Mobile Gaming - Borrowing PC Gaming Tactics to Milk Us Dry!? (Part 1)

Microtransactions... while not a new thing, they can be found in large quantities in the mobile market. Why has this market adopted the free to play method seen in PC gaming? Short answer: it works.

But let's look at why we, as consumers are being milked dry, and some of the methods we are allowing ourselves to be milked dry.

Mobile Market Madness

Why did they adopt this? Simple, mobile consumers tend to spend less on their purchases (source, here). With that in mind, think of the sheer amount of competition the developers are competing against. If they charge 99 cents, which is viewed as almost standard among games, then what happens when a new craze comes out and dries up their sales, even though consumers are still using their product?

The industry had to resort to, at the time, reasonable measures to sustain their businesses. But now, those things seem ridiculous. Does Candy Crush really seem like a billion dollar game?

Abusing the Consumer

Now this freemium / free-to-play method stalls gamers from progressing through a game effectively by putting up buy walls of difficulty. The other method is one I'd like to call the "time-out" method, which I'll go into detail in a later post. But in short, it's when gamers have to wait X amount of minutes (or hours as the difficulty goes up) before they can make an effective move. This is prevalent in even Pokémon and castle defense games. Ridiculous.

Why are they doing this? They are currently able to get away with it, and consumers are thinking individually on this aspect. It's getting so bad, that even paid games have incorporated this. Why should we have to buy a game and THEN pay to actually enjoy the extras while the developers rarely, if ever, upgrade the game's features. It's one thing if they upgraded the features, but completely another if they don't.

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