The money you use is never much, but that is just part of the design to make you throw out even more -- a few cents here a few cents there and suddenly a sizable amount builds up.
Now I am 33 and have a bit of experience with addiction. That helps identifying these traps -- Dopamine kicks are always the same, chemically induced or by stimulating your brain with rewarding gameplay. But to be sure, would I have been born 20 years later, I would definitely be hooked on that particular game and still throwing money out for -- not much but a faster reward-cycle.
Do you think that's an inherently bad thing? Maybe it was for you at the time but I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (in this case "a faster reward-cycle") is a great thing to have available to people who already have their basic needs met.
>> I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (...) is a great thing to have
Yes, definitely. Each and every person can use (or learn to use) these games responsibly -- Not only games -- books, videos you name it -- like most people here I have a steam account, amazon prime, audible and a few other amenities where I wouldn't use my money in a compulsory manner. But a lot of free-to-play games have these little tweaks, that make it so very easy to spend money and don't even think twice about it. The occasional invite to start a transaction, placed at strategic "blockers" where you'll otherwise have to wait for 24h to advance can already be enough.
The crucial thing is to know about these mechanisms and have some sense of introspection into ones own behavior -- these skills can be learned.
EDIT: After I read some of the other responses and thought about it -- it is also important for us all, to acknowledge that some of these mechanisms do work like drugs -- neurochmically. And like with drugs prohibitions are counterproductive -- but a good effort in regulation might be a good step forward -- I've read very good examples in the other parts of this thread regarding a step like this.
In times passed we had a limited supply of literature, music, games, even god forbid, TV and movies. But these days we can put those on mediums that practically never degrade, and the rate of production has gone through the roof, and the producers of many of those goods are either dead and gone or there is no way to get money to them for their work, and we have the technical means to get them to whoever could want them at an almost zero marginal cost.
In that environment, a population that clocks time mindlessly feeding dollars to another party looks pretty sick. Which is, it would be my contention, is exactly what they are.
It is essentially the same as the old and uneducated who pump billions of dollars through the mindless gambling machines in my country. Not a image of humanity anyone would talk about with anything approaching pride/respect. Frankly, we should be ashamed...
This issue isn’t really the money -> gratification conversion, it’s the addictive nature of the process. If I’ve done everything I can to addict you to my product (to remove your ability to decide for yourself)... I’m in a morally bad area.
I’m of the opinion that some of these addictive response patterns should be banned from games flat-out, whether or not there’s a direct connection to someone’s line of credit.
If heroine were free, it would still be a problem for those addicted to it, if not for very long. (Although no one would have a financial incentive to get other people hooked, so it’s an interesting thought experiment as to whether use would increase or decrease).
The result -- fewer heroine addicts, fewer drug-related crime, less active criminal underworld (because of lower drug-related income).
An adult discourse and proper handling of addiction and substance abuse not only helps the addicts, but the whole society.
Giving away the addictive thing you still have to pay the societal cost of having people addicted to it. Switzerland handles this is a very admirable way and they have excellent outcomes, due to treating addiction as a disease rather than an individual moral failing.
I don't see why substance abuse in particular should get a super-special treatment in our discourse on human addiction-related behavior.
If it's destroying your ability to function in society, and something that you might want to drop the habit of, we should support our fellow people in doing it. If that is gambling, video-games, porn, they all activate similar dopamine related effects. Heroine and other opiates are super-effective at this, but it is still the same pathway being activated.
Secondly, the developers now have incentives to make you spend as much as possible, which is why you'll frequently see psychological tricks to move you in that direction.
Even if the developers were completely earnest, the rewards cycle will cause craving for mire rewards and will easily keep one glued to the game longer than intended.
If I need to exert willpower to use a service "responsibly" while the service actually makes its money from people using it irresponsibly, the service probably shouldn't be used in the first place.
It's just one data point, but my mother-in-law, who's in her late 60's, plays a lot of free games. She did an audit of her spending last year and discovered she'd spent over $500 in Candy Crush (I think that was the game). She complained to them and they gave her a partial refund, though to my knowledge she continues to play the game. I would bet a lot of these players are less tech savvy older folks.
The consumer is not always right....
Apple and Google care about the attractiveness of the platform. They want you to buy the phone with the impression that apps are included for free.
I don't agree though that there's only up-front payment or freemium options on the table, nor do I agree that consumers wouldn't accept up-front payment if that was really on the table.
Consumers paid up front for games on the Gameboy and other handheld devices, and they paid enough to keep that industry alive right up until mobile games took over.
Any expectations consumers have right now that mobile games should be free is on the publishers, not the consumers - and while consumers are enabling and supporting the freemium casino model, I don't think that us humans in aggregate have as much freedom of choice as we like to believe.
Regulation is the only way out of this bind, but with the continued rise of neoliberalism that's just not going to happen.
Seems to me like a chicken and egg problem where the entrenched nature of freemium games create a consumer expectation that games should be free up-front, causing consumers to avoid up-front payment, which causes up-front payment models to be less successful, which further entrenches the freemium game model, etc.
I agree with you on principle that it's up to publishers to make the effort to change this model, but I don't see how that could happen without some external nudging to overcome the market forces at work.
I've tried looking for games I could buy outright. Try finding a game without ads or in app purchases. It is extremely difficult to search by those criteria.
Indiscriminate third party advertising and freemium games are going to cause significant long-term harm to mobile gaming, and possibly also to society as a whole.
There's still some games out there that use IAP in small doses (<10 total) to sell reasonably sized chunks of content, but they don't make the money that freemium games do.
(My own device operates on the same rules as my kids - no third party advertising, no freemium IAP stuff. There's really nothing to miss in that space anyway…)
Not all are IAP free, but it seems most of them are.
It's much easier to make a pay to win game, so I could try a few times more than by trying to make a good game off the bat.
People just don't like to pay money up front, so getting them to start for free and then adding in the paid features to skip past your intentional delays is a pretty strong tactic to get people to pay when they otherwise wouldn't. I just refuse to do it because I find it unethical.
Most dont earn money. It is winner takes all market.
> Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
I am. A while ago I ditched "traditional" games entirely and are not coming back, ever. I played only mobile games after. Through it is less so now, I did not ditched them and are willing to continue playing them (unlike traditional that I have decided to not play again).
Regulate children's games such that they must have a minimum price (eg. $4.99) and contain no microtransactions.
The same could be done with pornography: require $4.99/month as the minimum charge, paid via credit card, to access, and DNS ban all sites which do not acquiesce.
On mobile this isn’t true. I worry that now that Nintendo has gotten a taste of the F2P riches via Fire Emblem Heroes these ideas will seep into other parts of the business.
It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting. Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
It would seem that the payers are the exploitable - those able to be swindled with casino mechanisms.
As an ex- free-to-play game developer and one who believes regulation often does more harm to consumers than good, I'd like to see something done. I'm just at a loss for what would work.