[Dartanion7]

I recently wrote a book about Freemium, in part, because I think it is vilified unfairly within the context of gaming.

Before moving to gaming, I worked at Skype. No one ever accused Skype of exploiting people, or of facilitating addiction, or of polluting the purity of telephony. Skype made money by, essentially, up-selling people to paid phone calls. Those phone calls might have been to people's sick parents in foreign countries, or their kids. Imagine that! By charging for phone calls, Skype might have been prevented someone from speaking to their sick mother!

Freemium is a business model; it's not a moral framework or an ethos. Some people make terrible games with the freemium model; they likely would have made terrible games had they gone with an upfront payment model. The difference between the terrible freemium game and the terrible paid game is that people got to choose whether or not they contributed money to the terrible freemium version after playing it. They got more information before making a purchase, kind of like a test drive. Isn't that a good thing -- more information?

[chilldream]

Gaming is actually the most evil possible context for freemium. It encourages bad design at literally every level, in ways that generally do not transfer to other types of software.

If freemium were generally just a demo for a better game, you would be right that there's nothing wrong with it, but optimizing a game for freemium means a worse game. Watch the second video in the article; the "best value" gem cart is in the ballpark of just straight up buying a game. Except you don't get the entire game.

[Dartanion7]

> If freemium were generally just a demo for a better game

It's not, and no one ever said it was. The demo analogy isn't valid; a free-to-play game is a fully functional game. IAPs may unlock additional functionality, or help bypass time gates, or whatever, but the "core loop" of a game shouldn't (under the guise of freemium, anyway) be restricted by payments.

This isn't to say that it doesn't happen -- not every developer really understands freemium, and some bastardize it. But can you really argue with consumer preference for freemium? If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.

[chilldream]

> a free-to-play game is a fully functional game

I suspect my definition for "fully functional" is different from yours, but I have high standards.

> If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.

Actually it's entirely possible for something hated to also be the most profitable course of action given things like information asymmetry. For instance, if people would be happier with good $20 apps, but it's so hard to tell which $20 apps are good that no one is willing to risk buying them, then you end up with the current situation.

I'm not necessarily saying that this is the case (much as I hope it is), but I would love nothing more than for reviews like this to bring people around to how exploitative this model is, and how much it encourages bad game design.

[Dartanion7]

This is verifiably not the case; for example, see the positive reviews of Candy Crush Saga and any number of other F2P titles. It's pretty clear that consumers prefer the freemium model, it's just a vocal minority that continues to single out specific games (like the one in the OP) and use them to denigrate the business model.

Also, isn't your argument re: information asymmetry an argument in favor of F2P? In the case where a developer has made a great game, it behooves them to release it for free, not only because that's obviously what consumers prefer (see the App Store), but because it allows the app to be more widely distributed and critiqued (and thus the worst apps would be quickly identified as bad and not downloaded -- perfect information).

[chilldream]

> Also, isn't your argument re: information asymmetry an argument in favor of F2P?

It's an argument that developers and consumers can both be correct to gravitate toward F2P. It's not an argument that this is the happiest equilibrium for either. It's the same rationale behind lemon laws; the absence of such laws pushes the market toward a position where buyers have to assume all cars are secretly busted, sellers have to price their cars accordingly, and the market ultimately gravitates toward people selling busted cars because nothing else is profitable.