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A comment on How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry. Parent comment

Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by danielweber on Saturday February 01, 2014 @12:22PM (#7162273)
My rule is that there is no such thing as free-as-in-beer software. (There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.) The developer's bills will get paid one way or the other. The simplest and most efficient way is to just pay them up front. If you try to get things for "free" both you as the consumer and the developer will end up worse off.
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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by AJ007 on Saturday February 01, 2014 @01:15PM (#7162586)
Dwarf Fortress, the creator writes you a short story or illustrates a drawing in crayon in exchange for your optional donation. Quite the exception.
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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by bobjordan on Saturday February 01, 2014 @08:52PM (#7164417)
...and the developer lives on about $35K/year, which is far less than what he could be generating with that franchise.
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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by null_ptr on Sunday February 02, 2014 @12:59AM (#7165042)
Maybe that's because the creators don't see their work as a "franchise" and are happy to have a vibrant community around their game without needing to milk it dry for money.
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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by Proleps on Saturday February 01, 2014 @12:36PM (#7162372)
Most open source/free software(free as in liberty) is free as in beer. It gets payed for by donations and/or big sponsors. It has no hidden costs. Not everything is available as open source/free software, but it is enough have a usable computer and even some games.
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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by giovannibajo1 on Saturday February 01, 2014 @05:42PM (#7163808)
The difference is that such software goes through multi-year evolution and usage (be it bash or OpenOffice or kernel) so it makes sense for a company to invest on feature X that's missing for them, and get everything else for free.

On the other hand, in the game market, most games are a one-off experience with a very short lifetime (excluding MMO games). So there is no way they could be constructed through subsequent donations and evolutions.

Add to this the fact that open source communities are only made of programmers (because they are the ones benefiting most from the network effect and from incremental integration of software components), while games require other kind of professionals. Eg: volunteer designers in OSS world are mostly non existent; most of them are on the payroll of some sponsor.

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Re:How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry by philosophus on Saturday February 01, 2014 @02:20PM (#7162958)
I agree with this. I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV which has a monthly subscription fee. It's refreshing after Guild Wars 2 which was constantly trying to sell you something in the gem store. Unfortunately, I doubt many companies without the name recognition of SquareEnix/Final Fantasy could pull it off though.
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