• "We Own You" - Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer
    53 replies, posted
[QUOTE=omarfr;48711851]I really don't understand how people can waste so much money on F2P games. The only game I've ever spent money on that was F2P was League of Legends, and still I haven't spent more than $60 because that is the average price pf a game.[/QUOTE] The truth is that, well, people [I]do not[/I] waste money on F2P games at all. Most people will never buy an in-app purchase, and the ones who do rarely spend a big amount. That's why capitalizing on whales is so important. They're but a small fraction of the game's userbase yet they're were most of the money comes from. It's just a thing of weeding out normal players in order to find the easily addicted whales.
[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;48712653]Same thing applies to donating to servers on games like Garry's Mod. Right now it's practically an art on how to scam players in Garry's Mod. For example, if you want someone to give you $15 what better way then offering them "premium" weapons that they normally would be able to get through playing the game, but they could get it automatically through just paying you $15 every three months. Want to have a SUPAH COOL DONATOR job?! Spend $20 for Diamond VIP! The scam goes on and on until the server owner cashes out our the server crashes on it's own weight. It's just how things work, it was inevitable that this was going to happen. This is also the method the NSA uses to grab your information through certain apps and such.[/QUOTE] This is completely unrelated to the topic though.
What shocked me the most is how aggressively they are going after the whales. I knew whales were like 1% of all users and stood 99% of all income, but that game companies went to such lengths to squeeze every penny out of them is mind-blowing to me.
[QUOTE=Cassel;48712815]What shocked me the most is how aggressively they are going after the whales. I knew whales were like 1% of all users and stood 99% of all income, but that game companies went to such lengths to squeeze every penny out of them is mind-blowing to me.[/QUOTE] Yeah, reading about that Facebook stalking made me feel uneasy. I don't often if ever buy in app purchases, but even so, that was still an extremely unsettling anecdote.
The other day I was wondering about someone I knew back in grammar school and haven't seen in the years since. Using just Google, Spokeo, Whitepages, and Zillow I was able to get streetview pictures of where they are living now. I know it's them because in the streetview pictures they have a trailer parked in front of the house and that trailer has bumper stickers on it. Those bumper stickers are from a place they used to go to a lot back in the day, and it's kind an obscure offroading place so it's not like lots of people have those stickers. I know when they bought the house and how much they paid and what it's worth now. That's just from a name and where you went to school. Imagine how much more info people can get on you when they have stuff like email, Facebook, etc.
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If people want free-to-play to die out, we need to be more capable of buying games. The average American's budget is so tight that there just isn't readily-available funds to buy games. FtP is often the only viable choice. It's an economic problem, as well as a people problem.
I wouldn't say that. The average American has a lot of leisure money that they don't think they do. Don't go out drinking a couple nights a month, or eat out less, or skip a trip to the cinema, or buy a cheaper car, and it's amazing how much cash shows up. If anything, we have a spending problem. Unless you're just thoroughly impoverished.
[QUOTE=woolio1;48713598]I wouldn't say that. The average American has a lot of leisure money that they don't think they do. Don't go out drinking a couple nights a month, or eat out less, or skip a trip to the cinema, or buy a cheaper car, and it's amazing how much cash shows up. If anything, we have a spending problem. Unless you're just thoroughly impoverished.[/QUOTE] Most of the things you listed sure are better than paying for games though.
[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;48712653]Same thing applies to donating to servers on games like Garry's Mod. Right now it's practically an art on how to scam players in Garry's Mod. For example, if you want someone to give you $15 what better way then offering them "premium" weapons that they normally would be able to get through playing the game, but they could get it automatically through just paying you $15 every three months. Want to have a SUPAH COOL DONATOR job?! Spend $20 for Diamond VIP! The scam goes on and on until the server owner cashes out our the server crashes on it's own weight. It's just how things work, it was inevitable that this was going to happen. This is also the method the NSA uses to grab your information through certain apps and such.[/QUOTE] Those are the larger slot servers, once you hit the smaller slots like 20 or less, its usually a group severely dedicated to RP.
I think Path of Exile has the best F2P model, along with some moba games. (you just pay for cosmetic items) You should avoid any game that allows you to pay for an advantage and eventually it will stop, it's sad that a lot of mainstream titles still have this.
[QUOTE=omarfr;48711851]I really don't understand how people can waste so much money on F2P games. The only game I've ever spent money on that was F2P was League of Legends, and still I haven't spent more than $60 because that is the average price pf a game.[/QUOTE] I've wasted 500€ on an mmo... I feel ashamed.
[QUOTE=itisjuly;48713605]Most of the things you listed sure are better than paying for games though.[/QUOTE] That's subjective.
Using personal information to sell you things doesn't like a new, or scary, concept. Where you live and what you do are already common knowledge to people who are willing to look up your name, and if they want, they can contact and advertise to you. TV commercials do it. Tons of small businesses do it. You kinda HAVE to gather as much information as possible if you hope to advertise to the correct demographic and make any money (Which you'd have to use for more advertising). It probably seems scary because no one really grasps the concept of it happening on so grand a scale, but it's just the way things work.
[QUOTE=Guyw/suitcase;48714747]Using personal information to sell you things doesn't like a new, or scary, concept. Where you live and what you do are already common knowledge to people who are willing to look up your name, and if they want, they can contact and advertise to you. TV commercials do it. Tons of small businesses do it. You kinda HAVE to gather as much information as possible if you hope to advertise to the correct demographic and make any money (Which you'd have to use for more advertising). It probably seems scary because no one really grasps the concept of it happening on so grand a scale, but it's just the way things work.[/QUOTE] I can see where the issue comes from. Before at least those fucks needed to put in SOME effort. Now its just programs that other people made that were sold to people to use on people so they can sell said information on said people while the information gathering shit is copy and pasted 10000x in 1 second because computers can just so happen to do that. At least back in the day they had to open the god damn yellow pages and write shit down. [editline]19th September 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Agent_Wesker;48714283]I think Path of Exile has the best F2P model, along with some moba games. (you just pay for cosmetic items) You should avoid any game that allows you to pay for an advantage and eventually it will stop, it's sad that a lot of mainstream titles still have this.[/QUOTE] TBH what mainstream titles really have it? Dead Space 3, Sims, and Mass Effect 3 are the only mainstream AAA that seemed to really wanna screw people over for the most absolute mundane garbage. Otherwise its normally just day DLC mission shit(whatever, as shit as this practice is, it has more effort than f2p mobile shit) or just straight up cosmetic.
[QUOTE=RichyZ;48716348]funnily enough mass effect 3 and dead space 3 have the most easily bypassable micros ever the fun of me3 is the grinding in mp for packs and ds3 is already a super easy game, you'll never be hurting for resources unless you just build every item you see[/QUOTE] I wouldn't even know Dead Space 3 even had microtransactions(I finished the game) if people didn't get angry about it. Where even are they?
once again we learn that the corporate world has no ethical or moral standards, and for some reason we're still surprised
I like playing free to play games without spending a dime.
[QUOTE=TalonAran;48717345]I wouldn't even know Dead Space 3 even had microtransactions(I finished the game) if people didn't get angry about it. Where even are they?[/QUOTE] You can buy resources in-game, but if you've been playing the series a bit then you kinda know how to save ammo and not die like a dingus. No idea why you would even use the micro transaction system since the game was so damn easy.
[QUOTE=TalonAran;48717345]I wouldn't even know Dead Space 3 even had microtransactions(I finished the game) if people didn't get angry about it. Where even are they?[/QUOTE] The entire resources system. You can buy resources through EA's servers.
I see nothing really wrong with this to be honest. So what if free to play companies want to cater specific items to people who actually buy them? That's literally the point of most businesses, give your customer something you think they want to spend money on. You could argue that it's bad because they essentially "stalk" you but that information is all out there anyway, and at the very least it would just make the items they market less accurate if they didn't use such tactics. It hardly screws free players over if they design a flag to sell to a specific user base. Things like experience boosts and pay to win shit is terrible but at the same time it's a free-to-play game, and you get what you pay for. Micro-transactions are pretty terribly implemented in most F2P games, but in most cases it's not as if removing them would actually make the game better, so if people want to spend thousands of dollars on a F2P game they let them.
[QUOTE=Chrisholl;48722076]so if people want to spend thousands of dollars on a F2P game they let them.[/QUOTE] An industry that depends on peoples addictive personalities is a pretty vile industry.
[QUOTE=Disgruntled;48713548]If people want free-to-play to die out, we need to be more capable of buying games. The average American's budget is so tight that there just isn't readily-available funds to buy games. FtP is often the only viable choice. It's an economic problem, as well as a people problem.[/QUOTE] Those same people can't afford to spend that much money on the item mall, so publishers would be forced to go back to b2p if their games were filled with only people mentioned above.
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