industries about their failure to adapt to the times. And we give them a lot of backlash about trying to fight it by introducing new technologies like 3D and 4K, which the majority of the consumer market doesn’t care about. Yet the games industry is the one mass media industry that has actually been incredibly reactive in moving toward a new business model that actually works and keeps them afloat. And here we are giving them grief about it.
Mobile games are made targeting a casual audience, one that basically has no interest in paying consistently. There are statistics in a lot of well read dev blogs to back this up. If you have a marginally successful freemium game, you might live to feed yourself another month, if you’re doing a pay-up-front title – unless you’re a well known IP, the chances are you make about $40 in your first 3 months and sink after that. And that’s the sad reality of being a game developer these days.
When you pay a game in advance you know how much money you have to spend on the game to play it. On the other hand you just have no idea how much fun it will be to play it. Most probably there won’t be options to speed up gameplay or they are called cheats.
When you have to do in game purchases you can start playing for free, so you have an idea whether your money will give you fun in return or not (but no garantee ofcourse).
If the creators of a game with inline purchases limit the amount of money a user has to spend get the full experience I have no problems at all with it.
That doesn’t mean they have to limit the amount of money a user can spend to speed up the game, but a limit on how much money a users pays to get the full gameplay doesn’t always make the game more expensive than a game one has paid for in advance.
Edited 2014-02-04 05:48 UTC
The reality is people are playing these games and rating them highly. Maybe the reviews are all faked, but clearly lots of people do play and buy these things otherwise the games wouldn’t be made.
So yes it is funny how much worse the new version is than the old for someone that wants to play it intensely, but apparently it is not interesting to a different user group.
Who are we to judge whether a game should be made in a certain way or whether users should or shouldn’t enjoy these IAP games?
I prefer games with up front purchases where you get everything, but I’ve played some IAP games like Dead Trigger as well. I didn’t buy anything, but it was fun to play for a bit until I got to a point where I either had to start waiting quite a while or pay. So I stopped. I was entertained for free by a fun game, and if I really wanted to keep playing I could have forked over a bit of money. Of course if I wanted to keep playing for a really long time it would be very expensive. But it’s still entirely up to me.
As long as people are also choosing to pay for games up front those games will survive. Let the people who do the IAPs enjoy those and stop worrying.