Bloke steals $5m, spends $1m on Game of War IAP.

[mrs quoad]

California man spent $1 million playing Game of War

And here's a bloke who spent $2m of his (legitimately earned) income on Modern Combat. And managed to get a gamewide change by instituting a boycott on spending over an update he didn't like: http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/t...llion-in-a-mobile-game-then-he-led-a-boycott/

tbh, this is kinda why I overwhelmingly prefer "premium" mobile gaming; ie gaming with an up-front price. Most top end freemium apps have left me with a distinctly uneasy feeling that, in order to do remotely well in them, I'd have to spend far more on em than I would if they just had an honest / open / up front price.

(The first article claims that of those players who spend, the average last-year spend was $550. Though you don't need too many people spending utterly stupid amounts to bring the average up for everyone.)

 

[tommers]

There's some stat about 90% of their income coming from 1% of the players (I've made that up but it's something like that).

I hate it too. It changes the focus of game design from "this will be fun for the player" to "how can we get them to spend some money". All the real-time delays to research new stuff, difficulty spikes during the game to encourage you to buy help etc. Fucking awful shit.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I remember going to a game conference several years ago where one of the speakers made PvE MMOs for the SE Asian market, particularly South Korea. Purchases were standard then. He was saying that there was a game cultural difference between regions wrt this - it wasn't seen as cheating or unfair to buy a really cool sword in Korea, whereas in the European and US markets people looked down on it, though they were more prepared to buy subscriptions. This influenced his company's pricing model.

The stat about 1% of players ties in with stuff I also vaguely remember myself. I wonder how much there has been a shift to IAPs being seen as acceptable. Would be interesting to see stats from different markets.

(There was no suggestion that this was some sort of reflection of national culture or anything dodgy like that btw, it was just an observation.)

 

[Jon-of-arc]

There are loads of "game of war" type games, that literally look like they're the exact same design, gameplay and detailed mechanics as game of war. All utterly shit. They start trying to rinse you for cash long before thy throw any interesting game elements into it. I can't see where the fun or strategy in them is, as far as I played, but they're such blatant money grabbers, i just turned off.

 

[cybertect]

There's some stat about 90% of their income coming from 1% of the players (I've made that up but it's something like that).

I hate it too. It changes the focus of game design from "this will be fun for the player" to "how can we get them to spend some money". All the real-time delays to research new stuff, difficulty spikes during the game to encourage you to buy help etc. Fucking awful shit.

I gave up on Real Racing 3 on iOS because of this having graduated through the original Real Racing and RR2 which cost six quid. Reasonable physics and graphics for a mobile game and great fun. There was a lively users' forum with a great community; I spent vastly too much time playing it and at one point was amongst the top 20 drivers in the world in the online time trials (that's out of several tens of thousands of fairly regular players).

Then EA bought the Australian developers, Firemint, and RR3 shipped as a freemium game.

It looked great, the physics was better, it had multiplayer online racing in (more or less) real time, but after the first few of tournaments, every single thing required in-game 'gold' (separate from in-game $$ prizes) which you could obtain only slowly by tedious grinding, watching ads or more quickly by laying out large amounts of cash. Fixing damage, which could apparently be caused by merely breathing near the cars, could only be done by spending gold or waiting for hours (sometimes days). Need a particular car or upgrade which you must have to complete a tournament, buy some gold for £££. Certain of them needed £60, £70 or £80 worth of 'gold'.

There was an escalating battle of wits between EA and people who worked out how to cheat the game into giving them more gold. Unfortunately, these same gold-rich cheats were often just interested in trolling the online races, forcing crashes, damaging cars and making the multi-player experience entirely unenjoyable for everyone else. They'd always been around in one way or another, but because of the changes to the game they were now causing effective material loss to players.

There were complaints in the users' forum. It wasn't fun any more, it had become hard work and we wanted our fun game back. We'd said happily pay £25 for a version without any of the freemium nonsense. Quite a few of us went back to racing RR2.

Threads on the forum complaining about the freemium model and gold appeared more and more. Those threads got deleted by the mods more and more and then, suddenly in September 2013... the forum was 'offline for temporary maintenance'.

It would be back online tomorrow, we were told through social media. Then after a few weeks of 'tomorrow', 'next week'. Over six months later, the 'offline for temporary maintenance' notice disappeared and the server wen offline completely. However, it was still due back 'in a few days' when you asked them on Twitter. The forum is still down today.

So, anyway, EA and the freemium model killed my enjoyment of the game stone dead. Playing it became a frustrating chore and I have better things to do with my life than that. It's a shame, but when I realised I had begun to actively hate it, I simply stopped playing.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

On the plus side, candy crush has gotten easier and easier, and they've started dishing out the "paid for" items like, well, candy. Currently on level 635, and don't feel like I've been being rinsed at all - not got stuck on any particular level for more than a couple of "sets" of lives for months (after a long hiatus away from the game). There's a few new paid items that you can't get anywhere in the game at all (apart from a few bonus ones as advertising) and I suspect these will never become available, but they are so powerful they are pretty much akin to cheating. I just save my lollipop hammers for those moments where you are really close to passing a level (one or two moves) and this seems to get me by. Every 15 levels you have to pay 70p or whatever to open up the next 15, or wait three days, which is healthy. They also give you a bit of "gold" which will allow you to open up another 15 without the wait or paying, once in a while. Over all it just feels like a "fairer" freemium experience, one which provides a challenge that tempts you to "pay to win" as opposed to forcing you.

Some of king.com's other games seem to have kept the original formula, so I imagine they're experimenting a bit with their most established product, or aiming to retain/tempt bacj some of their huge user base who may have moves onto Pokemon or whatever the latest craze is, rather than having truly seen the light.

Still, seeing as freemium seems to be the way mobile is going to be, you could do worse. It remains a superbly designed match 3 puzzler, with gorgeous graphics, and a new mechanic chucked in every 50 levels or so to keep it interesting

 

[cybertect]

Over all it just feels like a "fairer" freemium experience, one which provides a challenge that tempts you to "pay to win" as opposed to forcing you.

Yes, to be fair, Two Dots is a beautifully executed freemium mobile game that I play regularly. I never feel I'm being rinsed with it and I'm happy to part with a couple of quid or watch an ad every now and then.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Still, seeing as freemium seems to be the way mobile is going to be

I don't think this is generally true; I can't remember the last game I downloaded because it looked interesting that was freemium. It did peak a year or two ago and it seemed like everything was bloody freemium, and maybe by sheer numbers it's still a popular pricing model, but the number of significantly different games in this area (let alone innovative), well.