Freemium iOS games made me want to pay for games

[jfrost]

Some incoherent rambling for your reading pleasure!

I recently downloaded Plants vs Zombies 2. Being a fan of the first game, I thought I would be in for more offbeat humor, nice art, and giving up strategic efficiency for the sake of the symmetric beauty of my garden.

To be sure, the game has got all of this. But it's also got the freemium structure that has turned it into a boring grindfest for most of the time.

You can't just play through the game. To access a new world, you have to replay the stages you've just completed to get more stars. Or you can take a shortcut and cough up $10 to speed up the process.

It's all very frustrating. They took a game and made sure to wreck the pacing they had developed in the first installment. If you do get PvZ2, you'll be playing the same stages over and over, trying to complete meaningless tasks to have access to a new world where you'll have to be the same.

The same happened in Real Racing 3. It's a good game, very playable early, specially when you adjust the controls to make the brakes manual and use on-screen buttons to turn instead of the accelerometer. But it also has this infuriating system in which we have to wait to perform pretty much any action in game.

At the beginning these waiting times are very bearable, hardly going over 2 minutes. But soon, they start to get serious. Your car needs maintenance? Well, you'll have to wait one hour to use it again. Bought a new car? Wait five hours. And you guys complained about the Neo Geo CD loading times!

Need upgrading? You gotta have these gold coins we're very stingy with and sell 20 for $10, and you cannot use the in-game currency for this specific upgrade because we thought people wouldn't spend enough real cash in game.

So, pretty much these games are very self-confident that they can waste my time or make me hand out money instead of just giving up on them.

Must be the same kind of hubris that made Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy on iOS charge 3 dollars per song. And the same arrogance that bled money from Zynga.

To be sure, I wouldn't have any issue paying for stuff to unlock in game. The problem is that the games's structure make sure that the payments I make are not a one-off thing. They're structured to make me pay repeatedly for the same things.

And that does not do.

So, in a sense these games were successful. They made me want to pay. So I deleted them and bought Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch, which costs $6 and gives me access to the whole damn thing from the get go.

[Violent By Design]

Quite a misleading title.

I don't play any free games on ios since I jailbroke it and just dload all that stuff for free anyway. A decent number of its most notable titles are free, and there are often promotional periods where a large number of games are free as well.

[jfrost]

A little bit misleading, but it was justified perhaps? :)

[Opa Opa]

I heard about the whole Pvz2 freemium thing. There are some good free-to-play games though. Have you played Into The Dead, jfrost? I was pretty hooked on it for a while but I never felt I had to pay for anything.

[Pulsar_t]

Is it morally "wrong" to crack those nefarious games to provide unlimited coins/tokens/stars/faeces?

[SamuraiMegas]

Jailbreak and get the crack that allows you free in app purchases.

[jfrost]

I heard about the whole Pvz2 freemium thing. There are some good free-to-play games though. Have you played Into The Dead, jfrost? I was pretty hooked on it for a while but I never felt I had to pay for anything.

I haven't. I'll look into it, thanks!

[jfrost]

Jailbreak and get the crack that allows you free in app purchases.

There isn't a good jailbreak for my iOS version. Either way, it doesn't seem like it would be that much fun having unlimited buys either. The games are broken in one way or another.

[RCBH928]

I think there is a good freemium and bad freemium

style1 : Makes you think the game is free except that there is no way you will continue in more than 15 minutes except without paying up or waiting 1 week to do something that you could have done in 1 second if you paid. And even this splits into 2 styles:

A) You pay and the game opens up and you can continue along

B) Constant blood sucking like paying $3 for the next level, except in the next level you will only be able to beat it if yo purchased upgrade X for $6 , and then you beat that level you discover that upgrade X you purchased in the previous level is too weak for this one so you have to buy another upgrade. To hell with them, am not sure who continues to play this way .

Style2: The game is playable but its like on hard difficulty, but very much passable. Upgrades are available to make it easier for you. If you enjoy the game unlock able levels exist. Good developers will even include a single price that will unlock everything in the game.

Personally I find the second style is even better than fully priced games. It really gives you a taste of what the game is like , so no buying regrets. You chose if you want to walk the difficult road or take it easy. You decide if the stuff is worth paying for or not.

I got all the stars in PvZ2 . I must say the developers are being sly, they kind of give you the idea that you can't beat this game unless you pay. But in reality its very well passable but its very challenging. Any way, I found my way through with paying around $5-10 which the game is very worthwhile.

One thing that upsets me is that there are plants that are only unlock able through paying up and its not cheap. I believe its $3 per plant, making it quite expensive.