The Problem with Freemium Games

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

The biggest problem with freemium games is that they are advertised as "free". If it was advertised that the game is a demo, then they asked you if you want to pay for the whole game. It wouldn't be a problem.

I checked out Saga games (Candy Crush, etc.) last year. I thought part of the challenge of these games was to complete it without paying for it. What they want you to pay for were cheats. Pay to keep from waiting until new lives are replenished. Pay to get power-ups that will make the game easier. If you play games for a challenge, then it was insulting to you for them to offer these things to you for a price.

It is this bait and switch with freemium games that make me hesitant to even check out most games in this genre.

And for me Asphalt. Make no mistake, i compare the hobby to RC cars. Sure you can rent out your kid cousin's crappy hand me down car and wait patiently to work your way up. Higher end cars are like expensive models with better transceivers and sleeker models. I think i paid about 500 total into this hobby.

But those event races with free cars if ypu are in the top 100 you have to deal with despite being the best you are soundly trounced by a bunch of foreigners who you know cheats and runs an extortion racket

The chinese played a heavy hand in this since their whole gaming industry is mostly freemium mobilw games or mmos and they acquired companies like Jagex and Riot and lo and behold microtransactions

 

[Darth_Payn]

Ah, freemium: where the "-mium" is Latin for "not really".

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

One thing that bothers me the most about Super Mario Run is people's comments about it. Stuff like "You have to pay for the game?", "What a sellout.", "Who is stupid to purchase it?" Like, the problem is not even the price tag or the DRM, is that the concept of paying for something is too much for these people.

Is it fair to say that I think Gamers these days are very stingy with their money.

I mean I to have standards of what I will and will not pay for, but jeez not buying something that cost say 3 dollars at least, now your just being Mr. Krabs.

I mean in the end they just have to accept that Gaming is and has always been an Expensive Hobby.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

The only freemium game I play these days is Warframe. I did play DC Universe: Online for a good long while; free to download and play, but certain classes are locked behind dollar signs. That's fairly reasonable - there's a good amount of classes to select from in the beginning anyway and the rest of the in-game restrictions were all pretty negligible

Warframe started off similar, with most everything being attainable by simply putting the time into the game, but after building a third weapon just for the hell of it I discovered that to even add the weapon to my inventory I would have to purchase a new weapon slot. The same went for all three weapon types. I kind of get where the guilt Yahtzee mentions comes from, as I was having a blast with the core gameplay of Warframe until I hit that monetary roadblock and got angry. I did feel like a mooch at that point and I got mad at the game for making me feel that way when it's totally reasonable to spend money on a game I put way more time into (and was having a lot more fun with) than some games I've actually bought recently.

I did end up buying some Platinum because I figured the game was worth some spare cash from me, but it was bloody expensive compared to some other freemiums out there.

 

[Fulbert]

I don't mind paying for games, I don't even mind paying a lot for them. It is paying for games advertised as free that I have a problem with. You want my money, you set up a toll booth at the entrance. Otherwise, it feels like you're changing rules as you go ("free? Of course it is free as long as you pay for it!") and I can't even be sure anymore what I get for my money.

 

[Sotanaht]

The thing about Freemium games typically is that what you end up paying for is typically cheating in some way. If you pay for a continue you didn't earn it in game. You did absolutely nothing deserving of a continue and yet now you have one, and you can keep buying more as long as your cash holds out. Doing so ultimately taints the experience the same way entering a cheat code would, you didn't REALLY win on your own skill and effort, you just bought a victory screen.

Besides, if the creators are offering to sell you a way to "skip" some element of gameplay then that implies that they themselves think that element isn't worth playing. Why the hell should you play a game that's so bad that it's own developers think it would be worth spending money to not play certain parts of it?

 

[darkrage6]

One thing that bothers me the most about Super Mario Run is people's comments about it. Stuff like "You have to pay for the game?", "What a sellout.", "Who is stupid to purchase it?" Like, the problem is not even the price tag or the DRM, is that the concept of paying for something is too much for these people.

I think that pretty much shows how the standards for mobile gaming are at an all time low, the idea of a free game there is that you can play the game at the inexistential cost of seeing an ad once in a while, but after Farmville and Candy Crush popularized the life system with a timer, things have been going downhill since.

Super Mario Run does deserve flack for having the balls to charge for a mobile game that has fucking microtransactions in it, reminds me of FF: All the Bravest.

 

[Igor-Rowan]

Snip

Uhhhhh, no, it does not have microtransactions, it only has the option to buy the entire game from the demo. They said from day one there would be no microtransactions.

 

[Chewster]

One thing that bothers me the most about Super Mario Run is people's comments about it. Stuff like "You have to pay for the game?", "What a sellout.", "Who is stupid to purchase it?" Like, the problem is not even the price tag or the DRM, is that the concept of paying for something is too much for these people.

I think that pretty much shows how the standards for mobile gaming are at an all time low, the idea of a free game there is that you can play the game at the inexistential cost of seeing an ad once in a while, but after Farmville and Candy Crush popularized the life system with a timer, things have been going downhill since.

As someone who owns basically the whole suite of Kairosoft games as well as dozen of other mobile games that I've happily shelled out for, this is what upsets me the most. If it's a game demo and you can unlock the full thing by paying, all for that. No different than computer game demos back in the day but freemium is almost a 100% guarantee that the game is going to be some kind of scam. No matter how much you spend, it's never going to be enough and seeing as how most freemium games survive due to whales, there is almost no point in playing them whatsoever unless you have that kind of disposable income. My patience to grind is stronger than my desire to pay exorbitant amounts of cash for the chance win, at least until I get fed up and uninstall it.

What's getting worse are the ones you pay for that then have the fucking gall to charge for stuff afterward. Kairosoft seems to be tragically marching down that road so there is a good chance they and I are done. Freemium and whatever the hell you call this garbage, needs to die so that the rest of the industry can flourish but only if people are willing to be reasonable about buying games. Sadly, I fear the wheels have already come off and judging by how much dodgy crap there seems to be in the Play store, I don't see them going back on any time soon.

 

[MCerberus]

One thing that bothers me the most about Super Mario Run is people's comments about it. Stuff like "You have to pay for the game?", "What a sellout.", "Who is stupid to purchase it?" Like, the problem is not even the price tag or the DRM, is that the concept of paying for something is too much for these people.

I think that pretty much shows how the standards for mobile gaming are at an all time low, the idea of a free game there is that you can play the game at the inexistential cost of seeing an ad once in a while, but after Farmville and Candy Crush popularized the life system with a timer, things have been going downhill since.

As someone who owns basically the whole suite of Kairosoft games as well as dozen of other mobile games that I've happily shelled out for, this is what upsets me the most. If it's a game demo and you can unlock the full thing by paying, all for that. No different than computer game demos back in the day but freemium is almost a 100% guarantee that the game is going to be some kind of scam. No matter how much you spend, it's never going to be enough and seeing as how most freemium games survive due to whales, there is almost no point in playing them whatsoever unless you have that kind of disposable income. My patience to grind is stronger than my desire to pay exorbitant amounts of cash for the chance win, at least until I get fed up and uninstall it.

What's getting worse are the ones you pay for that then have the fucking gall to charge for stuff afterward. Kairosoft seems to be tragically marching down that road so there is a good chance they and I are done. Freemium and whatever the hell you call this garbage, needs to die so that the rest of the industry can flourish but only if people are willing to be reasonable about buying games. Sadly, I fear the wheels have already come off and judging by how much dodgy crap there seems to be in the Play store, I don't see them going back on any time soon.

Problem's not with the concept, it's with whale hunting. There are sane games that start free but add, say XP boosters, or hats you don't have to save up for in exchange. Hell I've bought the PvE hearthstone adventures because they're fun while my friend saved gold for them.

Problem is you get the games where if you aren't a whale, the game despises you for it. Sometimes accidentally, like early F2P MMO conversions (SWTOR was famous for this, but LotRO had, well, more restrictions), but then there are the pure malignancies that happen when a developer has been bitten by a radioactive advertising executive that are the worst. The Dungeon Keepers, the games with energy bars, the ones where you only rent your unlocks unless you pay, the racing games where the only cars that can win are paywalled.

Some talk of Warframe in the thread. Did they not give you free plat early in the game? I've got 5 frames and a dozen weapons and haven't run out of the "free sample" yet

 

[VinLAURiA]

I don't know why you're still so angry about Nintendo, Croshaw. You finally got everything you wanted.

The majority of the company's been exiled to the prison of half-assed, freemium mobile gaming with all those unworthy [http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=280] non-gamers[footnote]"You've got to dig your heels in and show these changes who's the ***** before everything we've worked for all these years sells itself wholesale to the kinds of Bejeweled-playing, child-having twat-mackerels who spent the last decades nodding meaningfully to each other every time a Sega Genesis is found in the home of a murderer." -E3 2010[/footnote] you despise, Iwata is dead and replaced with a wet blanket of a CEO, the evil Wii dynasty has been slain, and you self-proclaimed "true gamers" have finally retaken control of the industry as what remains of Nintendo in the console race has fallen back into meekly following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Sony, "dropping the gimmicks" in favor of a half-measure of a console with paid online, an utter lack of any backwards-compatibility, a larger reliance on barren open-world games and increasingly generic multiplats, and yet another bog-standard "PC lite" featureset just like the "real" consoles, rather than doing anything to stand out whatsoever.

Once again, they've resorted to uselessly trying to appeal to "true gamers" like you, just as with the GameCube... which got mercilessly stomped on sales- and partnership-wise while you laughed from afar with your "god console" the PS2, as you so gleefully pointed out in your Capcom Five video. But now that they've "come crawling back" like an abused housewife after enough blackmail, why continue to rant about them? Or is this simply the post-return scolding of that "disloyal *****"? But hey, now that you finally got the PS4 clone you pissed and moaned for, I imagine the next logical step will be a resurgence of the "go third-party" whinging now that their new system has no USP that justifies its existence, after which will of course come the taunts of "how far they've fallen, just like SEGA and Atari", and you'll have successfully made them serve as a warning to those who would dare question the rule of you self-proclaimed "true gamers" ever again in this industry.

You and all the other cynical douchebags got your wish, and you poisoned my industry to do it. Have fun with your goddamn neural-jacks and sloughing off your worthless meatsacks to "ascend to VR Valhalla."[footnote]"When the gaming kids of today become the hairy, whinging twentysomethings of the future, they'll be declaring that Halo 3 was miles better than a game of interstellar bum pirates on the astral thought planes of the universal overmind, and they'll be just as wrong then as you are now." -XBLA Double Bill[/footnote] Meanwhile, I got to watch a good man give an apology to a jeering gamer culture as his final public communication two years ago, in what was a far more bitter end than he deserved.

It's my turn to be pissed off.

 

[Necrozius]

I just think it's fascinating how society broke free from Arcade coin-suckers thanks to a variety of home consoles and gaming PCs... and now we're right back to pay-to-play more. People are such suckers.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

I just think it's fascinating how society broke free from Arcade coin-suckers thanks to a variety of home consoles and gaming PCs... and now we're right back to pay-to-play more. People are such suckers.

"We're back to pay-to-play"? It was a steady transition from the arcades to the home! You argue that they spent the last few decades focusing on the "get the game into the homes" part of arcade machines, and now they're focusing on the "get every bit of their pocket change" part.