Sunday 20 October 2013

Micro Payments Are Cruel

Since I'm still preparing to move into my new apartment, I've not really had the chance to sink my teeth into anything proper and since I've been going out a bit doing all sorts of fun Japan stuff, a surprising amount of my time has been soaked up by my iPhone.

Now when you think about mobile or social games with micro transactions you generally imagine a shitty game with very little depth where you can basically pay money to win the game.  For this reason, they are generally not very well liked by people who play real games since paying to win requires no skill and it's a greedy way for a developer to squeeze cash out of people.

Well you're right, to some extent, but just take a moment and think about what's really going on.  These people aren't paying to win because they are lazy, you go and look at the insane numbers of hours that gets wasted on all sorts of facebook and iPhone games it's easy to tell that people aren't paying to win because of a lack of effort.

Just think about who the majority of these games are made for.  They aren't made for you and me, they are made for people who don't game at all and just want a quick fix of entertainment while they have time to kill, or something to play in the background while they upload pictures of the sandwich they had for lunch or whatever bullshit so called "normal" people like to do.

So when these people drop money on these crappy games, they aren't paying to win because they are lazy and just want an advantage, they are paying because they suck and they wouldn't be able to get to that point in the game any other way. 

When you think about it that way it's sort of cruel, that these people who don't really like video games anyway feel the need to drop money on shitty shallow experiences because they somehow became somewhat addicted to clicking farmyard animals......and they suck at even that.  These guys are making carrot on stick games that are JUST hard enough for non gamers to suck at them but not hard enough to make them quit, so instead they just pay a couple of pounds for that thing they can't get.

It's both cruel and genius at the same time, makes me think I should try and develop an iPhone game....

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