I, like many others, have been part of the growing trend of gamers who dedicate an increasingly large portion of our game playing time to gaming on my phone. I own a 3DS, but whether at work, on the train or hanging out of the passenger side of my best friend’s ride, my phone is always with me. Always ready to game. Well…at least when the games tell me they are ready.
I am getting increasingly annoyingly confused by a selection of the latest games available on Android/iOS and the pricing policies they employ that deliberately prevent me from playing the game any further. I accept that the Free To Play model is becoming prevalent for two main reasons; because it works and because it circumnavigates many of the issues of piracy. I do not understand why any of these F2P pricing structures, or any other game for that matter, would have in-built financial incentives to stop me playing. The question that keeps coming to mind is; why would any game developer be happy for me to stop playing their game?
I believe that the F2P model will ultimately prove unsustainable as it heavily relies on the regular harpooning of Whales (in non-marketing jargon, a rich idiot) by either taking advantage of those with more money than sense or tricking money out of the uneducated. I have been warning for sometime that if the industry (i.e. Apple etc) didn’t self regulate In App Purchases much more closely, that this situation would come to a head. With multiple tales of children spending £1,000’s and Apple talking about needing to compensate over $100 million in iTunes gift vouchers, I was not surprised to see the British Government step in recently to deal with an issue that is fast becoming an expensive problem.
While the F2P model is here though, it would be nice to at least implement it in a manner that does not encourage me to play elsewhere. In all my years as a gamer I haven’t seen any pricing models that discourage you from continuing to play in quite the same manner. Many people invite the comparison to the yesteryears of inserting coins into arcade machines and I would have to admit that there were some fairly nefarious methods of extracting more money out of arcade gamers, such as end of level bosses with lots of health and cheap moves — factors that often still influence the game designs of today — but somehow the F2P model seems more underhand, sneaking into your home and tricking the young and the vulnerable into stealing from your digital wallets.
The rise of the F2P model has recently been invaded by the inclusion of the time-gating of lives, retries and build times. I am not totally adverse to this concept and when well implemented it can add a weight to the sense of achievement – a mentality of “I earned this through my time and dedication.” But when poorly implemented it makes me yearn for the good old days of knowing how much I would pay for a game before I allowed the grips of gaming addiction to take hold.
I recently criticised Candy Crush Saga for all too aggressively seeking out your money in order to bypass the harshly implemented time-gates. I was happy to play along for a while, mainly as I liked the game, but I eventually deleted it from my phone as I objected to the manner in which it structured itself to encourage spending. Having spent a long time on level 33, which seemed at the time to be an artificial difficulty spike designed to encourage you to spend money to progress, I only reached level 35 before a “you shall not pass” paywall popped up in my face. Candy Crush Saga already does not allow you to use any of the “unlocked” power-ups without paying every time and charges you 69p (i.e the entire price of many phone games) just to refresh your lives. I decided at this point that, while I was happy to pay a small amount of money to continue playing, I could not trust the developer anymore. When was the next “surprise” paywall coming? If you lose my trust, you lose me as a customer and not just for this game. I will be actively avoid even downloading any game made by King.com in future.
I have been previously critical of the setup of Simpsons: Tapped Out on the BRBUK podcast, but I have to admit that I have come to terms with this, partly as I have come to realise that my expectations were perhaps part of the problem. I am accustomed to games that want me to play for as long as possible. My Xbox wants to play all day. My PS3 wants to play all night. Okay, so my 3DS needs a longer battery life if it wants similar, but I still suspect that it wants me to play games for longer than the regular “Hey! Remember to take a break!” style messages would indicate.
I have grown up with a generation of console games that encourage continuous play so much, that many of them remove any option to quit the game or return to the main menu. “You’re here, keep playing!” Games like Simpsons: TO and Tekken Card Tournament don’t say the same. They don’t want you to play *all* day, they want you to play *everyday*. Often multiple times a day, usually in short 20-30 minute bursts. My colleague, Jon has discussed his recent turnaround in his opinion of Real Racing 3 and now holds it up as an example of how to correctly implement the F2P model. I myself have found that Tekken Card Tournament is a well implemented example of having a game that is fun to play without any investment, but actively encourages it in fairly non-intrusive ways. I also like it when games allow you to sell items and “game” your way through their economy – it feels like I am being rewarded for years of constant RPG economy management — but I still find it disconcerting to have most of my sessions ended not by me or my need to get on with something else, but by the game saying; “I think you’ve had enough for today. Give me some money or find something else to do!”
A change in how these games are regarded may be required from the older generation of gamers, but it is also becoming more apparent that a greater level of transparency is needed. When purchasing a game for a one-off upfront price it is clear what you as a gamer are expected to spend to enjoy that product and also clearer that all design decisions are taken for the benefit of the game as opposed to the fastest way for the developer/publisher to buy another Ferrari. This problem is not limited to just newer gaming platforms, with Dead Space 3 coming under heavy fire for its inclusion of microtransactions, Sim City‘s recent “DRM” complaints and a number of high profile cases of on-disc DLC being heavily criticised, with Capcom being the most popular punching bag. Gamers and the wider game playing public react badly when they feel that someone is taking advantage of them or taking away something that they have already paid for.
I am becoming increasingly worried that the time-gating restrictions put on lives will not have the long term desired effect. The low barrier to entry to F2P games means I am more encouraged to flit between a number of F2P titles at any one time and this harms the level of consumer loyalty that developers want to encourage and harness if they want to attract true hardcore fans of the title who are willing to actually spend money rather than sneaking in under the IAP radar and stealing it from the misguided fingers of children. If all developers move over to a model that encourages people to stop playing, sooner or later everyone will.
