This is sort of like what advertising does to people in real life.
Re:How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
by el_dev_hell on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:34PM
(#19844624)
No really.
An ad convincing me to try X energy drink at least results in me getting an energy drink.
Games like this are selling you on a worthless digital item.
The idea is that advertising often gets people to buy things that are bad for them (like maybe an energy drink?) that takes up resources to produce. Maybe people buying virtual digital items is better for society than buying a brand new Corvette.
The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.
Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.