Not unaware, so I very well may be a shill. I get the psychology behind all of this, I just don't find it particularly problematic, at least the bits that I interact with.
As I've said, the model I support within F2P games is mostly equivalent to the coin-op arcade game: you died but want another move? A quarter to continue. You ran out of lives? A quarter to continue (or wait a little while for free lives). You want to cheat? A quarter, please. There's psychology there, but I don't think it's anything very new or sinister - charge people straightforwardly for playing, in an amount that seems fair for the amount of entertainment they're getting out of it. Give them something for free with the realization that most customers will never actually pay, and try to please everyone because word of mouth is the best advertising.
Sure. The profit motive requires that we design games so that people have incentives to spend quarters (or rather, dollars for packs of whatever we're selling, since you can't charge a quarter on the app store, but it works out to about a quarter per "unit" - I'm totally against in-game currencies because they make purchases less transparent, and that's bad). That means making difficult levels, more or less. But we'd make ridiculously difficult levels anyways for design reasons, and our greater incentive is to make sure that people stay in the game for as long as possible, so we primarily worry about crafting compelling experiences that people enjoy, and don't feel cheated by. Freemium just means that we place the "pinch" levels more carefully than we would otherwise.
In my current project, skill still reigns supreme - while we do present increasingly difficult challenges to the player, we specifically avoid the type of RNG-based difficulty that Candy Crush leans on. If you fail, it's not because you got an impossible seed (which is often the case in Candy Crush, as I know all too well, as an avid player), it's because you could have done something better but didn't. Internally, we make sure that we are all able to beat every level without using boosts or any such nonsense; those are there merely to accelerate progress for the impatient, never a requirement.
Granted, we're all really good at our game at this point, so the difficult levels might be very difficult for normal people even if we can beat them, but forcing people to either get really good or pay money to progress is fair, IMO, and much less abusive than leaving it to randomness.
Maybe that's just rationalization, maybe we're actually doing better than other people, I'm not sure, that'll be for you to decide when we release, and it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing...either way, F2P is here to stay, and believe it or not, some of us really do want to make it as fair to players as we can while still working profitably within the model (we need to make enough money to stay afloat, and premium casual games do not do that). I'm 100% open to suggestions, as long as you realize that "go premium" isn't a realistic one, because we've tried, and it doesn't work anymore.
Ok, so here's a little story for you: My earliest memories of arcade machines are such which played motorbike racing games or bubble bobble. As far as i remember the machines allowed you to play as far as you could and when you failed the machine reset and you had to pay to have another attempt. Now i was just informed that apparently it was the norm in the USA for arcade machines to offer you to continue from where you were for more cash.
Now why did i need to be informed of this? Because i live in germany where arcade machines, along with slot machines and similar, are banned from public establishments; because yes, this stuff is exploitative.
Now, that said, there are also some real differences between software for your home and arcade machines: The arcade machines were real upfront about what's going on. You paid a coin to play, and you paid a coin to cheat. There was no pretension of free and no obfuscation of the transaction. further arcade machines were made at a time when the hardware was not affordable for the home.
> In my current project, skill still reigns supreme
That's a tall order. Please do me a favor and go through the article and make a list of techniques you see that your game does NOT employ versus those it DOES employ.
Also, a question. I play a game because the gameplay is enjoyable. Is there ever any point where the game says "no, you cannot play unless you wait or pay"? Note, i did not say progress, i said play.
> it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing
That is the entire problem. Just like arcade machines back then you are extracting money from those who are either not mentally capable of or lack the experience to make a fully rational decision.
As for suggestions, really damn simple:
1. Don't sell cheats.
2. Allow me to make a down payment to purchase the entire game, in two possible modes:
2.a) if most of the calculation involved in a game happens on a customer machine, just allow me put down a single lump sum (guild wars, roaming fortress)
2.b) if most of the calculation involved happens on a company server, allow me to pay a regular fee (eve online, and i'm really fucking sure there is NO f2p game that even approaches the amount of computation their servers do)
You can stack on all kinds of naff f2p bullshit you like, but plenty of games which were made with more effort than any f2p game are profitable on these models, even in the mobile space.
I had a look. There's nothing I can see that suggests they are centrally computing anything like 1920x1080x24 bits of data at 60Hz, that's 360MB of brand-new data per second per user, which is what our graphics cards are doing for us client-side.
I won't. And neither are they. Perhaps a very, very sparse approximation taking advantage of diagonal and/or block structure that actually computes a miniscule fraction of that.
As I've said, the model I support within F2P games is mostly equivalent to the coin-op arcade game: you died but want another move? A quarter to continue. You ran out of lives? A quarter to continue (or wait a little while for free lives). You want to cheat? A quarter, please. There's psychology there, but I don't think it's anything very new or sinister - charge people straightforwardly for playing, in an amount that seems fair for the amount of entertainment they're getting out of it. Give them something for free with the realization that most customers will never actually pay, and try to please everyone because word of mouth is the best advertising.
Sure. The profit motive requires that we design games so that people have incentives to spend quarters (or rather, dollars for packs of whatever we're selling, since you can't charge a quarter on the app store, but it works out to about a quarter per "unit" - I'm totally against in-game currencies because they make purchases less transparent, and that's bad). That means making difficult levels, more or less. But we'd make ridiculously difficult levels anyways for design reasons, and our greater incentive is to make sure that people stay in the game for as long as possible, so we primarily worry about crafting compelling experiences that people enjoy, and don't feel cheated by. Freemium just means that we place the "pinch" levels more carefully than we would otherwise.
In my current project, skill still reigns supreme - while we do present increasingly difficult challenges to the player, we specifically avoid the type of RNG-based difficulty that Candy Crush leans on. If you fail, it's not because you got an impossible seed (which is often the case in Candy Crush, as I know all too well, as an avid player), it's because you could have done something better but didn't. Internally, we make sure that we are all able to beat every level without using boosts or any such nonsense; those are there merely to accelerate progress for the impatient, never a requirement.
Granted, we're all really good at our game at this point, so the difficult levels might be very difficult for normal people even if we can beat them, but forcing people to either get really good or pay money to progress is fair, IMO, and much less abusive than leaving it to randomness.
Maybe that's just rationalization, maybe we're actually doing better than other people, I'm not sure, that'll be for you to decide when we release, and it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing...either way, F2P is here to stay, and believe it or not, some of us really do want to make it as fair to players as we can while still working profitably within the model (we need to make enough money to stay afloat, and premium casual games do not do that). I'm 100% open to suggestions, as long as you realize that "go premium" isn't a realistic one, because we've tried, and it doesn't work anymore.