I'm mostly a "core gamer" who likes to purchase my games and play them at my leisure, but I've checked out a few free to play games on my phone, either because they were cultural phenomenons (Candy Crush) or were featured on this site (Heroes Charge.) While a few games seem to do Free to Play pretty well (Crossy Road comes to mind) one thing that has struck me is just how little you get for your money in most free to play games. In Candy Crush, for example, a buck will get you a few extra turns or a few extra moves and that's it. In Heroes Charge...you can buy gems I guess, but in quantities that won't do much to help you get past the various progression blocks unless you're willing to fork over the cost of an actual retail game.

What gives?

I get that F2P is all about hunting for whales, but does offering terrible values really help with that? Wouldn't more people be willing to sink more cash in if the value were a little better? I don't mind throwing a developer a few bucks if I've enjoyed their game, but often it feels a lot more like a tip than an actual purchase because the value is so lousy. There has to be some decent compromise between pay once to own and pay out the nose for a single life or to overcome a minor progression block.

I wish there was a different term to describe the types of mobile games you're talking about. I think lumping the likes of Candy Crush and Heroes Charge in with Warframe and Marvel Heroes does the latter two games a huge disservice.

Personally, I would describe most mobile F2P games more along the lines of Pay to Win, Pay to Play, or alternatively, Garbage.

@bigsocrates:I think the point is that the game has to be addicting but mediocre at best, until you conduct a microtransaction, then it's all sparks and rainbows and 'you won!'s. So that you associate fun with the act of paying, but are too hooked to realize that just going through the motions itself is not fun.

If the free aspect of the game is fun then there is no incentive to pay. If the 'pay once' aspect of the game leaves you up with a prolonged reservoir of fun and value then people will buy the bulk coins or whatever once or twice. I figure that the people who design the game would probably make it so that you don't buy the bulk coins, but buy single coins enough times and end up paying more anyway.

As the Bombcrew mentioned once on the bombcast... there are dark powers at play here. Us petty gamers accustomed to notions of value purchases and bang-for-our-back steam sales can never understand that these 'games' are not in fact 'games', but rather milking systems designed around reward processes in our brains, devised using psychology rather than game design.

@imsh_pl: The thing is, when you make a microtransaction it's NOT all sparks and rainbows. You get an incremental advantage, or over a single roadblock, only to be faced with the next roadblock. That's what I don't get. It would be like paying to defeat a single non-boss enemy in Dark Souls. Well congratulations, you're past that enemy, but there are a dozen more just like him around the corner so you haven't really achieved much. Candy Crush has like 400 levels or something. Pay to beat one and you're likely to run into one just as a hard a few levels further on. That's why I stopped playing rather than give them money, even though it's a decent enough time waster and if they just wanted to flat out charge me $1 for every pack of 25 levels or so (and make it so none of those levels was intended to take 100 tries to beat without spending more money) I would be willing to consider it.

@mb: 100% agree. The "F2P" term is fairly new in itself, and it seriously feels like we need to expand on the term. As you said, lumping Warframe under the same umbrella as Candy Crush and the likes is just.. wrong. No other way to put it, really. Dota 2, Smite, League of Legends, Warframe, Team Fortress 2, Rift, Tera, Marvel Heroes etc. These games do it right, they're free to play in the most basic sense of the word. You can literally play the entirety of the games without it feeling like a massive, unfair fight against a paywall. Games like Candy Crush and Game of War should be labeled "Free to Try" or something like that. The enjoyment you can get out of them from not spending any money barely is barely existent.

Putting them all under the same term does a disservice to the developers who actually puts in significant effort to find a good balance while it unfairly elevates the shite by putting them next to stellar games.

Yeah, they're bad values. The thing to keep in mind is that they can kinda charge whatever, because all that matters is that their game is good enough to attract a decent number of players, and then the 1% of players that have tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income will just burn a bunch of it on this dumb mobile game.

The value is always going to seem bad for your average working joe, because at this point the F2P market almost expects that those players aren't going to spend a cent on the game.

@bigsocrates: Did you know that, psychologically speaking, sporadic rewards are more effective than consistent rewards? If you want your dog to learn to play dead, it's more effective not to give him a treat every time he obeys, just a fraction of the time. It works similarly in humans, particularly in developing children (and before you ask how sick I am that I teach children to play dead for treats; my girlfriend works with mentally disabled children and she shared this fact with me).

So if we were to view microtransactions through the lens of psychological conditioning, perhaps it actually makes more sense not to have them be as rewarding each time.

I'm not a psychologist, of course, so I can't speak to the validity of this hypothesis. My take is simply that we should not view F2P game design by comparing it to the principles of good video game design, but rather by seeing them through the prism of literal conditioning. Which makes for a dark vision indeed.

You have knowledge about video games; you know what a good one looks like, and when a bad one wants to swindle you out of your dollars. You are used to rewarding developers with money for good products. It is likely that you will never be caught in a microtransaction hell simply because you know they exist. But these... products aren't after you. They probably know that you actually would be willing to dish out a few bucks for a 'complete' package, but that's not their concern, since by doing so they might lose out on people they are actually milking for money.

@bigsocrates: I think part of it is to get people into the next tier: bundles of items for a "discounted" price. Buy 10 energy refills for the price of 8! Here's a nice bundle of items to get you started for the low, low price of 29,99!