The best freemium mobile games are simply better than best paid mobile games

Wait, what? Did you just say you don't play CoC anymore?

You stated so many times that it's the best game ever and you don't need any other games. And how it's so great because you can just pay to skip the boring grinding. Now you say it's too hardcore for you? Could it possibly be that the game is not as much fun without throwing more money at it?

Please, for the the of Godus (sorry), just admit you were wrong.

 

Not that it's wrong, but that wasn't the question.


What I was trying to get at here is that some games work better as free to play games, other better as premium games. Games should be designed around either being premium or free to play. Turning one into the other will probably result in a worse game (which is why I was using singleplayer-focused $60 premium games that I couldn't imagine being nearly as good with free to play elements as an example).

Freemium isn't simply better than premium, it's better in some cases and worse in others (which should be fairly obvious), it has its benefits and downsides.

Clash of Clans is not a game that will appeal to everyone, because the quality of a game is subjective and everyone has different interests, many of which Clash of Clans does not cater to it, nor any other game can be "the best game". There is no best game. There is no best business model. Profit does not equal quality and quality is subjective. A game doing one thing better than an other doesn't necessarily make it a better game. (etc, etc.)

That's what I was hoping hitmantb would realise.

This topic is pointless.

 

Demos solved that problem nicely. Rather than see a f2p push on major consoles, I'd like to see one of the console makers bring back demos in a major way.

But as for how console gaming could be improved with f2p, just take a look at Team Fortress. They've made far more on strictly cosmetic hats than they did on the game when it cost money. Lowering the barrier to entry to zero allowed a ton of new people to play the game, which kept the community strong, which kept the regulars coming back and buying hats. An unequivocal f2p success story.

 

Did you just call clash of clans hardcore and filled with depth?

Lol I'm done. Your not even talking about what you started the thread for, it's now just babbling.

Your saying that as if Premuim games have no depth and developers put no effort into their games. Nothing you have said so far is too logical and I'm baffled onto how you haven't realized this yet.

 

You'd save a lot of money but in the long run you'd most likely end up spending more than you saved for more Need for Speed fuel. (example)

 

Lol heroes charge is more of an kind of turned based RPGS than like WOW. Dungeon Hunter or even Order of Chaos is more like that. Even your comparisons are off.


Not only that you are generalizing that all Premuim games are low budget and get limited development post release.
You wanna know why so many Freemuim games get so many updates?
It's really because people COMPLAIN about how BAD they are considering they are puting MORE MONEY in than you would a Premuim game.

 

I just played Heroes Charge for five minutes and deleted it. Automated everything, then you tap your characters when their specials are ready? That's what you call depth?

You also know a game's gonna be top quality when the first thing you're shown is the shop to spend real money.

 

Final Fantasy games don't have cool down timers on their power moves. I can't help but think your arguments would be stronger if you didn't reference things you obviously haven't got even a basic understanding of.

Not that I'd use most FF games as an example of gameplay depth. FF is the Call of Duty of RPGs. Especially since somewhere around FF6, the difficulty in the games has been reduced to the point that you can pretty much hammer the confirm button to resolve most battles. They're spectacle, part of why they do so well with the larger audience.

Something like the Shin Megami Tensei series is a better example of depth. Almost every battle has a good chance of killing you if you don't consider every move. The game will drive your face into the ground if you don't use sound strategy, and it's not apologetic about that. Which is probably why its sales can be measured in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions.

 

This is the simplest way to make money from games... Especially on Android.

 

Cooldown is present in the MMOs, yes. The MMO FFs are not on the App Store, so they're not going to work as an escape hatch for you. None of the other games in the series use cooldowns.

There's nothing artificial about the difficulty or complexity of SMT and Dark Souls, either, at least in as much as any aspect of a game is not artificial. I'll agree, they're not the best route for mainstream gaming, though Dark Souls has surprised me with both the degree of its success and the reason for it seemingly being its carefully cultivated image as a "super-hard" game.

I find SMT to be quite fun to play, but 'fun' is a subjective thing, and I'll acknowledge that you (clearly) and many, many others don't find difficult games to be 'fun'. That's fine, I appreciate and respect that there are many different flavors to that emotion.

I also certainly agree that if you want to hit the widest market possible, ie have your game be 'fun' to the largest amount of people, it's wise to shoot for both simplicity and relatively low difficulty. A certain percentage are not going to be satisfied by that, but multiplayer provides a useful bandage because it allows those players to seek others who might provide an appropriate challenge level. Those who are also not satisfied by that are probably a fairly insignificant percentage and unless you're running a very carefully aimed business with costs to match, it's not wise economically to chase them at the expense of everyone else.

Once again, however, I'm left wondering why I, as a player, should care about any of that? There are so many developers making so many games that, even though I sometimes like a game aimed at that small percentage, I'm positively drowning in choice. You can pick any tiny niche in 2015 and I can guarantee there are more games being made for that niche than, say, great 2D platformers were made in the PlayStation era. If I were running a publisher, I'd approach things differently, but as a player, I don't see why popularity or how much money a game is making should factor into my personal enjoyment at all.

You're an odd person to talk to, hitmanb. I hope you don't mind me saying that. I think you're being a bit disingenuous and making extensive use of fisking/cherry picking to hammer in your points, but there are interesting discussions being had here, so even though you sometimes aggravate me, I thank you for bringing the topic.

edit: with regards to FF7's speed, some of that was due to technology (the PSX had a small amount of RAM and the CD-ROM drive was 2x, not very fast at all) and some of that is due to the real-time nature of the ATB system. If things ran quickly, the player wouldn't have time to think about the moves they want to perform, and there would be complaints. If you look at FF13, it's much faster-paced, but a consequence of that was transferring control of 2/3 party members to the CPU and even setting the player you're controlling to partial-auto. The bottleneck of the human mind, to an extent.

 

One of the main reasons why you are out of place, you are calling mobile games watered down clones and too much for mobile gaming, people like you are why freemuim even exists.

"Devs-how do you like our new game?
Players- MAKE IT FREE now and open world with good grafix and the download size is too big!"



You honestly can't consider yourself as a relevant mobile gamer if you are judging it this way.

To be honest, A LOT of them are like that although, there are countless Devs out there that put their heart and soul into their games. As you say, MOST OF THE APPS ON THE APPSTORE ARE FREEMUIM. Now put two and two together and what does that mean?

Your "opinion" has just become blatant bashing of people who prefer a less costly, more fair, and even more enjoyable play style. All you have been using for information is the millions of people playing freemuim games right now as ammo for when you run out of ideas to spit out at us.

 

While I disagree with most of his conclusions and his way to integrate information, I have to respect hitmantb for having the courage to put up against an audience traditionally more vocally favorable to premium games.

He's obviously right about several things, like when saying that there's several top quality freemium games out there, that it became the maintream market on mobile and therefore tons of people are enjoying them. It is also true that with the maturation of market, a segment of the freemium market shifted from casual to mid-core (deeper games).

There's lot of interesting things to discuss about and hopefully this thread will avoid falling into freemium bashing.

That said, I'd like to add a comment about another downside of the freemium model. Because it runs on nitro and relies on only about 2% of paying customers, it has to burn through so many users. The reason CoC has now to rely on Superbowl ads his most certainly not because it goes so well but rather because it's having trouble acquiring users using traditional channels and is looking for alternative ways to bring more users. This might announce a decline for the franchise (there's only so many people on the planet! Think about the ex-king-of-the-hill Zynga and its command ship Farmville for instance).

As a comparison, Minecraft is burning through users at a much lower rate and because of that, it has a much longer longevity potential.

 

I'm very happy there are developers like Atypical with games like Radiation Island who give a f@&€ about guys like hitmanb and his freemium crying.
They proof with an awesome game that the industry is not dead and that there are many many players who want exactly this premium AAA+ games.
But i guess this game would be too difficult for hitmanb, who thinks waiting is a game mechanic that is genius.

 

Now you're just spouting nonsense. Brave Frontier isn't a game. Brave Frontier is a very traditional card collecting simulation with the *appearance* of competition layered on top of it. However, it lacks any real decision making, any real risk/reward, and any place for skill whatsoever.

It does well precisely because of this - the only determinant to getting bigger rank numbers next to your name is money primarily, time played secondarily. At no point do you ever have to worry about losing your place due to someone genuinely better coming along because there is simply no such thing. If you get "beat", spend more and/or play more, feel powerful, whee!

The vast majority of spending in freemium games is driven by ePeen envy, and Brave Frontier somehow captured a very large slice of the "my ePeen is too small, waaah!" crowd by giving them something that sort of looks like an exciting game but, in reality, is no more of a game than watching SpongeBob on Nickelodeon.

EDIT: As some others have noted, you are to be commended for taking on a demagogue contingent that dominates the discussions on TA and you have raised some great points, but you also exaggerate far too much the depth of most of these games and fall back on a very meaningless category as an argument for quality: mainstream.

Being mainstream has never said anything about quality directly. Quite often things that are high quality do become mainstream, but just as often things become mainstream because they are just appealing enough to large swathes of people without also in any way challenging or offending large swathes of people. Goes for comedy, movies, books television shows, etc., and, now that we have gaming devices in hundreds of millions of hands, games.

So many of the dominant freemium games fall into this latter category. They don't challenge, they don't push people to think, they merely entertain at the bottom of the barrel degree of difficulty and complexity and find their whales by giving people who find bottom of the barrel degrees of difficulty and complexity pleasing a simple method for feeling more powerful at the bottom of the barrel.

You earlier lambasted PaD for not succeeding outside Japan, but that's not because it's developer are too traditional or whatever it was you said, it's that the game is simply too complex and skill based for these mainstream audiences you keep championing. Battle Camp, my counter example that there is no quality in freemium, has hovered in the 60-80 spot for grossing for close to 2 years, both remarkable yet also a statment it can't capture a wider audience. This is somewhat because the monetization is so extreme it can't capture a larger audience, but also because the game is as skill based and demanding as a WoW Raid guild. You can't get anywhere in the competitive ladder without a large group of people (20-25) who communicate, coordinate and function as a whole so, again, NOT mainstream.

So, yay, for being willing to sit here and have people be just as wrong as you are with their tear downs of any notion that freemium is often far better and engaging than many premium games because, as I noted, continued cashflow = continued development, but you lose much of your credibility with the continuous appeal to popularity in your arguments about quality compared to relatively popular niche games.

Is X-COM:EW a higher quality game than Brave Frontier by every single real metric of game design, absolutely, don't even waste mine or anyone's time trying to make a counter claim on that proposition. However, is Brave Frontier a far more popular game than X-COM:EW and far more financially successful, absolutely as well. They both can co-exist in this world and don't take anything away from one another. BF's core audience has very little intersection with X-COM's.