I don't dispute the OP's argument. It just makes me sad.
One of the things I really used my iPad for a lot is games. The distribution mechanism and purchasing system are super-simple. You could (and can) get high-quality games for a low price. I see I've spent 100+ hours playing Bejeweled 3 alone.
Yet the trend has clearly gone towards in-app purchases. I tried some golf game (Tiger Woods something?) and it was constant nagging for in-app purchases. That got deleted in about 2 minutes.
Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most. And I've tried a bunch (spending no real $$$) to see (I'm a sucker for world-building games and there's a dearth of those, sadly).
The second category (normal games with in-app purchases) create the wrong incentives. Whereas Angry Birds originally spread because it was a hugely fun game, the game developer is incentivized to make you fork over more money, typically at the expense of the game itself.
It saddens me that Angry Birds has gone the in-app purchase route too.
Sadly the genie is out of the bottle. Any sensible game developer will go this route. Add to this the "social" layer being foisted on users and it's really looking like dark days ahead for gaming.
And this is exactly why I'm predicting a crash in the mobile games market. People are going to figure out sooner or later that they're being exploited and not actually having much fun and the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down. It's actually worse than that because games make up the bulk of the app stores' revenue.
Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most.
A game that markets itself through a social network is not intrinsically social. It's just parasitic. Zynga is Facebook's tapeworm. Games, for over 5000 years, have been a lot more social than Fartville. This Zynga shit is alienating. It's about as "social" as playing the lottery is intellectual because it involves numbers.
I was at Google during the Real Games battle, and inadvertently became somewhat of a lightning rod for it. I'll skip over the whole history but just say this: if decisions had been made on merit rather than rank, Google+ Games could have been something, and if it had, Google+ would have become an actual contender in the social space. I saw first-hand the damage that Zyngaism can do to a potentially major product.
I think all of this Zyngarbage is an attempt to emulate the success of Magic: the Gathering and its iterative pay-to-keep-current mechanism, but without the insight and work that made Magic (in spite of its annoying pricing model) great.
There will be a flight-to-quality in the gaming space (Zyngarbage will always exist, just as third-rate porn always will, but it will become a low-margin commodity) but I have no idea when it will be and what it will do to the current cottage industry.
> Any sensible game developer will go this route. Add to this the "social" layer being foisted on users and it's really looking like dark days ahead for gaming.
Was this not the same with arcade games padding difficulty and length to force players into shelling out quarters? I find the "IAP and F2P will RUIN GAMING!!" arguments to be mostly based in fear and not common sense. It's true the majority of people aren't engrossed in gaming culture, so they are more likely to fall for F2P tactics, but that doesn't mean every single developer is going to leave the "quality" gaming market to wither and die.
I hope that Apple will realise that these games are hurting its brand and products and will kick them out of the App Store just like they did with fart apps. I don’t see what kind of business advantage allowing these games gives them.
It’s their “walled garden” and it’s their responsibility to take care of it when it’s overran by weed.
I consider myself sensible, but I would never use IAP, except under one condition: the old "shareware" method. That is, distribute a demo for free, charge for the full game. Even this model has been abused though with certain expansion packs (cough cough Mass Effect).
The second you start treating your customers like cash cows, the faster history will forget your game. Make games that are fun to play, charge enough to support yourself and expand your company. You do not need to rely on parasitic behavior to accomplish this. The possible end benefit is that you build more loyal customers. After having played my first game with IAP, I will never buy another.
Completely agreed. My hope is that either the whole thing collapses with a "what the heck were we thinking" like the $3 ringtone idiocy from several years ago, or at least that there's enough customers like us so that lack of IAP becomes a viable selling point.
""" Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most. """
I think you can see that some game especially on mobile are starting to be more social and more skill based, even if the gameplay is asynchronous. I'm thinking about games like Words with Friends or SongPop. Draw Something is also really social but it's cooperative, not competitive.
I don't have an issue with in-app put purchases, it's like the old try-before-you-buy model. I have have spent 100s of hours playing "robot wants kitty" (with in-app purchase called kitty connect to get user levels) and "Solomon's keep" with its addons. Both apps are free (and brilliant), with optinal paid add-ons that make the game even better.
If it weren't for these two games (with addons), I most probably would have traded my iPhone in.
The in-app purchase is one of the worst elements of mobile gaming of all-time. The social games are complete shit and why Zynga is about to be de-listed from the market.
It's a shame there's so much emphasis on QUANTITY over QUALITY these days with both consumers and developers.
I came to say the exact same thing. I hate almost any form of in-game currency, and the "rise of IAP" coincides with me stopping downloading games at all (I think the last was Death Rally).
"Last year I held a special webinar that was invite only and everyone had to sign an NDA before attending. On this webinar I explained the current state of the mobile game industry and my plans to dominate as an independent developer."
For me, that quote about sums up the rest of the article. Too much arrogance in there for me.
Trey Smith is from the "Internet marketing" world and a friend of Frank Kern's. Now, I like these guys (as far as I can learn stuff from them for free - spending $10K for a "mastermind"..? nah ;-)) but they seem to take approaches that.. rub some people up the wrong way (and that's putting it lightly). Nonetheless, I've still found there's a lot to learn from their experiences even if the delivery is a bit.. slick.
Yup, that type of "social proof" is really off putting. If he started with an actual achievement like making an app that made a lot of money I would have kept on reading. After I read this I quickly scanned it and decided it's not worth my time. I don't always agree with this, but it seems to fit - people who know do, people who don't know teach.
I dislike free-to-play games because they tend to distort the gameplay towards paying additional in-game credits. It also feels a bit like printers: you get the printer for cheap but pay a lot on inks. Here they lure people in with a well-designed free game that lives on in-app purchases (IAP).
That being said, the revenues discussed in this post are crazy.
On a side-note, I wish the App Store allowed to filter out by apps that have or not IAP. I really don't mind paying for apps and games but sometimes there will be a cool free game available. Nowadays most games are free but with many IAP. If I see a high-ranked free game I tend to turn around when I see it has IAP because I know the gameplay will be around buying more stuff.
On a second side-note, I wouldn't mind the fall of Angry Birds. IMO, the game has received a disproportionate amount of success and the merchandising all over the place has been ridiculous (e.g. a "Angry Birds" Roku box? That makes no sense). The game is ok but not very original or entertaining (again, IMO) but the milking of the brand has been the worst part of it.
People wonder where video game arcades went after the console market started to really gain traction in the early to mid 1990s (and really got rolling with the Playstation 2). Outside of Japan, they largely went away, but now they're back: on your mobile device.
We've gone right back to feeding tokens (in-game credits) because now you can distribute the equivalent of an single-game arcade cabinet -- a game that is designed to optimally take in cash at a given rate -- to every mobile device. A good analogue would be to make a beat-em up arcade cabinet that let you start out for nothing, but when you inevitably get KO'd, you have to feed it a few tokens for the privilege of continuing before the 15 second countdown elapses and you have to start from the beginning.
Personally I get put off a bit by free to play. I expect to have the game pushing ads at me non stop or trying to get me to purchase things in game. Where as I associate a quality paid game to be clean and just giving me the game without all those other distractions.
Granted I am sure there are some decent free to pay titles, just the mental impression I get before trying new games, based on past experience.
True... YOU expect the game to push ads at you or try to sell you things, because this is your domain. You look at it from a totally technical point of view, you have plenty of experience dealing with this sort of thing. Mr Smith the average app user on the other hand doesn't have this expectation, and if a little box pops up telling him he can upgrade his sword twice as quickly for just 99 cents, he just might do it..
I've been building out free-to-play games that are purely ad-supported, with unobtrusive banners only, no interstitials. It's not as profitable as IAP or in-your-face ad-based games, but it seems to appeal to my target market.
The problem is that to remain competitive, I'm feeling pushed to build an IAP game :-\
What's even worse are the paid games that also have "Buy 10000 coins" in IAP.
At this point I have enough games to play and any games that have IAP consisting of energy/coins/diamonds/whatever I immediately avoid, even if it's a well-liked game. I don't have time for that sort of thing.
Funny thing I've found myself doing recently, when I'm hooked in to one of these horrible, grindy, submarine IAP games which I should know better than to keep loading up but hey I'm only human. Since my iPad is jailbroken I just SSH in, find the game directory and more often than not find my stats sitting there in a simple .plist file (maybe a binary plist, but then you just use the appropriate editor), make myself an in-game millionaire, load it back up and enjoy the game at max power for a few minutes before turning it off and never thinking about it again, a 'weight' lifted off my shoulders. It shocks me, how when the grind is suddenly removed, my interest in such a game that minutes before I had been feverishly, morosely addicted to, /completely evaporates/.
It's funny how me doing this is quite comparable to piracy, but - rightly or wrongly - I feel almost no guilt about doing this because by the time I've got to this point I've lost all respect for the game anyway.
It's ironic how Apple's locking down of the device is enough for most developers not to bother obfuscating their game save files so that if you have taken the trouble just for that jailbreak step, you're unlikely to meet much further resistance.
And finally when I do run into a game which has apparently taken cursory defensive steps such that my crude hackery only succeeds in stuffing everything up and losing whatever progress I did have, this too turns out to be funny. As I have no impulse to start playing from the beginning again, I breathe that very same sigh of relief, and forget all about it. Win-win.
Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.
Hmmm, I'm not entirely sure, though I also don't like the model. I have fond memories of stuffing quarters into arcade games, a "pay to play" model that's even more direct in it's incremental revenue collection. Yet that payment model did not lead to bad gameplay, even though it did limit the types of games that were created at the time.
Possibly free-to-play is different, certainly it doesn't have the same requirement of keeping the gameplay fast-paced, so it's possible to make a boring one. But there are plenty of boring flat rate games as well. I wonder what people growing up on this game model will think about it?
I agree. While all of these pseudo-gambling games have been common place on PCs and the web for going on a decade (maybe more?), it's sad to see it start leaking into traditional game spaces as well.
iOS is basically brand new, so maybe it was inevitable for these types of games to take over. I'm interested to see what happens in the next console generation - it might be a sad state of affairs beyond big-budget AAA titles.
I agree that it has the potential, but I think that this is unlikely. The approach to generating the incremental revenue can be done in at least two ways: claiming expected value and creating additional value. To use two free-to-play games as an example, consider League of Legends (LOL) and Dota 2. LOL requires one to use either purchased currency or earned currency to unlock characters. Dota 2 immediately makes all characters available to play. Therefore, a Dota 2 player would expect to have that value, yet it must be purchased through time or money in LOL. Both games, however, create value through the selling cosmetic enhancements to heroes.
If you think about it, the demo model seems like a special case of the free-to-play model: a small amount of content is free to play and the rest of the content can only be accessed through a purchase.
Forget about whether IAPs are bad. Did nobody pick up on this?
> In the last month, this single game generated over $12,000,000 on iOS alone. They have not ported the game to Android yet.
> If this is the case and it holds ranking for the rest of the year, then this single game is worth $109,500,000 PER YEAR on the low side.
Holy fucking shit. $100m a year of high-margin sales for a single iOS games?
World of Warcraft makes, last time I calculated it, roundabout these amounts, and WoW is one of the most financially successful games ever and requires masses of investment in infrastructure, new content, community management, developers, and so on - so big it swallowed Blizzard whole for a while.
If a silly, simple, stupid looking iOS game can make $100m a year of almost raw profit, this is... well, just mind-blowing, really.
Is it just me or did the game market become much more sinister than it used to be? It's all about getting people effectively addicted to make more money out of them. Give them a taste for free, once they're hooked, start cashing in on those poor addicts.
It does seem sad. So many problems to be solved in the world, but the things getting financial reinforcement and attracting technical talent are compulsive gaming and nanosecond-level stock trades that are unrelated to productive work. Good thing Farmville wasn't around in the 1960s, we'd have never gotten to the moon.
Calling the game market "sinister" borders on hyperbole.
Horia Dragomir and Stephanie Kaiser from Wooga gave a presentation[0] on metrics driven game development at GOTO Copenhagen earlier this year. Through the lens of one of their more popular franchises "Monster World", they discussed, among other things, A/B testing and the surprisingly short life (days to weeks) of a game feature before it becomes irrelevant. Nothing in their talk suggested late night meetings in dark corners, plotting to turn their users into addicts. Rather, they discussed adapting to rapidly changing trends and patterns--which sometimes but not always included introducing new in-game purchase items.
If on the surface the game industry as a whole appears to you to be an online equivalent of a casino, thats fine. What I see are dedicated and passionate engineers trying to ensure the survival a product in which they've dedicated years of their lives to getting right, by employing many of the same techniques nearly every other user facing tech company uses everyday, and I for one am not ready to cast the first stone and accuse entire industries of moral bankruptcy.
It's not that it's more sinister, it's just that the spectrum of people who play is just so wide now. I assume the "sinister" side form your affirmation would correspond to the casual section of gaming.
Back in the early days, only "hardcore" players would really pay attention to video games, but now, with so many casual games coming out, everybody is busy click or tapping away at least for five minutes each day.
While there are heavy monetization wheels turning in the casual world, it's still about getting people to relax.
Let me explain a small difference, bare with me.
Just think about what user penalties for mistakes are in casual games. Also, think about how many time a casual game has made anyone feel that a mistake is their fault.
Now think about hardcore games: it's always your fault.
This means that to be better at a hardcore game you need to train. There is no magic button to press to become a pro gamer over night.
With casual games, the only way to get "better" is to cheat luck of make time go faster. And there are buttons for that.
Very few people press those buttons because very few people are looking to do or get better at those games.
These buttons are clearly offensive to a person who is a hardcore gamer at heart. I know that, I see them everywhere.
I guess your affirmation comes as a result of the growth of casual / social games while the pace at which hardcore games are being released has stayed pretty steady over the years.
And the "give them a taste for free" bit makes me think of trial periods for non-gaming software.
It's pretty much always been this way since the Internet became ubiquitous. UO/EverQuest/DAoC/WoW/etc. started with subscription fees and a steady stream of expansions; followed by "DLC" on the latest round of consoles, and thanks to the iPad and Facebook; it's just more mass-market.
It's not just you. I've very glad I got the hack/slash/upgrade/repeat cycle out of my system with Diablo II many years ago, before publishers figured out how to rent Skinner boxes.
The original game model for PC was freeware first hubs and pay for full games, like Doom and Quake. This is only a more predatory evolution of that concept.
Trey bases his assessment on Apple's published "Top grossing" list. This is potentially problematic as it's not clear over what time period this is based or what other metrics Apple uses to put apps into this list. Apple, like the publishers would like to encourage people to spend more over time than just download free apps so they're incentivized to encourage the implication that in-app is the way to go.
Perhaps Angry Birds is dropping on the pay charts because people are finally bored of the franchise? How many years and different ways will people pay to shoot slightly different pigs with birds?
I hate, hate, hate games that use in-app purchases as a significant part of game play (and removing grinding qualifies, imo), to the point that I look to see what the top in-app purchase are and won't download games which let you buy in-game currency.
I really don't like free to play games, as they're implemented now. The current strategy is simply "pay to progress" rather than to unlock more functionality. I was playing this game called Tiny Tower, and in it, you could pay to finish building a room. If you paid for the room, you ... had another room. You could then pay for another room. The dynamic of the game didn't change, things just moved along.
Even without this, because so few people pay anything, the dynamic of the in app purchases is skewed so that you have to spend a ton of money to get anything out of your purchases (people willing to pay are willing to pay a lot, apparently). So people like me, willing to spend $5-$10 on a fun phone game but not $50, are sort of left behind.
Re: "The fall of Angry Birds", this article should be titled "The fall of paid games, the rise of IAPs".
Angry Birds, as a franchise, is doing anything but falling. Just look around the next time you go to a Walmart or Target. Angry Birds lunch boxes. Angry Birds Halloween costumes. And yes, Angry Birds Cheese Nips[1], which my kids are consuming even as we speak.
And it's only inevitable that Rovio is or will be working on an Angry Birds game that takes advantage of IAPs over an up front charge.
There are some interesting insights in here, but I think it's a bit like talking about the "fall" of Harry Potter or the "fall" of Star Wars. People get bored of particular entertainment franchises and icons and move on to the next thing. While there's undoubtedly more to milk from Angry Birds (especially if iOS devices get new innovations they can lean on), they'd better be working on new franchises that could be even bigger.
is because trial periods aren't being done? Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to make Angry Birds free, have only the first 20 levels be playable, then pay $9.99 for the remaining 80 levels? (I'm making these numbers up BTW.)
Obviously IAP makes a lot of sense for Farmville-style games that are all about "objects", but when tacked onto Angry Birds Space, or most games really, it feels like the company is just trying to take advantage of you.
Why don't we see any "free trials" like this in the App Store? Is it against Apple TOS or something? Or have studies shown it just doesn't work? (And I don't mean the free "lite" versions of games -- those are annoying because you lose all your progress and have to start the full version from zero.)
$12,000,000 a month? Holy shit. I had no idea the ceiling was that high. I made a free to play Android game that took me 6 weeks and made about $10 total... I guess I need to give this another shot.
There really should be a Game Store separate from the App Store. Currently, if you're not looking for a game, pages like "Top Grossing Apps" are completely useless in the App Store.
Saw a friend of mine the other say, he had a angry birds teeshirt on. He has never played it ever in his life nor even knew it was a game, just liked the teeshirt. I showed him the game, involving the killing of birds and pigs and he was not phased in any way but still likes his teeshirt.
Apart from that any old death of Tetris type article were you change the title to angry birds will be relevant in such matters of simple fun games and there lifespan.
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
One of the things I really used my iPad for a lot is games. The distribution mechanism and purchasing system are super-simple. You could (and can) get high-quality games for a low price. I see I've spent 100+ hours playing Bejeweled 3 alone.
Yet the trend has clearly gone towards in-app purchases. I tried some golf game (Tiger Woods something?) and it was constant nagging for in-app purchases. That got deleted in about 2 minutes.
Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most. And I've tried a bunch (spending no real $$$) to see (I'm a sucker for world-building games and there's a dearth of those, sadly).
The second category (normal games with in-app purchases) create the wrong incentives. Whereas Angry Birds originally spread because it was a hugely fun game, the game developer is incentivized to make you fork over more money, typically at the expense of the game itself.
It saddens me that Angry Birds has gone the in-app purchase route too.
Sadly the genie is out of the bottle. Any sensible game developer will go this route. Add to this the "social" layer being foisted on users and it's really looking like dark days ahead for gaming.
[+] [-] cageface|13 years ago|reply
Zynga was just the bellwether here.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
A game that markets itself through a social network is not intrinsically social. It's just parasitic. Zynga is Facebook's tapeworm. Games, for over 5000 years, have been a lot more social than Fartville. This Zynga shit is alienating. It's about as "social" as playing the lottery is intellectual because it involves numbers.
I was at Google during the Real Games battle, and inadvertently became somewhat of a lightning rod for it. I'll skip over the whole history but just say this: if decisions had been made on merit rather than rank, Google+ Games could have been something, and if it had, Google+ would have become an actual contender in the social space. I saw first-hand the damage that Zyngaism can do to a potentially major product.
I think all of this Zyngarbage is an attempt to emulate the success of Magic: the Gathering and its iterative pay-to-keep-current mechanism, but without the insight and work that made Magic (in spite of its annoying pricing model) great.
There will be a flight-to-quality in the gaming space (Zyngarbage will always exist, just as third-rate porn always will, but it will become a low-margin commodity) but I have no idea when it will be and what it will do to the current cottage industry.
[+] [-] ceol|13 years ago|reply
Was this not the same with arcade games padding difficulty and length to force players into shelling out quarters? I find the "IAP and F2P will RUIN GAMING!!" arguments to be mostly based in fear and not common sense. It's true the majority of people aren't engrossed in gaming culture, so they are more likely to fall for F2P tactics, but that doesn't mean every single developer is going to leave the "quality" gaming market to wither and die.
[+] [-] DrJokepu|13 years ago|reply
It’s their “walled garden” and it’s their responsibility to take care of it when it’s overran by weed.
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|13 years ago|reply
The second you start treating your customers like cash cows, the faster history will forget your game. Make games that are fun to play, charge enough to support yourself and expand your company. You do not need to rely on parasitic behavior to accomplish this. The possible end benefit is that you build more loyal customers. After having played my first game with IAP, I will never buy another.
[+] [-] zizee|13 years ago|reply
It seems to me that if people were willing to spend more money on quality titles this trend wouldn't exist.
High quality AND low price? Seems unsustainable to me.
[+] [-] orangecat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zabar|13 years ago|reply
I think you can see that some game especially on mobile are starting to be more social and more skill based, even if the gameplay is asynchronous. I'm thinking about games like Words with Friends or SongPop. Draw Something is also really social but it's cooperative, not competitive.
[+] [-] rustynails|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dakrisht|13 years ago|reply
The in-app purchase is one of the worst elements of mobile gaming of all-time. The social games are complete shit and why Zynga is about to be de-listed from the market.
It's a shame there's so much emphasis on QUANTITY over QUALITY these days with both consumers and developers.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjsamson|13 years ago|reply
For me, that quote about sums up the rest of the article. Too much arrogance in there for me.
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sausagefeet|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Timothee|13 years ago|reply
That being said, the revenues discussed in this post are crazy.
On a side-note, I wish the App Store allowed to filter out by apps that have or not IAP. I really don't mind paying for apps and games but sometimes there will be a cool free game available. Nowadays most games are free but with many IAP. If I see a high-ranked free game I tend to turn around when I see it has IAP because I know the gameplay will be around buying more stuff.
On a second side-note, I wouldn't mind the fall of Angry Birds. IMO, the game has received a disproportionate amount of success and the merchandising all over the place has been ridiculous (e.g. a "Angry Birds" Roku box? That makes no sense). The game is ok but not very original or entertaining (again, IMO) but the milking of the brand has been the worst part of it.
[+] [-] MrFoof|13 years ago|reply
We've gone right back to feeding tokens (in-game credits) because now you can distribute the equivalent of an single-game arcade cabinet -- a game that is designed to optimally take in cash at a given rate -- to every mobile device. A good analogue would be to make a beat-em up arcade cabinet that let you start out for nothing, but when you inevitably get KO'd, you have to feed it a few tokens for the privilege of continuing before the 15 second countdown elapses and you have to start from the beginning.
[+] [-] robryan|13 years ago|reply
Granted I am sure there are some decent free to pay titles, just the mental impression I get before trying new games, based on past experience.
[+] [-] highace|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soofaloofa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egb|13 years ago|reply
The problem is that to remain competitive, I'm feeling pushed to build an IAP game :-\
[+] [-] Splines|13 years ago|reply
At this point I have enough games to play and any games that have IAP consisting of energy/coins/diamonds/whatever I immediately avoid, even if it's a well-liked game. I don't have time for that sort of thing.
[+] [-] CmdrKrool|13 years ago|reply
It's funny how me doing this is quite comparable to piracy, but - rightly or wrongly - I feel almost no guilt about doing this because by the time I've got to this point I've lost all respect for the game anyway.
It's ironic how Apple's locking down of the device is enough for most developers not to bother obfuscating their game save files so that if you have taken the trouble just for that jailbreak step, you're unlikely to meet much further resistance.
And finally when I do run into a game which has apparently taken cursory defensive steps such that my crude hackery only succeeds in stuffing everything up and losing whatever progress I did have, this too turns out to be funny. As I have no impulse to start playing from the beginning again, I breathe that very same sigh of relief, and forget all about it. Win-win.
[+] [-] mdonahoe|13 years ago|reply
Developers are learning to fight against it, but it funny how much effort goes into making sure some bits dont get flipped.
[+] [-] colinshark|13 years ago|reply
Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.
[+] [-] tedsuo|13 years ago|reply
Possibly free-to-play is different, certainly it doesn't have the same requirement of keeping the gameplay fast-paced, so it's possible to make a boring one. But there are plenty of boring flat rate games as well. I wonder what people growing up on this game model will think about it?
[+] [-] chucknelson|13 years ago|reply
iOS is basically brand new, so maybe it was inevitable for these types of games to take over. I'm interested to see what happens in the next console generation - it might be a sad state of affairs beyond big-budget AAA titles.
[+] [-] bmh100|13 years ago|reply
If you think about it, the demo model seems like a special case of the free-to-play model: a small amount of content is free to play and the rest of the content can only be accessed through a purchase.
[+] [-] mapster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swombat|13 years ago|reply
> In the last month, this single game generated over $12,000,000 on iOS alone. They have not ported the game to Android yet.
> If this is the case and it holds ranking for the rest of the year, then this single game is worth $109,500,000 PER YEAR on the low side.
Holy fucking shit. $100m a year of high-margin sales for a single iOS games?
World of Warcraft makes, last time I calculated it, roundabout these amounts, and WoW is one of the most financially successful games ever and requires masses of investment in infrastructure, new content, community management, developers, and so on - so big it swallowed Blizzard whole for a while.
If a silly, simple, stupid looking iOS game can make $100m a year of almost raw profit, this is... well, just mind-blowing, really.
[+] [-] harpastum|13 years ago|reply
World of Warcraft subscribers have been declining steadily for the last couple years [1], but they still have ~9.1 million subscribers.
The least a subscriber can pay is by buying in 6-month increments, which is 12.99 a month [2].
So, even though they're making less money than ever, 9.1 million subscribers at 12.99 per month is 1.4 Billion a year.
[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/02/world-of-warcraft-los... [2] http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/payment-option-credi...
[+] [-] gingerlime|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmethvin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsantero|13 years ago|reply
Horia Dragomir and Stephanie Kaiser from Wooga gave a presentation[0] on metrics driven game development at GOTO Copenhagen earlier this year. Through the lens of one of their more popular franchises "Monster World", they discussed, among other things, A/B testing and the surprisingly short life (days to weeks) of a game feature before it becomes irrelevant. Nothing in their talk suggested late night meetings in dark corners, plotting to turn their users into addicts. Rather, they discussed adapting to rapidly changing trends and patterns--which sometimes but not always included introducing new in-game purchase items.
If on the surface the game industry as a whole appears to you to be an online equivalent of a casino, thats fine. What I see are dedicated and passionate engineers trying to ensure the survival a product in which they've dedicated years of their lives to getting right, by employing many of the same techniques nearly every other user facing tech company uses everyday, and I for one am not ready to cast the first stone and accuse entire industries of moral bankruptcy.
[0] http://gotocon.com/cph-2012/presentation/The%20Metrics%20Des...
[+] [-] hdragomir|13 years ago|reply
Back in the early days, only "hardcore" players would really pay attention to video games, but now, with so many casual games coming out, everybody is busy click or tapping away at least for five minutes each day. While there are heavy monetization wheels turning in the casual world, it's still about getting people to relax.
Let me explain a small difference, bare with me.
Just think about what user penalties for mistakes are in casual games. Also, think about how many time a casual game has made anyone feel that a mistake is their fault.
Now think about hardcore games: it's always your fault.
This means that to be better at a hardcore game you need to train. There is no magic button to press to become a pro gamer over night. With casual games, the only way to get "better" is to cheat luck of make time go faster. And there are buttons for that. Very few people press those buttons because very few people are looking to do or get better at those games.
These buttons are clearly offensive to a person who is a hardcore gamer at heart. I know that, I see them everywhere.
I guess your affirmation comes as a result of the growth of casual / social games while the pace at which hardcore games are being released has stayed pretty steady over the years.
And the "give them a taste for free" bit makes me think of trial periods for non-gaming software.
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangecat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jere|13 years ago|reply
I have no doubt this is how it works, but I never thought I would see the day when something that costs a dollar is considered premium.
[+] [-] casca|13 years ago|reply
Perhaps Angry Birds is dropping on the pay charts because people are finally bored of the franchise? How many years and different ways will people pay to shoot slightly different pigs with birds?
[+] [-] TWAndrews|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdkess|13 years ago|reply
Even without this, because so few people pay anything, the dynamic of the in app purchases is skewed so that you have to spend a ton of money to get anything out of your purchases (people willing to pay are willing to pay a lot, apparently). So people like me, willing to spend $5-$10 on a fun phone game but not $50, are sort of left behind.
[+] [-] jader201|13 years ago|reply
Angry Birds, as a franchise, is doing anything but falling. Just look around the next time you go to a Walmart or Target. Angry Birds lunch boxes. Angry Birds Halloween costumes. And yes, Angry Birds Cheese Nips[1], which my kids are consuming even as we speak.
And it's only inevitable that Rovio is or will be working on an Angry Birds game that takes advantage of IAPs over an up front charge.
[1]http://www.walmart.com/ip/Nabisco-Cheese-Nips-Angry-Birds-Ch...
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|13 years ago|reply
is because trial periods aren't being done? Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to make Angry Birds free, have only the first 20 levels be playable, then pay $9.99 for the remaining 80 levels? (I'm making these numbers up BTW.)
Obviously IAP makes a lot of sense for Farmville-style games that are all about "objects", but when tacked onto Angry Birds Space, or most games really, it feels like the company is just trying to take advantage of you.
Why don't we see any "free trials" like this in the App Store? Is it against Apple TOS or something? Or have studies shown it just doesn't work? (And I don't mean the free "lite" versions of games -- those are annoying because you lose all your progress and have to start the full version from zero.)
[+] [-] habosa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylec|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|13 years ago|reply
Apart from that any old death of Tetris type article were you change the title to angry birds will be relevant in such matters of simple fun games and there lifespan.