I think it's fair to say that my opinion of mobile games up until recently hasn't been very high. Mobile games are for the most part designed to be snackable, requiring very little investment from the player. They are time fillers, intended to occupy the cracks in a person's life during which they would otherwise me twiddling their thumbs or trying not to make eye contact with strangers on the train, and as such I didn't see much value in them. It's probably not insignificant that I hadn't played very many of them. Up until now I've owned fairly modest mobile phones, capable of making calls, sending texts and checking Twitter but not a whole lot else. When I did get a chance to try one of these newfangled mobile games on someone else's device they were usually the mass appeal super-hits like
Angry Birds which tend towards the lower end of the skill spectrum, usually only serving to fuel my disdain for the entire platform. A few months ago, however, I invested in a Nexus 4 and have been starting to explore this new frontier and find the games that are actually intended for people like me to play. But whilst the games are starting to feel more familiar, the way in which I pay for them is still going to take some time before it becomes comfortable.
As someone who plays a lot of video games what I'm used to is spending a lump sum up front in order to play the game, and never having to worry about it again. The acts of paying for a game and playing it are entirely separated, one always happening completely before the other can begin. But in the mobile gaming space a large number of titles are free to download and play. The intention is that after trying the game out for a bit the player will decide to spend their money on something. A lot of non-game apps try to shepherd free users towards a premium version of the software, offering improved features or the removal of advertising. It's a bit like downloading a surprisingly robust demo before deciding to commit to buying the app. One of the most common ways of monetising games, however, is through microtransactions, allowing the player to spend small amounts of money to unlock benefits in the game. This has become known, unfortunately, as the freemium business model. It is this that causes me some discomfort, and not just because it serves as a reminder that there is no formal review process when it comes to inventing words. It's a model that can very easily be exploitative of the player, or at the very least be mishandled, making the game feel unbalanced or incomplete unless very large amounts of money are spent. For example, after the player gets beyond a certain point the game's difficulty may suddenly spike, with a handy reminder that a pack of health potions can be had for only a dollar, but in order to actually finish the game the player is likely to need tens or hundreds of these packs. Even if a game doesn't do this, because it's possible gamers like me tend to be on the defensive when playing freemium games, always on the lookout for the moment when the game turns and starts demanding payment. Seeing that the most expensive item in the premium store of a game costs $99 doesn't help.
Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe in supporting the developers by paying for the games that I play. Long before I even considered working in the games industry to be a possibility I knew that people worked hard to make the game I was playing, and thus should be suitably remunerated. It's a pretty simple equation: if the people who make the games don't get paid, eventually they're going to stop making them, and that will be a bad thing. However, without that initial lump sum I'm a bit uncertain about the best way to go about rewarding developers for a game well made, and it has lead to some bad experiences.
In February I started playing a game called
Life is Magic, having met the developers in Seattle last year and liking what I saw, and was initially very impressed by its interesting element-based RPG combat, its use of the device's location to transform the real world into a fantasy landscape and its clever use of social features to form parties with your friends. The initial download was free, so I started to poke around in the game's premium store to figure out how I could give something back to the developer. Unfortunately all I could find was the option to buy crystals, the game's premium currency, used to purchase new spells and equipment for your character, none of which I really needed. After quite a lot of consideration I finally put my money down and bought a pack of 110 crystals, spent less than half of them on spells before hitting the limit of what my character was allowed to use for their level, and then found that what I had left wasn't enough to buy any equipment better than what I already had. The spells I bought, whilst helpful, didn't do much to accelerate my progress through the game, and after pushing myself to play for another couple of weeks (after all, now I had spent money so I
had to play) got fed up and stopped. So now I'm just left with a bag of useless crystals and £8 that I will never see again.
This is of course my own fault. No-one was forcing me to spend any money, and I was fully aware of what the crystals were used for before I bought them. The problem is that I was trying to take responsibility for something the designers of the game failed to do: create a compelling reason for someone invested in their game to spend money. This is a very common failure for freemium games, particularly since not every player has the same expectations about paying for games. Getting the monetisation right in a freemium game is a bit like crossing
a canyon on a tightrope for an audience who can't agree what sort of
bicycle you should be riding. It's a tricky thing to get right and it's not surprising that so many games prefer to target the whales, the small percentage of players who spend exponentially more money than everyone else.
From my point of view the problem is this: whilst I'm not someone who feels that spending real money on virtual items is a waste, I'm not sure if I'll ever feel comfortable spending money on things that I don't get to keep. If a game offers me a permanent upgrade, such as a coin doubler that lasts for as long as I choose to play the game then I'm fine with that. Even if the thing I buy is fairly minor and acts a bit like a tip jar for the developers then I'm happy; in a lot of ways it just feels like paying for the game as I normally would. But if the game wants me to spend 69p on something that I can use only once then I'm not interested. The fact that it's only 69p doesn't matter: that money is gone and I have literally nothing to show for it once the boost wears off. The most egregious example of this I have encountered is in a game called Smash Cops: Heat, in which the player can buy packs of single-use upgrades that make them temporarily faster and invincible during a mission but are very easy to not use effectively. If you buy one of these packs, use all the upgrades but still don't complete your mission, then you're back to where you started except now slightly annoyed that you spent money on going nowhere.
So here I am in a weird situation: I prefer not to get games for free. These days if I'm browsing for a new game to play I spend a lot more time in the paid section of the Google Play store. Call me old fashioned (and many will) but I prefer to not have to consider the game's business model before I jump in, or whilst I'm playing. I don't want to get invested in a game's mechanics only to discover that I'm never going to see the end because I object to how it wants me to pay for my fun. I'd rather just pay for the game and know that I'm getting an experience balanced in the same way as everyone else. I'd rather get the business part of the transaction out of the way so that I'm not thinking about it whilst I play. I have noticed that in games with microtransactions I'm developing a kind of weird aversion to anything that might require me to spend money. The game
Nimble Quest allows you to spend tokens to activate a bonus that lasts for the next round of the game. I have plenty of tokens, and I would probably find the bonuses very helpful, but I don't want to use them because I know they're something that I would eventually spend money to get more of and I just don't want to engage in that system. I feel discouraged to explore the full structure of freemium games because I'm expecting a pay wall to slam down in front of me if I try to do too much. When playing
10000000 or
Dungeon Raid, which require payment up front, I can just relax and enjoy myself.
The way mobile games are monetised clearly works for a lot of players; it's hard to ignore how much money games like
Candy Crush Saga are making. But for people like me who are used to buying games up front, it's going to take both developers and gamers a little whilst to get comfortable with each other.
