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A new report has found that 82% of American gamers made an in-game purchase in freemium titles last year.
Woo, I’m part of the 18% who doesn’t fall for shiny virtual objects for credit card swipes. Annoying in ‘free’ games, infuriating in paid ones.
That 18 should be way, way higher though.
I see it as a challenge, what’s the most I can do in the game, not paying for anything? It gets annoying with some the arbitrary restrictions they put up though, meant to slow your progress and just make the whole experience suck. The incentives seems to be, “Buy this pass and you’ll blaze through these boring parts!” But the “benefits” are just based on bypassing some digital numbers that they’ve purposely made as annoying as possible. They made it slow just by tweaking a number in some code, they could just as easily dial it to another number, but likely it’s at the optimal number for whales to start paying money. It all feels very predatory.
The question is: does “ad-free” or “purchase the whole game” affect this percentage? Because there’s games, like Super Mario Run, where you get the whole game downloaded, but World 1 is the demo and after that there’s an in-game purchase for the full game.
I tend to avoid free games as best I can…
If it’s free, you’re the product.
That doesn’t make sense here, does it? The product is the digital skins or whatever
Makes perfect sense. Those free games are generally funded by advertisements. You are the product being provided to the people paying for the ad time.
I just realized you must be talking about mobile games or something. lol
I was thinking of the finals or even warzone. Completely free games where you can just pay for a skin for your gun. Seems pretty great to me. I never pay for another COD game while then some poor addicted souls pay for everything they can. I mean, it works out pretty well for everyone… except those people, since they end up paying way more than what a game used to cost
Sad, but this includes mobile, so PC only numbers are probably a bit better
I don’t mind paying for something if the game is good, as long as it is not pay to win. I bought some starter pack for Path of Exile. I have hundreds of hours in that game, so I bought some stash tabs and cosmetics.
Path of Exile is an okay example, but even the most basic tabs being pay only shifts it to pay2win. These days, if you want to do anything more than try the game through the campaign, you need at least a few paid tabs.