Ask HN: Did pay-to-play games really ruin the gaming industry?

Free to play is a market reaction and people do play them and it is becoming the only way to get revenues as a game developer. But there are plenty of other games out there and games for every consumer, free to play, premium, etc. In most free to play games most people pay less than premium games, it allows games to reach the people.

The thing about the current free to play market is some do it well like Valve, Halfbrick etc that add to the fun of the game usually through customization and vanity additions, but others it is part of the game design and much like social games where it is metrics over gameplay. It just serves another consumer, even if that doesn't interest old school lots of content and pay up front gamers.

Done well, in a way it is a return to the Arcade but much more cool in that you can customize the game and get more from it with additions, which do cost time/money to produce. Games also want you to play for a long time now, or many times in small increments, where before arcade games were made harder to skimp on content and get more quarters.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/6/5386788/when-was-the-most-ex...

In games like Clash of Clans, etc... You can play without paying. But it is just depressing to have an opponent attack you, where you can tell that they have effectively bought their way in. They didn't spend the time to effectively build their city, wait for their upgrades, etc... instead, they just bought a ton of gems and used that to make their city.

So, the users who don't just buy their way can feel cheated by the game. They put in a lot of time into their cities, but they can just get crushed by people who just bought theirs.

Sure, the authors can get more money, but it just ruins game play for the rest of us. Even in games like Candy Crush - you can win without paying extra, but for some levels it's almost impossible to complete without using bonuses.

Source: I've played both Candy Crush and Clash of Clans to the point where they weren't fun anymore largely because of the pay-to-play nature.

Gamers have weird psychological issues with grinding in games.

Some of them like the delayed rewards from grinding and feel that people who don't are lazy and lack a work ethic. This group finds paying to avoid grinding immoral.

The other major group hates grinding in games. These people see the pay to avoid grinding option as the developer asking for money to not be an asshole. Mid game. So they aren't thrilled about it either.

The other issue is that grinding isn't supposed to be a big deal in games because the grinding activity is supposed to be enjoyable. The F2P market is designed around it not being enjoyable.

A car racing game should be advertised at $X, with DLC like extra tracks or cars being available for more money.

But manipulative tactics mean the player will be forced to grind a single track many times to get something that allows them to continue. They can pay to avoid that grind. Worse artificial delays are often built in and an IAP is provided to circumvent that artificial delay. Using our hypothetical race game as an example there might be a supply of tyres. Each time you enter a race you use four tyres. Tyres are replenished at a rate of one every hour, unless you've paid for an IAP - "tyre factory upgrade: never run out of tyres - $Y".

EDIT: plenty of people have bad memories of collectible card games and talk of feeling manipulated and exploited and addicted.

Trading card games require an initial purchase - most people purchasing them are aware of what they're getting themselves into. You know there are lots of rare cards that you'll never see, and you're fine with that when you buy your deck(s). For one thing, this filters out a lot of people who would gripe about having to pay. But also, if you play enough to really need the best cards, usually you've accumulated enough cards that you can trade with people to make any deck you want. This places a sort of spending cap on the game, after which you can compete with the best players in the world - which can be a pleasant surprise to players who haven't thought that far ahead.

Modern free-to-play games start out free, then surprise users with ways to spend money in the middle of the game. As you play on, even if you do pay, you discover that there is no limit to the amount you can spend - and you see that there will always be better, more powerful users who have spent more than you. Lots of users become bitter about this once they've invested some amount of time (and/or money) in the game world.

With MMOs, you have a very clear 1:1 value of purchase. The yielded "product" is the sustaining of the very service itself. No different than your internet service, cable TV, etc. These games have found that this isn't necessarily a sustainable model, as there is (as we all know) a clear disparity between those that can afford the monthly fee and those that cannot. Eventually if the game loses its overall worth, either by content, quality or service, then those that are minding the budget will leave with little convincing. That's the reason they went to the new micro-transaction model. By offering varied levels of shiny, the tab so to speak is picked up by those who can afford an excess... in effect carrying those who cannot, and allowing for all to play. In turn, the popularity of such an environment establishes word of mouth... as everyone wants to play with their friends. The ecosystem develops, and thus you have a reasonable model. This has worked for LOTR:O, STO and SWTOR. Even EVE online has adopted a model that is in the middle, whereby a user who is sufficiently established in the real world can purchase time for others, and establish their own fortunes in game thanks to the work of those who can't afford it in the medium but can afford it in the virtual.

In these cases the difference in overall representation is simple: You do not gain anything by the value adds except novelty. On the rare occasion you will get something of strength/power, but its not a permanent superiority: its merely early access. The entire reason it has become the model of success it is, is due to its availability to the masses in a harmless form: you get to pay for cosmetic differences only. This was actually the source of quite a bit of humor in season 1 of PA/PVP's The Trenches comic. There is nothing technically or physically better about the item, it only looks different or sounds different. But, it costs money... and it is unique. By being unique, one feels special - and by that it becomes valuable. That 14.99 item now becomes the monthly fee for someone else.

The other model, however, employs the opposite effect. This is the most visible one in the mobile world. Money buys you superiority. It may be in the form of bonuses (double exp, faster earning of money, whatever), or in the form of tangibles such as weapons or stronger characters. The most obvious one is the current games whereby you establish a limit on 'turns.' Those turns govern your advancement, access, worth... the person with money can move infinitely, the one without sits and waits. By the end of the week, they have no competition.

The goal in both is to make money. That is the business and that will always be business. The harm, is that its no longer a playing field where you're playing a game. Its buying the win. Since the business model works (they profit, who cares about the person?) the gaming industry shifts so that it continue to make that profit. Thus, you have DLC - the game is incomplete the first time you pay for it, so to play it you have to buy the rest. Though, you don't have to. But, an entire ecosystem is playing the cooler stuff... and you're sitting behind.

This business model is new. The reason its different from TCG, is TCG itself requires a tangible asset - you cannot play without the cards. Magic is nothing without a deck. To build a deck you must buy the cards. Invariably this means that to build a good deck, you must increase your chances to obtain a valuable card - thus you need to buy many boosters and decks. The model itself is simple, but its not exactly able to be changed - if cards are merely an imaginary item that one draws on their own...

I wonder why you would like to pay up front for a promise rather than trying to play a game for free and if and only if you think it is worth it pay some money.

I believe we can all vote with our money which model we believe is best. Let the market forces figure out which model will be dominant in the next ten years.

When you purchase a pack of cards, you now own them; you can hold them in your hands, arrange them in binders, sell them on to someone else, etc.

With free to play games, you buy some gems or coins and then spend them in the game and they are gone! You can't sell them on, you cannot take them out again later and look at them. It feels more like burning money than buying something.

1) The older models have transparent pricing, whereas pay-to-play have opaque pricing. You can tell the price of a deck or full version of a shareware game, but you can't tell how many IAP's you'll need over the lifetime of a pay-to-play game.

2) When something is "free!" but actually not, it is a bait and switch technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch). This leaves many consumers with a feeling of being tricked.

3) IAP's are often transient replenishables such as gems or gold. A trading card or full version of a game, you own permanently.

4) It's hard to trust that pay-to-play games isn't specifically designed to make you part with dollars. Players come to doubt the fairness of the game rules. Even for "honest" game makers, there will be suspicion of foul play in the game mechanics.

5) Pay-to-play games, like slot machines, make their money from 10-20% of users called "whales", who are susceptible to gambling addiction. Using psychological tricks to extract money from such people is very shaky, ethically.

When games promote feelings of suspicion, exploitation and even psychological manipulation in the majority of players (i.e. non-whales), you get this kind of backlash, as in the case of clash of clans and other pay-to-plays.

Has it ruined the gaming industry? Not in my opinion - I think (or hope) pay-to-play is a fad which will devolve into a niche. As people become aware of the shady tactics being used, they'll tend to avoid them. Or at least gravitate towards those pay-to-plays, where it really is possible to have a decent game play experience without paying.

I don't think Clash of Clans is pay-to-play or pay-to-win. I don't pay a dime and am perfectly able to play it quite effectively.

The real problem with many of these free "social" games, however, is that they've turned micromanagement into the actual game. Quite often, there's very little strategic choice to be made, you just need to check in regularly to give new orders because you can't queue your orders.

Back in the '90s, people used to complain about the micromanagement involved in many big games. Designing your empire in Civilization is fun, choosing spots for new cities it, selecting new research is, but managing every individual city and unit gets really tedious after a while. And for some reason, this modern genre of games has removed all interesting decisions from their games and turned the tedium itself into what the game is about. You can't queue stuff, or at least not a lot, and you have to earn the privilege to avoid a small part of the tedium of micromanagement. Less micromanagement has become the reward for playing. And yet without it, there's practically no game.

Clash of Clans is not remotely the worst in this; designing your defense and organizing your attacks are still interesting parts of the game. But without those, you'd get a game like Hay Day which has practically no recognizable game underneath all the tedium.

But all of these games, including Clash of Clans, eventually have to make money for their developers, and they do so by making the game less fun than it needs to be, and you can pay to skip the unfun parts. And some people are suspectible to that, and end up paying. And the real evil of it is that they prey on addictive tendencies to get a few people to pay a lot.

But in the end, the games are intentionally designed to be less fun than they could have been.

A new category (maybe called "freemium") needs to be set up for games like these, so we can avoid them wholesale.

The model is this: If you play for long enough, you'll receive new equippable weapons at random times. You can trade these with other players, craft them together to create different items, or simply buy them with real money. So far so standard.

What's interesting is that the non-default weapons are all balanced against each other. In theory, players who grinded for a long time or paid real money are still on an equal footing with players who joined the game yesterday - actual skill at the game notwithstanding. In practice, mistakes are made (the Soldier's default melee weapon is a lot weaker than all the available alternates, although the alternates are all roughly equal in power), but the idea is there.

And there are items that can only be earned through the shop, or as part of one-time giveaways, or by earning achievements in different games. But all of those are either completely useless (hats and badges), or cosmetic variations on existing items. Their value is not that they make the player stronger, but they simply tell other players "I have something you don't have".

TF2 demonstrates that pay-to-play can be done right. It's simply a matter of striking the balance between creating something that lots of people will play and creating something that earns a lot of money per player. Unfortunately, in the mobile world, 10 mediocre apps are a lot more profitable than 1 excellent app, so there's little incentive to create quality. That's the real problem, not pay-to-play.