Free to Play isn't to blame, it's the consumer

Well you say time and time again, but then you offer only one example, and they went back to paid. So for them it was a choice between free++ and paid.

What I said is keep the free-2-play model, including whatever 1$ in consumable game purchases you already have, but have a 'Play Nice all you can eat' system on top of it. This should not discourage people from playing or paying as they would already do because it is just an additional tier.
"The chronic free to play complainers typically also are the ones who wait for price drops, want eternal updates, and other incredibly unrealistic things." Right, but if they would complain 'I would like to pay just once' or 'I hate it that I am nickled and dimed at every corner', that complaint would still be made probably but become invalid if they are offered a way out.
Plus, in my world-view, it would also be nice to have a limit on what people with addiction tendencies could spend on a game, assuming they would figure out they should just pay the unlock-everything amount at some point.

 

I completely agree. It's the 'casino' mentality that I find so predatory.

 

This is not the fault of the average gamer but instead just a natural transition in the market caused by the flood of casual gamers. The average IOS game isn't made for the person who grew up playing Secret of Mana, Katamari or Zelda. The iOS market is almost 100% chasing your mom grandma and little brother who never touched games unless it was a family gathering and someone brought something like Rockband or Wii sports. In the past there was no such thing as a truly casual gamer, u had to buy a dedicated gaming machine and spend money on each game u bought. Joe Schmoe and Granny were not about to spend $200-$600 to casually play video games. Joe Schmoe and even Granny now have a cell phone though, and wouldn't u know games are now free!

I strongly disagree with this article because I think the average gamer has shown time and time and time again we will pony up. We will pony up $60 for full releases, we will pony up $100s to buy a system just to play a few stand out games or get a needless collectors edition we regret buying later. We are not what turned the IOS a market into the cesspool it is and made it hard for developers to make a buck there. The IOS market is the way it is and will remain the way it is because for the millions of gamers out there, there are billions who are not serious about gaming but are happy to try something for free. Games will remain freemium and unfairly balanced because Joe Schmoe will play an hour here and there and toss $5 to proceede in a poorly balanced game, a real gamer would just realize each year now 1,00s of games worth playing come out and why am I playing an u fairly balanced game with energy timers like Pocket Miner(a game had it not been u fairly freemium balanced would have been amazing)when I can play Spider, Skyrim, Hearthstone, GTA5, Destiny, Infamous or any number of respectable games.

I want to make it clear I am not saying that being a casual gamer is wrong. We all have our hobbies and we chose ourselves how to divvy up our time, if u are not hurting others u then u can't make a wrong choice. It does not mean though thst I have to be happy thst Joe Schmoe and granny's choice to take up gamings ultimate effect on the market.

 

People that self-identify as "gamers" will pony up but it has been shown that the hardcore gamers do not make up a majority of the market. I see this is your first post here, but it's easy for people in this community to see a lot of similar thought or go to other gaming sites and see the exact same complaints and think "Man, everyone agrees with me! Why isn't F2P going away?"

People who are vocal about gaming may be loud but they are not the majority. This community might be large in an Internet sense, but it makes up a very small segment of the market.

You are right that someone like me will happily pay whatever I think a game is worth. I look at a game like Card Crawl and think "They're not charging enough" but the market reality may be very different than what I think.

 

Human nature: bad on its own, terrible in groups!

Sadly, I don't see a solution other than to make the best of it, but yes, consumer behavior is at the root of the problem. Hopefully premium keep succeeding too... on occasion.

 

ermmmm you kind of just made my point. I know we gamers are not the majority anymore, that was my point that cell phones made us a minority in the economy. We were always the majority and the cash cows and then in a blink phones changed that so the entire market naturally changed too. I would be shocked if gamers who traditionally were referred to as hardcore or core made up more then 10% of the IOS market. My secondary point was that yes I and many others hate this change and there is nothing wrong with voicing that and blowing some steam. Phones changed the market and it's not changing back anytime soon. Thank God for steam!

 

I guess more than anything I took issue with Eli saying we want our cake and eat it too. I just do not feel this is the case and is putting blame in the wrong place(and it kind of felt like picking a fight in the processe). I felt he implied hypocrisy that's just not there. I also feel that the attitude that free to play is keeping studios afloat that might not otherwise stay afloat is the wrong attitude. Why do we want companies putting out terrible games to stay afloat? I hate seeing developers make good games and go under water, but I would rather them go under after a few underrated gems then have the market flooded with crap freemiums just to keep afloat. Not every game can be a hit and that includes many good ones. To me Elis logic is like saying more people would go to the art museum if they added free food and repainted every piece of art to have a modern celebrity in it. Would more people go? Probqbly. Is the world and our culture better off? Well I'd say no but I seem to be increasingly in a minority when it comes to deciding what's right.

 

Feel free to do some research for yourself, but to get you started, here is one of my absolute favorite games, destroyed by trying to do exactly what you are suggesting:

www.wired.com/2012/10/outwitters-sales-disaster/

As you can see, it's not a new problem.

 

I am not convinced yet we have reached a point of no return yet.
(Note: I am not saying I am sure we have not reached it yet, I am saying I am unsure)

If you look at Consoles and PC/Steam, you see a trend towards free-2-play too, but the biggest games are still premium (I rather say paid-up-front), and in fact paid-up-front with then paid DLC on top. And with the success of the new console generation sales (where I think sales way exceed what people thinking mobile was going to steal their lunch), it really looks to me that the paid-up-front model is staying on the living room side. Especially with huge surprise hit after hit after hit in recent times.

On mobile, the story is very different *right now*, the masses refuse to pay up front, and in true the-people-have-spoken/ the-customer-is-always-right fashion everyone is introducing three virtual currencies in their games. But I still have the feeling (disclaimer: note at the top of this comment) that it is a temporary wave.
Because a very small amount of free-2-play games take in all the cash. So EA, Supercell, and King.com (and now Rovio) make a ton of money and are success stories, but what is going on outside the top 20 of mobile game companies. Will they also thrive on free-2-play, or is it simply that they failed in paid-up-front, and now just try their luck with free-2-play and will fail once more. Because I feel that free-2-play success is based on massive player numbers, and if everybody is playing Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga, smaller free-2-play titles are out of luck.

 

I am not against free to play, I am against the current implementation of free to play. There are a few games like Hearthstone that I am glad are freemium and I think handled the model in a fair and sensible way. There are many many many more games like Marvel Heroes that fall in a mid range giving away plenty of free content but still suffering from freemium slow down. My issue is thst most of the market does not feel like these two games. Most of the f2p market feels like a big scam, heck I have even played preemium IOS games still designed to rip off the consumer. Most games I have played on IOS thst are freemium either within a few hours or within 15 hours hit you with not just a pay wall but multip,e hidden pay walls.

I used Pocket a miner as an example earlier and it really is perfect. It requires energy but then refills it as u level. Within a few days I had to start watching ads constantly to keep playing, but I did and didn't mind. Then though my pick ax(needed to break rocks in stage) maxed out. Now your pick already only had like 200 durability and it required 350 or something like that to beat a stage. U had to pay in game coins to reset your pick and relelvel it all over again. To reach max level u would have to do this multiple times. In order to finish this game(thst I had already spent money on too) I would now need to spend 100s of hours leveling and releveling my pick, or spend an outrageous ammount of real world money. I didn't hit this pay wall til after I had already been playing the game for 30 or more hours and had already put money into the game. It was so obviously designed to just be a huge rip off and most players won't relize it til it's too late.

I am not against free to play. I am against ripping off the consumer and design games to be purely monetary in nature, not art or fun. Art and just the art of fun are being lost as developers strive to be the next Candy Crush. It makes me sad and I think it is understandable for me to have strong feeling(especially when I go out of my way to be respectful)

 

Of course it's the fault of the consumer according to every thoughtful post on the topic EVER. The devs are simply pivoting to find a way to monetize their work. Rather than roll with these changes, however, I've chosen to spend most of my gaming money on desktop rather than mobile games these days.

I find it amusing, however, that Toucharcade's Champion of Freemium Editor has found himself in the position of taking his site Premium to stay afloat thanks to a lack of F2P advertisers willing to pay for ad space. I wonder if he sees the irony...

 

An Alternate Opinion

As a reference point, my first gaming console was a Magnavox Odyssey. Followed up by a Colecovision and on through the Nintendo consoles. We were happy to pay $20-40 a game. The libraries were small and the amount of time and fun to be had in finishing "Legend of Zelda-Link to the Past" was well worth the entertainment dollar. In regards to IOS, for me it comes down to too many games, not enough time. I have dowloaded literally 100's of games since I bought my first IPad. Many, many premium titles with 5 star reviews. At this point I'll only buy a new premium title if I like the review and it's the kind of game I might enjoy. "Oceanhorn", for example. However, if a review says the game is flawed, say "Broken Age" or is not quite my cup of tea, say "Xcom:Enemy Within", I put it in my wish list on Appshopper. If the price drops to something I'm willing to pay, I'll buy it. That's what it's worth to me. There is too much supply. It has devalued the product. Appshopper says that 2,351,127 apps have been approved for the appstore. Not all games of course, but you get the idea. It's not just IOS. My son gets incredible deals on Steam.

One last point, I feel I don't own these games anymore. With console systems once you bought a game you always knew it would work. With IOS it feels like renting a game for an unspecified time, you never know when the next update will break it and cause it to go away.

 

Part of why I took the time to post too was that as o said before I really feel like the way Eli worded things was antagonizing and defensive. I appreciate the work the guys here at touch arcade do, it's the only app on my iPad I let give push notifications and the only non game/news app I use multiple times a day. But man for years I have felt like so many articles and reviews are wrote in a way that sounds defensive of IOS gaming or its community. There is an inferioty complex thst seems to run in dedicated IOS gamers thst reminds me of the defensiveness Nintendo fans used to have for playing kiddie games(not saying I think Nintendo games are kiddy I love them). I also feel this shows in far too many review scores as well, there is an eagerness and willingness to look past far too much in freemium games. Pocket mine 2 thst I just ranted about 4 and a half star touch arcade review. I have wasted money on too many freemium IOS games with good reviews that after playing for a few days I can't help but wonder if the reviewer played more then a dozen hours.

I respect the TA team and am again thankful for the dozens of weekly reviews and articles, love the weekly hearthstone suff and have followed TA for years, but I just sense a real complex when it comes to IOS being just as good as its big brothers on consoles and PCs.

 

Your point on supply is a good one. IOS is the most flooded market there is so of course game quality and price is being driven down. It's not just IOS though, it's a whole industry problem. Steam is my platform of choice at the moment but it's flooded with dozens of new crap games every week too. I wish Appl would add a curator system like on steam to help find the cream in th crap

 

Wait what, why am I saying smiley face, this means I fell into a F2P 'trap '(seriously, I think TA is then the only F2P 'game' I am p(l)aying right now)!

 

Apple is to blame!

The whole App Store eco system was geared up right from the start. Right at the start, even before IAP reared it's head. Let me explain.

Apple wanted the pricing tiers on the App Store to reflect what they did to the music industry… Individual tracks for 99c which basically killed off Album sales. Apple knew that people would pick and choose their music and for 99c they could choose a custom compilation. The people were happy but the musicians complained it killed their Album sales. Anyway I regress…

So Apple decided when the App Store was created that the lowest price tier was 99c and they probably knew there would be a price war that the developers would do to get noticed as the market got crowded. This is basically when the race to the bottom happened. The people were happy but most of the developers were not. At this point peoples expectations towards games changed to the point that they felt if a game was above 99c then it was not worth getting. Then the developers to combat this started doing sales on higher priced games. At this point games got devalued more in peoples eyes. The market from the start was wired for this to the point where games as an art form became cheap commodities. People will pay through the roof for something that is art and gives enjoyment but as soon as it becomes a commodity then all they want it basement bargains.

Then when Apple introduced the IAP system the f2p market started. The early games that adapted to this model were basically slated by the game players… but at this point the mobile market had expanded beyond belief - people that did not normally play games started to play them and they headed straight to the free games. The hardcore gamers at this point became a minority and the publishers and larger developers with money changed tacked and started tapping into this new market. An example of this is my sister in law, who is in her mid 40s, only downloads f2p games and right out says she will never pay for a game but at the same time will spend on the odd IAP.

So the hardcore gamers felt an outrage to f2p… but at this point their attitudes had changed because of the race to the bottom and the premium game been devalued as art. So they refuse to pay for high end premium and the publishers refuse to make games for the premium market because there is no money in it… sure you get the odd hit but when you look in the grossing charts you realise that premium games make next to nothing.

The real blame to the present market I feel falls right on Apples head. They basically devalued the worth of games by setting that 99c tier from the start. For a company that says they love all art form factors have basically destroyed the music industry and the games industry by devaluing art items. They have screwed creative people by turning art into a commodity for profit.

If the lowest price tier had been set at $6 then things would be different now…