Abuse of free-to-play is destroying video gaming

[Cat333Pokémon]

This opening post has been copied here: http://www.floatzel.net/articles/free-to-play.php

If you've been lucky enough to avoid all the cruddy city-building Farmville clones on various mobile platforms (notably the modern license-squandering equivalent of LJN Toys, Gameloft) and Facebook, as well as all the garbage like King's Candy Crush that you hopefully have been lucky to avoid seeing on a neighbor's mobile phone or even in commercials on television (for goodness' sake), then allow me to explain "free-to-play" (or more accurately, "pay-to-win") gaming.

Microtransactions are the latest craze in gaming for devices that can have a linked credit card number. The general idea is that you can pay an insignificant amount of money to coerce a significant in-game change. More specifically, four notable forms of abusive microtransaction have come to light:

• First, forging equipment and constructing buildings within some games force you to wait real-word hours before the process can complete. Or, you can pony up a little cash and it'll be done right now! (Let's see how well that works in the real world...) "Gimme, gimme!"
• Second, bosses are extraordinarily difficult, and acquiring the necessary equipment requires a great deal of in-game currency, which can oh-so-conveniently be purchased, a real dime for a virtual dozen. "Mom, what's your Apple password?"
• Third, oh no, you've run out of lives in a puzzle game! Wait until tomorrow, or rope a new player into joining your quest? "But all of my friends are either playing or are too smart to avoid it, and I'll be on the train for another half hour. Oh well, over-draft that card!"
• Fourth, and this one is the most evil of all, an enemy clan has the upper hand in every fight against you. Your own crew is clad in silver and bronze gear, but they've got gold-tier weapons, which can only be acquired through extreme luck in the aforementioned reforging game, or by using the incredibly convenient shop manned by some guy whose grin is a little too wide for his face, obviously there to encourage draining your bank account. There's always the uninstallation option, too. There's no way to win this one. Sorry.

If you can't see where this is going, that "insignificant amount of money" adds up substantially as you purchase doohickey after whatchamacallit after tchotchke for your character or land. After a while (or perhaps after viewing your account statement), your brain acknowledges that you have dropped a small fortune--the cost of a AAA video game or two, or even an entire game console--on a silly mobile game, all because of loss aversion from sunk costs. In short, you've already made a small investment, so quitting makes that investment for naught.

Gameloft, in particular, seems to be wasting popular licenses left and right on this junk. The first major My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic game? Farmville clone. The advertisement on a scrap of paper included with a DVD of Men in Black 3? Farmville clone. ...And with the Blu-ray of Ice Age: Continental Drift? Yep, a Farmville clone. A good amount of the licensed stuff on the mobile stores? You guessed it: Farmville clones.

You often can see articles about microtransactions ruining many good franchises. Overall, I think all this disservice by the likes of these greedy mobile developers--both to fans and the original franchise creators--is just ruining classic video games and may likely send the entire art form into the ground again à la the Crash of 1983, where nobody trusts buying games any more due to too many mediocre experiences.

To sum it all up, I'm going to quote that last review:

Originally Posted by David Jenkins

Just play a video game, a real video game, and help stop these hateful anti-games from spreading their poison any further.

[Dragonite]

I never understood the allure of these microtransaction things (and by the way, Tetris is fifty times better than Candy Crush). Hell, I think most MMOs are dumb, to begin with. That being said, I don't know as much about this all as I probably should, as a game design nerd.

Also, a bunch of you may find this video interesting. The guys have done a bunch of other videos on F2P too, if you liked this one.

Lastly, fun fact about me, someone actually asked me to help them implement microtransaction code in a Game Maker game. I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to feel about that.

[Cat333Pokémon]

I think my personal preference is to avoid spending money on a product where I don't get anything out of it. I have to say that one of the best ways that I've seen folks make a game free is by simply releasing a demo, which contains the first few levels of the game, then at the end of the demo showing off some of the levels that can be found in the full version. Often, they get you because you'll play the demo a couple times, think it's fun, and want to try out new parts of the game. It also lowers the odds of you from buying a game you'll resent having bought because you can sample it first (and resented sales almost certainly skew sales figures, especially lately with many games focusing heavily on pre-order bonuses, which you have to invest in before the reviews are published).

Now, I don't mean time-limited trials. Those are no fun because they're too arbitrary and you can't feel like you've completed all there is to do in the demo.

Although, that money bomb thing that allows nearby folks to get money as a form of playing Santa Claus sounds really cool.


However, I do play a single free-to-play game, and I have purchased the "premium" version for $3 because the game was a lot of fun, had a great premise, introduced me to a lot of great music, and paying for microtransactions meant skipping what made the game fun. It's called SongPop, a simple name-that-tune game that pits you against other players, seeing who can guess the titles faster and score the highest in each round. You earn currency for winning, and you even earn a little currency for losing. After playing a bit, you can acquire enough currency to purchase a new playlist, each of which contains songs of a specific theme or genre. (Of course, you can purchase this currency with real money, and they're sold in almost the exact same units, 400 coins, as the prices of most playlists, 399 coins.) They limited the free game by having a low maximum number of players you could face at once, urging you to either remove people who hadn't played in a while or become VIP/premium to raise the cap. (VIP is a temporary version of premium, lasting only a week or a month or whatever, and it's rather expensive in comparison to premium.) In addition, you could get longer song clips, higher quality audio, and no advertisements. VIP is the one thing I think ruined the game a little, as the features have been gradually getting removed for premium users: clips are shorter, the sound quality isn't as great, and VIP has a much higher player cap. (At least keeping the older version of the game prevents some of these from taking effect, and I've backed up the paid-for APK just in case something goes wrong with my tablet.)

[Dragonite]

I just now thought of this, but would Steam's trading cards count as "microtransactions?" You basically have to spend money to get a full set, except you don't actually have to pay any money because you can basically earn it by selling cards, yourself. And the cards are completely worthless except as collectors' items for your favorite games, or to feature on your profile, and they're tied to your account so you're not left hanging if your computer dies.

[Magmaster12]

I'm just wondering did you see last week's episode of South Park about Farmville knockoffs?

The games can be REALLY addictive but once you stop it's actually incredibly easy to never come back.

[GreenMan]

Like Scott one of the few games that I play in this genere is Songpop though I also play here and there Age of Choas (it sucks thanks to the devs tanking it I haven't spent another on it and only reason I go back is that there is a few people I talk to, most at this point I have on other means so I go back even less often.) The other one is Dragonvale, you can buy gems to progress faster and but I've yet to have a reason to they give you plenty of space and it's something I poke in look around at my dragons and leave alone for a while.

One other one that I do play is Plants vs. Zombies 2 it falls in this catogeory because you can buy new plants upgrade the number you can use and all that fun. Like the original it is at a lot times frustrating when the one plant that can help you didn't bring. I've had it since release and again yet to spend any money on it, they balance it well enough I feel they aren't trying to get into my pockets but sadly it's something that is only supported by the people who are letting their pockets get into it. If it was on the app store as a game for 5 bucks I would have buy it, cause I love plants vs zombies and the previous game was good.

[Cat333Pokémon]

Originally Posted by Dragonite

I just now thought of this, but would Steam's trading cards count as "microtransactions?" You basically have to spend money to get a full set, except you don't actually have to pay any money because you can basically earn it by selling cards, yourself. And the cards are completely worthless except as collectors' items for your favorite games, or to feature on your profile, and they're tied to your account so you're not left hanging if your computer dies.

I would say they partially do, but the fact you can actually sell them for Steam funds (which you can turn into subscriptions--I don't like referring to them as purchases or "owned" games with those icky terms) kind of makes them less of an abusive microtransaction.

Originally Posted by Magmaster12

I'm just wondering did you see last week's episode of South Park about Farmville knockoffs?

The games can be REALLY addictive but once you stop it's actually incredibly easy to never come back.

I saw a clip from it. *sees it on South Park's official site* Well, I know what I'm watching tonight.

[kakashidragon]

Speaking of Free-to-play games, i do play 1 online game every once in awhile its called Fallensword(from hunted cow), its like an old school RPG game thats kinda like Diablo. (But theres no final boss, you just keep leveling up while they make levels, monsters and areas ect.)

I havnt yet spent a dime on it, but to me once i hit lv400! im going to need more Stamia points to keeping playing it more often. (Which you have to spend these orbs to upgrade your max stamia points that you sometimes have to spend $60 to get 400 of them)

[Twiggy]

One indicator for me to see if a free-to-play game is more like pay-to-win: does it take more than two days to get to a reasonable level without using in-app purchases?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of F2P games fail at that, hard. Sometimes even whatever IAP you can do is extremely limited in usability or is going to end up completely used up by the end of the day...

To be honest, I find a lot more enjoyment in playing (possibly full-priced) 3DS games.

[Trainer_Kylce]

Well, Twiggy, the ltimus test that I use is "How well I can do by paying actual money" vs. "How badly am I gimped if I don't pay"

Take AdventureQuest for example. Aside from the one time payment to upgrade to "Guardian", which I think it's fair(And isn't necessarily needed. I own a non-guardian character and she's doing just fine without guardianship.) you could call it F2P . There are far lesser games on the eShop for more.We should take a look at their in-game currency, Z-tokens.
And here is my unofficial analysis.
While there are things you will miss out on, and there is an advantage to paying...a lot of the stuff you buy with in-game money (your gold) typically can work just as well. You don't /need/ any of the stuff in that game, and there's nothing saying that you have to. You can do just as well without 'em.
...But they're still nice to have.

Let's compare ths to candy crush saga, which has been beaten to death, so I'll let you use your own experiences.

While something like AQ is considered F2P and there is an advantage to paying, I would hardly call that game P2W.