Let's talk about micro transactions

To some people micro-transaction is a dirty word, but when it is done right out can actually improve the overall game experience.

Some games have, in my opinion, implemented it will and others have it work well.

For me, Hearthstone seem to have done an overall good job with their business model. I like that you can gain every card without spending a penny, but if you don't have much free time you can invest a bit of money.

What games do you think have a model that works well and what doesn't?

Let's talk about the pros and cons of this system.

 

This is one of my favourite subjects.

I like models where I get to play as long as I like without spending money, and at no point will I become "stuck" and unable to progress.

That way, whether i spend money is always up to me. I never feel railroaded into it. It's not the money that irks me, and I don't think it's what irks anyone else either. I think what upsets people is the part where you say "spend money or stop playing."

I like artificial caps on the money. Some games will place an arbitrary limit on how much of something you buy, and it's like $60 to hit that limit. So that feels like they have some social responsibility in play, and won't just keep taking your money as long as you'll give it to them. Even when some other option lets you be a whale if you like. Also, you might have ten different things that cost $60 to top out, and seriously $600 on a game?

Still feels fair, because you won't let someone spend $6,000.

 

I remember when that used to be ok and was called a demo disk..

Not exactly a game (unless you think of it as a financial game for creatives) but Second Life is the only micro-transaction based system I've ever thought worth getting into. While some transactions there are to add actual game play (like my racing timing gate system) the majority are for clothing, skins and other ways for the player to express their individuality. A point Rockstar caught with GTA V online I think..

 

Still is okay, if you tell the player up front and only do it once.

But fire up Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff on mobile or Facebook, and you'll rapidly hit a point where every single available action is sitting on an eight-hour timer that you could finish immediately with gems that you buy for cash. And once you do that, you'll hit the same point in about the same amount of time.

It doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that if you expect to perform enough actions to earn enough weirdo event currency to buy the fancy statue before the end of the week when the event closes, you're going to need $30 to $50 worth of gems. So this basically means "pay $40 to put this fancy statue in your town, so other people can see you have it, and then they will totally think you're cool."

The concept of the timer taking so long to finish and needing gems to complete it, that's not bad. What makes it bad is the part where once all your timers are running, there's nothing left to do. The game is literally saying "you've had enough fun for now, you have to pay if you want more fun."

Demo disks didn't do that. When you got to the end of the demo disk, all you had to do was start the demo over again. I played DOOM episode 1 hundreds of times before I actually bought it.

As a general rule, I think you should avoid any options where you have to make a new thing before the player can buy it. If I buy everything you have for sale, what do you have that I still want and can buy again? Also, what if I don't care about vanity and individuality?

 

Me too. It's why I brought up Second Life and it's player created content. A normal game equivalent could be setting up an official marketplace for mods and taking a commission / approval fee as appropriate.

GTA online is the other way with only official content sold and mods resulting in bans.

Nothing, but thank you for being a walking in game advertisement for my stuff

Then you must be into the core gameplay (or not 'my' target market at all) and help make sure there's things happening when people stop shopping and start playing. Then maybe peer pressure might encourage a little care but if not, you still would be expressing your individuality by staying with stock content.

Of course this all assumes a MMO rather than a single player game.. The very idea that a game is going to try and annoy me enough to spend money for relief puts me off those without even trying them.

 

Second Life, as I recall, had massive issues with money laundering, gambling, and IP theft. I'm not sure I'd use it as a model. Plus, if you give your players a drawing tool, it will only be a matter of minutes before someone draws a dick.

 

Yeah, giving players a cash out option brings a whole new layer of things to worry about.

Having an approval process to categorise mods as adult only or reject depending on the game's sensibilities would somewhat take care of dick pictures.

I'm not really promoting Second Life as a model, just as a good example for discussing some of the pros and cons of micro transactions and the different forms they can take.

 

My wife & I play Path of Exile which is (still) free and supported by MTX's. They only sell cosmetic items (skins, pets, effects, etc) & QOL character items (more character slots, stash tabs, etc)

They don't have any caps that I'm aware of and to create a new unique item for the game I think it's like $1200 or so.

I won't post how much we've spent, let's just leave it at a lot

 

On one hand, how much you want to spend is up to the person so the $60 "fair price" is the most arbitrary thing here. If someone is happy to spend more, it doesn't mean the model it's unfair.

On the other hand the vast majority of mtx is lockout via paid timer removal or in-game paid power currency. That's a pretty bad model just on a moral level. I don't understand how someone justifies this model.

Hearthstone was pretty fair imo but they recently devalued purchase value by retiring cards in all but one mode after a period of time. I think this could be okay because they constantly update it but still, I feel like I lost a lot of deck value over time for this change.

 

I am not fond of micro transactions, although if they have to be done, I like the way Hearthstone does it. Also, I think it is Eve Online that allows players to buy game time and sell it in game to players who might otherwise not be able to pay for their subscription. That seems fine to me too.I would probably be okay with cosmetics, although I doubt I would personally buy any, just because I am stubborn that way. I would pay for the game or monthly fee though happily.

However...I watched my mom in her 70's spend way to much money just to keep her android game from locking. She spent much more than she thought she did and she really needed her money for more important things. I also saw my son, when younger, spend the vast majority of his money on Facebook games, $2 here and $5 here until it added up to a lot of money.

I don't have a problem with subscriptions or paid games, but these tiny bits of money that add up to so much after a while, sometimes without the person noticing, just feeds into compulsions. Getting a phone call from your frantic elderly mom because her game locked her out is not pleasant. It feels like manipulation to me.

 

That's true. Which is why I am talking exclusively about what I like, and not what is objectively fair or not.

Well, imagine that I give you a television with a little box on it, and if you want to watch that television you have to put a dollar in the box every so often.

If you don't like this, you can just go get a different television. Nobody is making you watch mine, so if you'd rather watch the one you have to put money into, that's nobody's fault but yours.

Personally, I look around and see lots of televisions I don't have to put money into. I'll just watch one of those.

 

These are the things that bother me. I feel like any game with IAP should exert some energy and effort toward identifying people who are spending compulsively, and putting the brakes on. It may cost you some money, but honestly, this is morally wrong. This is people who don't have a free choice. And we should be able to spot this and stop them.

 

I understand that, I wasn't trying to stab your opinion

I see your point that it's really a personal choice and here are indeed alternatives, but is that really an accurate illustration? It seems like in reality the model we're talking about is actually more along the lines of the TV stops working for 8 hours until you put in more money, then it stops for 12 hours until... then 16.. then 28... Thats the 'evil' mtx model I'm referring to. In addition, it would be free for x period, then you would get used to it and be forced to start following this little schema. It shouldn't be confused with mmo style pay-to-play monthly fees, which is flat and regular like most standard billing.

 

Well, sooner or later, you'll stop putting in more money. If nothing else, you'll run out of money.

And what makes the model stupid is that when it says "you must wait seventy-two hours to play some more," that's seventy-two hours I want to play a game and I can't play yours. What do you think I'm going to do? Stare at your lock screen and cry? Hell no, I'm on the damn app store.

 

It is not free and you know that, because you won't post how much money you have spent. Did you spend more than $15 a month? If so, then it is not only not free, but it costs more than your average MMO.

I wish people would stop calling games like this free. Yes, they are cosmetics, but since the full support for the game comes from buying these virtual things, then somebody is paying for the game...people like you and your wife. Ultimately it is your choice, but really..it is not free.

Online games often push the competition stuff, attracting those who want to compete with others. Cosmetics are another way to compete. Again, nothing wrong with that, but this is not a free game. Some folks are paying way more than others...which maybe is a nice thing since then so many people get to play free off your dime. I like it when we share our money. lol

 

A friend of mine I play games with, we shoot each other recommendations all the time and eventually I just found myself saying "Ok, I'll check it out. But is it free? I can't afford another free game dude."... That kind of illustrates the state of free games. In the end if they're actually any fun then they're probably more expensive than just buying an 'expensive' $60 title.

 

Actually it is 100% free and many people play it as such and don't spend a dime.

However,
Just did a rough estimate and we've been playing since closed beta in 2011 & average maybe $50 per year so for 72 months it's about $4.15 / month (each)

I thought we were discussing micro transactions not berating life style choices

PS thanks, I hadn't actually stopped and calculated the cost, now I know

 

Not so bad as you thought, then? That is always good.

How you spend your money is up to you. I could care less about your lifestyle choices and honestly, I don't considering micro transactions a life choice. lol

However, many people spend and like you, they do not know really how much they spend. I was actually really surprised when I found out how much my son had spent on the Facebook games and so was he! The point is that when you pay $5 or $15 a month on a regular basis, you can budget for that cost. But when you pay a little bit here and a little bit there, it is very easy to lose track of how much you pay. And really, isn't that what is supposed to happen? If I told someone it would cost $150 a year to play a game, how many folks would want to do that? But if I said only $12 a month, that seems fair.

How many people spend more than $12 a month to play games? I am pretty sure my mom did and she is on a fixed income. If we didn't help her out once in a while, she would be unable to pay her own expenses...and she is a very proud elderly woman.

What has occurred is a culture where 'free' games has become the norm and no one wants to pay for a subscription or an android game. So we find sneaky ways to get them to pay. I wonder if we will ever be able to back to actually asking customers to pay a fair share for a game.

 

What if I told you that you could play a game all you wanted, and only spend money when you wanted to, and you could even spend nothing at all?

Lots of games are like that. I've played AdVenture Capitalist for two years and never spent a dime. In fact, most of the time when I spend money on a game, it's because I decided the game is worth what I am spending. Creativerse got $60. Crush Crush got $30. Soda Dungeon got $10.

Most games get nothing at all, especially games like Family Guy and Candy Crush which try to force it out of me with timers. Because they don't let me play the game all I want and only spend money when I want to; they block me from playing until I spend money, and say "we think you will spend money instead of waiting this long because you are that stupid and impatient."

This offends me, so I close the game and go play something else. There are plenty of things to play.

In the last week, I've spent $15 buying games. I bought the new DLC for War for the Overworld, and a terrible platformer called Mad Dagger, and a terrible tower defence game called 15 Defense, and Dawn of Discovery Gold Edition was on sale for $5 so I bought that too. That's a pretty light week for me, I'll often spend twice that.

So I am what they call a "whale" in the F2P world - someone who spends more than $50 a month on games. I am the person they want playing their game, and I am the person they want to spend money in their game, because I will spend that money and not be angry about it. When I really enjoy a game, I'll play it exclusively for a month or longer, and in the F2P space I may very well throw up to $150 down it.

But good luck keeping me on your game for more than three months, especially if you've convinced me to throw $50 or more down it two months in a row. I will almost always play a game for two or three weeks before I spend anything, and once I've spent a substantial amount on it, I start questioning whether this is really worth what I'm paying.

This is consistent with what I've seen quoted in the F2P space as what whales look like: we'll play often and have long play sessions, and once we start buying we will continue buying until we stop forever and then quit the game. We're price-sensitive and respond well to sales, but we prefer large infrequent purchases to small frequent ones.

Basically, if you are courting whales, you want to identify the people who have frequent long play sessions and offer them discounts on large purchases. If I've played your game several times a day for a week, and you offer me the $100 pack of premium currency for $60 with a free bonus upgrade and a vanity item I can't get anywhere else, I will quite likely buy it. And then you'll know I'm someone you should be trying to get more money out of. You can probably do that twice more in a month, if you play your cards right.

Now compare problem gambler and compulsive buyer behaviour. They're price sensitive and respond well to sales, then buy frequently in small amounts. They're the people who buy the $1.99 new player bundle, drop $2 on bonus items before the next level, pay $1 to get a few more moves, and after six levels of that they don't play for three days because they're horrified at how much money they spend. But they come back, and they play again, and they spend again, and when you add it all up it's the same $50 a month that makes a whale.

That's the "I wish I could quit you" player. They are not playing a game anymore. You are not having fun together. They are an addict and you are their pusher and you sell them the thing that is killing them. We know what this looks like and we are doing it on purpose.

Having spent several years in the online marketing community, I think I can pinpoint the problem: we have developed a culture where anything is permissible if you did it for money.

Everybody lies on their resume. Everybody lies in a job interview. Everybody lies at work. Everybody steals cable, hijacks the neighbours' wi-fi, and pirates software. Everybody torrents movies and music. Everybody has an adblocker plugin on their browser. And we have decided as a culture that this is fine. In the name of freedom, we will steal the product of someone else's labour simply because it costs money and we don't want to pay and we just can.

So when a sneaky game developer tricks us into spending money on his game because we are stupid and make bad decisions, this is okay. It is, in fact, part of the game. The game is free, if you are good enough at it not to need the paid upgrades, and if you are good enough at the marketing metagame to say "no" every time it asks for money. No matter how pushy the game gets, that's just how the game is played, and if you get taken in and pay for something you are a rube who deserved to be taken because you are bad at F2P gaming. Git gud.

It doesn't take much thought to realise that this is a really, really sick dynamic that can't be condoned. It hurts people. It ruins lives. And it's not what games are doing that causes the problem - it's what people are doing. We accept this kind of behaviour from games, because we accept it from each other. If you lie to your boss to get a pay rise, we high-five you and buy you a pint. How is that different? Lying to someone for money is okay. We decided that a long time ago, and this is where it got us.

If you don't like it, don't do it. That's all you have any real power to accomplish now.

 

These are the sorts of games full of ads. I completely get ads, but I will always buy it within 3 minutes of trying it if it is something I like. Many times though, the option to buy without ads is not there. Those I simply delete from my tablet.

I also think this is true. But sadly, it is so prevalent on the popular android/iphone stores, that developers feel the need to use these tactics to get paid for the work they did. Not entirely any one person's fault, but the problem lies with the entire game development community who are feeding these free games to the gamer community. Yet what choice does one developer have when all they want is to make a fair wage for their work? A bad situation, I think. Most of them, even with the dlc and the ads don't making a living wage off of their games.

That is what is sad and why our company won't develop mobile games. It is also why I rarely buy mobile games. When I do, it is that $2.99 card game or that $5 99 puzzle game. I would pay more than that if I liked the game, but I am not one who needs a game so much that I spend hours looking through piles of pictures and descriptions for that perfect game. Those stores are not just made for people like me. lol To be fair, I am not really a good thrift shop shopper either, so maybe it is just me...although my husband is the same way. We never play 'free' games for very long.

Give me a good place to buy games for my ipad that cost what they are worth up front, like Steam for mobile, and I will be happy to buy games from indie developers.

 

Not all of them. When games throw ads in my face, I drop them immediately. I recently played some F2P zombie clicker thing which invited me to spam my Facebook friends, then took the "No" button off the screen when I tried to click it, leaving only the "Yes." Other players have told me this is a joke and the "Yes" button doesn't actually spam Facebook. I don't think it is funny, so I don't play that game anymore.

Meanwhile, I am still playing AdVenture Capitalist after almost two years, and have never spent a dime on it. No ads.

No. No, it doesn't. A great many successful members of the development community are:

- Not doing these things
- Talking about how they do not do these things
- Telling other people not to do these things

Unfortunately, most people are stupid. The last time I checked, most F2P games don't make money. There's this inherent assumption people have that when there are twelve games on the app store that all use the same tactics, these tactics are successful. In reality, the most predatory and aggressive tactics are not working. The mobile version of Dungeon Keeper is such a complete turd it's like the poster child for awful F2P game design, but people will point to it and say "well, that must work, or they wouldn't be doing it."

That's not what I hear from the monetisation experts. They give advice that sounds a lot like good UX design. They talk about surfacing your store early and often without being intrusive, and adding buy buttons to dialogs your players are going to see anyway.

Abandoning the app store to the hyenas will never make anything better. If only crap developers are submitting to the store, then only crap games will be in it.

We need more good examples.

I like this idea. Really, I do. Have you looked at Amazon Underground? That's been an interesting thing to me.

 

I looked at it for my mother but for some reason it wouldn't work with her android tablet. Seems it is more geared to the Kindle Fire which makes sense. I have an Ipad so probably won't work on mine. I like the concept though.

Looks fun but I would rather play it on my PC. Phone games for me are simple games that pass the time while waiting at the doctors office or while on the phone on hold. lol

 

They've gotten really inexpensive. Plus I am so totally in love with Kindle Unlimited and all the books I can read.

 

I can do all that on my iPad. I also have three regular Kindles. lol

 

Be careful with gross generalizations. This is just not true.

 

All broad generalisations are false. It is, however, a complete waste of time to write half a page of legalese crap to enforce some notion of technical accuracy that nobody actually needs.

 

Sure, but excluding words like "Everybody" and "Everyone" often removes the need for all that. I'm just saying that I stop taking your argument seriously the second you try to say something applies to "everyone," especially if it doesn't apply to me.

But anyway, I'm taking the thread in a completely different direction now, and that's not cool. I'll cede control back to the conversation at hand.

 

Compare these two statements.

- Everyone has a tablet.
- The overwhelming majority of people relevant to this discussion either own a tablet or have ready access to some sort of personal mobile computing device which serves a similar function and can be considered roughly equivalent to a tablet for all meaningful intents and purposes.

I would rather type the first one. I understand that you might prefer to read the second one, but you should be able to infer all the relevant disclaimers all by yourself without me having to type them. If you're not, that's not my problem. If you are, but you just want to argue about whether I should type them anyway, you're not the boss of me and I don't care.

Which is relatively easy to drag back on topic. Compare these two scenarios.

- A game has IAP.
- A game has IAP which deliberately tries to avoid exploiting people who have gambling problems, are compulsive spenders, or just have poor impulse control.

I myself would prefer that every game with IAP was in the second category. However, it is an objective fact that gambling problems and compulsive spending and poor impulse control are not the game's problem. They are the player's problem, and it is the player's job to account for and control them.

We can't force our morality on other people, because it's personal. If it's okay for a game to have IAP, it's okay for a game to have predatory and aggressive IAP. It may be disgusting and repulsive, and I would certainly like such games to carry disclaimers (which they do; every store tags IAP-enabled apps), but even a game like the mobile port of Dungeon Keeper ought to be allowed to exist.

Sure would be nice if all the major storefronts looked at it and said "not in our store," though. I'd rather something like that was available strictly from the publisher, so you'd have to go looking for it. You know, like porn. You can't just stick porn on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart won't let you. No major retailer will let you. Your porn has to be sold at special porn shops where people go to buy porn.

 

This has been a very interesting read. I have nothing useful to add but it is good to see differing opinions on the different models. It's also interesting to see the games mentioned as examples.

 

I like how World of Tanks / World of Warships have done it. At no point is it actually necessary to pay money to play the game, and at no point does paying money give you something better than the players who put in the grind for free.

What paying them money can do is allow you to earn in game currency and experience faster with their premium accounts. You can purchase in game currency directly so as to use it for any number of things. You can also purchase a small number of vehicles that are unavailable for free, which aren't necessarily better than the freely available ones, but they are different (you also cannot use a pay for vehicle as a starting point to advance to higher vehicles either, you still have to grind to do that).

So what this lets players do, for example if all your friends are at level 7 and you're just starting out, you can optionally grind for months to get to level 7 or you can straight up purchase a level 7 vehicle and join your friends immediately. When your friends advance to level 8 though, you can't advance from your level 7 to level 8. You have to grind up your free vehicles in the mean time to level 8 or you're going to get stuck purchasing directly again. So in the end if you're playing the game long term you're going to have to grind up with everyone else.

 

Holy S*** dude, that's not what I meant and I assumed you were able to infer that by yourself without me having to type it out.

Compare the following statements.

- Everyone has a tablet.
- Many people have a tablet.
- Most people have a tablet.
- Lots of people have a tablet.

And really, that's not the statement you were making. You were making a statement about behaviors with negative connotations.

- Everyone has stolen money
- Many people have stolen money
- Most people have stolen money
- Lots of people have stolen money

Which is hardest to type?

If you want to take everything to a ridiculous extreme just to make a point wherein you are considered right, that's not my problem. If you don't want to take my advice, that's not my problem either.

 

Time gating is bad design and does not ADD anything to any game. In reality the game is artificially truncated/gated to force the player to pay if they wish to continue playing. Anyone who says time gating adds gameplay is being deceptive. Its anti-consumer friendly and bad game design.

Imagine after beating level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. receiving a popup saying - Congratulations on beating level 1-1. To play level 1-2 you have to wait 4 hours or you can pay 50 coins ($1.00) to unlock 1-2 right now!

"What a great offer the developer has given me! To let me pay to allow me to play more of the game!
Rather- wtf? I have to pay to play the next level or wait to play the next level?? Uninstall.

IAP (imo) are fine as long as they are vanity/cosmetic items OR if they are a one time purchase to unlock an entire game.
One time IAP to give access to the rest of the game is a great way to allow anyone to try before you buy the full game.