What's the appeal of freemium games?

[Naer]

Also maybe a more important question, what's the appeal of speeding up your progress with real money?

 

[Dulanic]

Also maybe a more important question, what's the appeal of speeding up your progress with real money?

I hate them, but it seems like it's all that's available lately.

 

[sweenish]

I rather like Fallout Shelter and Pokemon Go, but I have not and don't plan on giving away any money.

If they want my money, make a good game and charge for it. With that said, IAP to unlock full version is fine by me. Most of my mobile games are not free.

 

[quikah]

I play a couple, mostly Clash of Clans and hearthstone, but I don't actually spend money on them. For me they are nice distraction when I only have a small amount of freetime, like 30-60 minutes. I don't see the appeal of spending money on them either. I get bored of them quickly, I do most of my gaming on PCs.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Also maybe a more important question, what's the appeal of speeding up your progress with real money?

So you can get far ahead or stop noobs.

The key to success with freemium games is to develop something that's playable without paying. Boom Beach, Clash of Clans are great examples. It's easy to grind up to a reasonable level where your gameplay really matters. Sure you can grind ahead or pay at that point, but it can be fun for both parties.

 

[swanysto]

It plays on the ever growing problem with society always wanting to get to the top the easy way, or do things the easy way.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It plays on the ever growing problem with society always wanting to get to the top the easy way, or do things the easy way.

Mixed with the games genuinely manipulating those with potential gambling addictions (called "whales" in market lingo).

 

[Roland00Address]

Also maybe a more important question, what's the appeal of speeding up your progress with real money?

The appeal of a freemium game is the feeling of exploration even if its exploration in a contained space. Think of it as the feeling of creating change, and you are the agent of the change. Kinda like the idea of imagination with legos and while imagination is cool, it is also cool to start making it real.

You first need to place a person into this kinda of world, this kidna of mindset prior to even them thinking it is a game that costs money.

Once they are already engrossed in the mental simulation. Once it has become a game and they feel a slight rush. You then remind them that they can speed up the simulation, create more profound change, by using these resources, these credits, just like these other resources the person is spending all the time that the game gives for free, or the game gives if you shake the tree, or you pick them up from the ground.

But you get an even more profound change by spending another type of resource, a resource that is a gem, or coin, or shiny gold bricks, but in reality this resource is you spending outside money just like you were putting dollar bills on the table and handing them over, or if you were swiping with your credit card.

How freemium games work is they are a mental simulation that is too engrossing, and they separate you from the feelings of your body, they also separate you from the feelings of the outside world, and you do not think of this is costing you money, money that was meant to do X in the outside world. Now you just think I need more gold coins to create more change in this virtual world.

Put another way think of it as someone "hacking your mind" and instead of you living in the real world, part of your mind thinks it is in a virtual world. Put another way this is what the art of suggestion, some people call it the art of hypnotic suggestion. Where you are not a sleep but part of your senses are dulled, but another part is hyper aware, and the suggestion is so obvious that you do not think the counter narrative up to solve the problem.



Freemium games and whales will not work in the majority of the population. Most of the population may spend a small amount, but it is to unlock features that are not possible in another way, but the whales spend money not to unlock features but instead to speed up the game, as a force multiplier as an analogy. This is similar to how certain people are more suspectible to certain styles of marketing, or certain people are more suspectible to hypnosis, or more people are more suspectible to the stroop "interference" effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect.

For the people who are not aware of the stroop effect. Imagine that you have to write down the name of a color when you see the word of a color on a computer screen. If the screen flashes blue the word you write down blue. Now imagine what happens when they do the word blue, the word red, the word green both in the word but also match the color blue, red, and green to those words. Now in the middle of the "game" they started making the word blue the color red, and the word green the color blue to start confusing you. This is what the stroop effect is, sometimes called the stroop interference effect. It has to do with processing speed, automaticity of thought, selective attention where you ignore information, response control / inhibition, and it can involved with parallel information distributed processing when you add more rules. Like you are supposed to ring a bell whenever you see the color blue, but you are not supposed to ring the bell when you see the word blue and the color is also blue. Put another way the stroop effect is a fancy and more complicated way of doing simon says but with different senses and different rules on what is the triggering factor for simon.



South park did a wonderful job explaining this phenomenon with their episode freemium is not free (season 18 episode 6)

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I am not against the idea of freenium games, freenium games are a good form of free trial for things like games, but also stuff that are not games like software. That said I believe laws should be written where the app developer is forced to put in the app preferences in some place where the user can state before hand, I want to spend only $20 a month, or $200 a month and after that limit has been surpassed the user has to re-enter their credit card information instead of the game taking the information directly from the already entered information from google, apple, etc. In other words they user can change their mind, but after that preset limit prior to them starting the game of $20 a month, or $200 a month they are "automatically cut off" unless they choose to re-engage.

Pretty much you re-entering your credit card information is forcing you to exist the mental simulation and force you to re-make a choice once again whether you want to continue or not.

 

[Roland00Address]

It plays on the ever growing problem with society always wanting to get to the top the easy way, or do things the easy way.

You just describe human nature.

You also just describe animal nature.

Which would a rat rather do to get a treat?

1) Push a lever with the lever being right next to their bed and their toys

2) or go through an entire maze in order to find the treat?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I think it's a great model, you don't have to pay anything if you don't want to and can still experience the full game, but if you want to get ahead faster or get more items etc you can pay money if you want. It's win win for the user and the developer. Of course some implementations are better than others. If the non paying customers are super screwed over then it's not really fair.

 

[Zaap]

Personally, I don't much care for the model. But if it works for devs and other consumers, fine.

I'd much rather just pay a fair amount for a game and never be bugged again to fork over money, and then stand an equal shot as everyone else playing the game.

I'm NOT by any stretch a big gamer, but it somehow just feels wrong for me to pay real money to get ahead in some way. I just mean personally, I don't care what anyone else does- for me it just isn't gratifying.

Right now I'm hooked on Trivia Crack. For the life of me, I can't see how anyone can feel gratified playing a trivia game that allows you to spend money to essentially bypass *actually answering the trivia questions* and move ahead in score as if you did!

That's seriously goofy to me, but I also understand the devs should make their money any way they are able to.

 

[mrochester]

I think it's a great model, you don't have to pay anything if you don't want to and can still experience the full game, but if you want to get ahead faster or get more items etc you can pay money if you want. It's win win for the user and the developer. Of course some implementations are better than others. If the non paying customers are super screwed over then it's not really fair.

It does teach the terrible lesson that the way to get ahead is to pay money. Games used to be about skill or using your brain etc (there are still plenty of games that are, but there's no denying there's a big trend toward gaming where the only skill required is to open your wallet). Other than an upfront cost to purchase the game, I don't think any game should offer you the ability to pay money to get ahead.

 

[Willhouse]

Also maybe a more important question, what's the appeal of speeding up your progress with real money?

I think the answer to the thread title, is that some freemium games are fun to play free, at least for a little while. Many start out extremely fun, providing reasonably rapid progression, and then gradually slow down to a huge grind. At that point, I think people quit or just log in a few times a day to collect whatever currency has been accruing and perform maintenance tasks. People who don't want to grind and have disposable income spend money to reduce the grind.

I can say I've spent cash on freemium games like Clash of Clans (and a similar game Dungeon Master) to get the extra workers. It probably totaled $50 and allows one to spend the in-game money more effectively. I don't spend a lot on freemium games, but if I like a game, and I can spend a little money for a tangible improvement, I will consider it to help me and help the developers.

On the other hand, I've definitely had much better experiences and prefer playing pay-up-front games, but I can only find so many for mobile.

 

[swanysto]

You just describe human nature.

You also just describe animal nature.

Which would a rat rather do to get a treat?

1) Push a lever with the lever being right next to their bed and their toys

2) or go through an entire maze in order to find the treat?

Not the same. You have left out the payment factor in this analogy. If the mouse had to give up something in return for having the luxury of a food lever, than you might be talking the same thing. Otherwise, you would be correct, I think everyone would pick scenario 1, which in turn would mean that everyone playing the fremium games would buy their way to a better position.

 

[z1ggy]

It's a great business model I think, especially when the game is very good/addicting, and has theoretically limitless expansion, like Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Pokemon, etc. 95% of people don't pay money (or very little, like $5/yr), but those that do probably spend a bunch of money on it.

 

[Roland00Address]

Not the same. You have left out the payment factor in this analogy. If the mouse had to give up something in return for having the luxury of a food lever, than you might be talking the same thing. Otherwise, you would be correct, I think everyone would pick scenario 1, which in turn would mean that everyone playing the freemium games would buy their way to a better position.

No I purposefully left out opportunity cost for you never brought up opportunity cost in your initial post.

My point was that if there is no opportunity cost than human and animal kind's brains are hardwired to take the bigger outcome. That was my entire point. Doing otherwise would be absurd on its face.

You may have intended to bring up opportunity cost but your original post never did so.

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If you want to argue about delayed gratification and immediate returns vs delayed but greater returns as the opportunity cost that is something you can debate. Do understand though the longer the stretch in time, the greater unpredictability of the reward happening, the greater chaos of the environment, and the greater amount of stress all cause reward discounting of future rewards in both humans and animals. The more you do of these various types of stressors and the greater the amount of reward discounts.

There is a huge amount of neuroscience investigating this, but also psychology, and also economics. The sum of it is humans act just like animals, so we should not be surprised when human beings "fail" and do not take the more logical outcome, and we succumb to the more instinctual impulse. Yet even though human beings are like animals we have executive functions that allow us to do things in a more logical way, to extend our concept of time and our concept of reward and our concept of cooperation outward. That said executive functions are not limited to humans we now know that animals have proto versions of the same thing, humans are just more developed and the various types of executive functions are more integrated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

 

[Ns1]

freemium games are great for casual gamers because there is often little to no cost associated with it.

also...

Willhouse
Junior Member

Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 15

 

[cmdrdredd]

I've seen some games that have artificial limiters. Like a sniper game that gives you only so much ammo and you need to either pay a couple dollars to get more or wait 24hours to get the next free supply. This differs IMO from a golf game that lets you unlock a course by paying for it, or you can earn it by doing well on the free course.

For mobile games it makes sense because most titles are only mildly entertaining for short bursts and grinding over and over to unlock things can get tedious. People need something to do on their commute or a long trip and to be limited from moving on is frustrating. These are only a few examples of the types of people they are trying to attract. Others have been mentioned previously. I've never personally paid real money for in game items or to unlock something in a game, but if people want to do it go right ahead. It's not at all unlike buying DLC for PC or console games. If the game gives me a limiter like the above mentioned ammo replenishment, I simply move on to something else. Luckily most titles allow you to obtain resources from within the game by some means. For example Pokemon Go lets you get pokeballs, incense and other items from poke stops rather than buying it outright. Sure the poke stop rewards are random but you can hit multiple stops in succession or stay at one location a while (I think it's 15minutes) and it will allow you to spin again.

 

[mrochester]

It's a great business model I think, especially when the game is very good/addicting, and has theoretically limitless expansion, like Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Pokemon, etc. 95% of people don't pay money (or very little, like $5/yr), but those that do probably spend a bunch of money on it.

It taps into a similar mentality that gambling does. It's definitely highly exploitative.

 

[z1ggy]

It taps into a similar mentality that gambling does. It's definitely highly exploitative.

Exactly. Also, with younger people who are used to "instant" gratification because they grew up in the age of the internet, are way more likely to spend that few bucks to get XYZ items faster/more powerful in a shorter period of time.

That's why Supercell offers freemium games, but has revenues in the millions of dollars.

 

[Midwayman]

The appeal to the player is "Hey, free game!" no risk to try. If you're the sort that never plays a game more than a day or two they are great. Move from game to game before the negatives set in.

However the negatives are huge for anyone playing past what amounts to a trial period. I'd much rather they just be honest and put the first level or whatever up as a demo and then charge to unlock the rest. Bad thing is there is no upper limit on spending. Played a few like world of tanks on PC and its kinda absurd how much money you can pour into it. That sort of game would be $30-40 if you bought it outright, but its trivial to pay hundreds playing it over a few months.

 

[BoberFett]

I've always abhorred the idea of microtransactions, pay-to-win, etc. I'd rather just pay my money and get a full game.

I will confess to recently spending money on Gems of War however. I played for free for a couple months without spending a dime. There's not really much you can't eventually get for free if you play long enough, but I broke down and bought a $50 bundle of in-game goods including an item that would double the rate I earn in-game gold, etc. I figured that with as much enjoyment as I got out of the game, and the fact that it's online with continual updates and support, supporting the developer was worth the money. That I got some nice little bonuses out of it is just icing on the cake.

I highly recommend the game by the way. It's your typical match three game, but it's got an interesting combat mechanic paired to a virtual collectible card game. It's by the same devs as Puzzle Quest I believe.

 

[mrochester]

I've always abhorred the idea of microtransactions, pay-to-win, etc. I'd rather just pay my money and get a full game.

I will confess to recently spending money on Gems of War however. I played for free for a couple months without spending a dime. There's not really much you can't eventually get for free if you play long enough, but I broke down and bought a $50 bundle of in-game goods including an item that would double the rate I earn in-game gold, etc. I figured that with as much enjoyment as I got out of the game, and the fact that it's online with continual updates and support, supporting the developer was worth the money. That I got some nice little bonuses out of it is just icing on the cake.

I highly recommend the game by the way. It's your typical match three game, but it's got an interesting combat mechanic paired to a virtual collectible card game. It's by the same devs as Puzzle Quest I believe.

My problem has always been that no mobile game has ever been 'fun' enough to warrant paying for it. The platform is just far too limited for anything other than a casual, brief game, and they usually aren't worth paying anything for. I'm happy to pay for PC games though. My best ever purchase was Cities in Motion. 700 hours of gameplay for £12.99. Bargain.