[KhalPanda]

I (sadly) don't play any mobile games for this reason. _Every_ game seems to revolve around engineering you to buy to speed up progress.

It's just one step worse (maybe two) than everything being a subscription. I prefer buying games(/software) once and being left to enjoy the game.

[strictnein]

What sucks is that they've gone back and added so much of this junk to older games too. Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys through increasingly difficult levels. The last time I opened one of those games I hardly recognized them.

[christoph]

What's particularly galling is that many of those games had a reasonable up-front cost with an unwritten agreement you were buying a complete product, then as time and updates have gone by, they've totally junked the original product you paid your money for. I'm basically done with anything on mobile that has IAP or potentially might at a future date.

[techsupporter]

> Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys...

And in the case of the original Angry Birds, Rovio even removed it from the app stores (and renamed it for past purchases to "Red's First Flight") because of the "game's impact" on their portfolio and business model.

https://twitter.com/Rovio/status/1627956351002443778

[TedDoesntTalk]

I just installed and played Plants vs Zombies (the original) on Android a few days ago. I did not see any way to purchase anything…. Yet

[strictnein]

I think I may have been conflating PvZ 1 and 2.

[robotnikman]

Yeah, its PvZ 2 which has all the added bs

[techsupporter]

I don't play a lot of games, probably so few that even spending on this is a "waste", but this is why I subscribe to Apple Arcade. IAPs and upsells are completely banned and each game in that separate market is included. (I would even consider paying a bit extra to get games through there, treating Apple Arcade like a Costco membership.)

There are some games in there, like the Star Trek one, that are clearly IAP-infested outside of Apple Arcade. You can see the inflection points and the spots where you'd be prompted to "buy" more "transporter power" or whatever. But like watching an American TV show on British TV, where the action fades to black (for a commercial) then comes right back, these are both jarring and interesting. The game would be perfectly playable, and arguably more interesting, without these points but the developers wouldn't be able to hook their whales so they exist elsewhere.

[mortenjorck]

When browsing a listing in the App Store, I always used to jump immediately to the in-app purchases section and pattern-match for two things: “1 month, 3 months, 1 year…” in the case of apps, or “10 gems, 50 gems, 150 gems…” in the case of games. Either would be an instant disqualification.

I say “used to” as I gave up browsing the App Store.

[arsome]

I've barely touched the App Store in the past few years while I used to peruse it regularly. Now instead of browsing for top selling games like I used to, I'm back to using a search engine or reading reddit threads for suggestions.

App stores are too polluted with garbage now, they went from being a unique selling point of mobile platforms to entirely useless and I think IAPs are largely to blame.

[zug_zug]

I can't help but think I'd buy 10x as many games on mobile if there was a way to filter out all in-app purchases (other than pay once: add-free forever no more asks to buy)

[givinguflac]

This is why I love Apple Arcade. No ads, no in app purchases, and plenty of classic and big name games too. They aren’t all good, but there’s plenty there to make it worth it.

[no_wizard]

Bloons TD 6+

One of the most fun tower defense games I've played in a long, long time

[Loughla]

The best game I've seen for this is WazHack. It is free to download and play, but only to a certain depth. From there, if you want to go further, you pay for whatever type of character you want to use. If you only want to use one type of character, like barbarian, it costs 1$x. If you want to play all 8, it's 8$x.

Straight forward, you can play it to see if you like it, you can play the different characters to see if they match your play style. No other purchases needed.