7 ms·

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

by merb 10y ago

donkeyd 10y ago
I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.
- mentalpiracy 10y ago
  I have come to see the same. I want to reward game creators for giving me enjoyable entertainment, and taking the risk by going free-to-play rather than forcing me into an up-front purchase. I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats. Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun. In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke. The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.
- osi 10y ago
  free to play, with no gameplay restrictions is an excellent model. when you can then do IAP to get "extras", it's a great "pay what you feel it is worth" type model. another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.
  - donkeyd 10y ago
    Also works well in CS:GO. The skins add nothing to the actual game play, yet people like the value they add. Just a shame that it brings kids into a gambling state of mind. Would've been nicer if you could just buy them outright.
    - croon 10y ago
      You can, it's an actual market. The price is just high, because the chance to get them is low. If you could buy them for what I assume you expect to be a lower amount, they would not sell nearly as many chests, or no one would want the item anymore because it's no longer rare.
- nemo44x 10y ago
  > In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game. The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly. I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above. For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.
  - jpreiland 10y ago
    also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective
    - nemo44x 10y ago
      Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving! But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?
    - 10y ago
madeofpalk 10y ago
Pokemon Go has a really interesting mechanic for this - one of the in app purchases you can buy is for a 'Lure' that you can place in your physical area (in game) that attracts Pokemon for all people in the area. So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Something most people don't know either, you get 10 coins a day for each gym you have a Pokemon set up to defend (up to a maximum of 10 gyms) - giving you up to 100 free coins every day for just playing the game. And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either (and they are pretty common even in my suburban area, there's three on the ~15 minute walk to the convenience store down the street) there's little reason to spend money unless you are sitting in your house all day playing instead of actually walking around (which is by design). Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.
  - organsnyder 10y ago
    > And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either Based on what I've read and my own experience (including a month as a beta tester), this isn't quite accurate. There are a few items that can't be harvested, including incubators, lures, lucky eggs, and backpack upgrades. Those can only be purchased.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      Bah, you know what, you're right. Still, 100 coins a day from defending 10 gyms (not hard to do if you are in an urban area) is enough to pick up any item in the store (minus the storage upgrades), at least. Lures are really nice considering they benefit everyone in the area, so if you are nearby a group of players lure trading can be a pretty good deal.
icoder 10y ago
Could be, but in-app purchases often rely on very skewed spending behaviours. In other words, you alone may not be the best representative here, at least not with the 'whale' that is found for every 1000's of "you's".
dilap 10y ago
why? do you also refuse to put quarters in arcade machines?
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  ... not when I own the hardware :)
- croon 10y ago
  Not parent, but for me: Yes, I do. Arcade machines led to terribly designed games then, and running a game on purchases leads to terribly designed games now. This is not to say that there can't be good free-to-play games with IAP, but the vast majority of the payment models is terrible in game quality (not talking about success). I honestly have a hard time coming up with a good example of an app, but in the PC space, excellent examples of quality free-to-play meets success is TF2 and Dota 2 where you can't buy an advantage yet they are hugely profitable. I've spent at least 200 bucks on dota 2, and regret nothing. I have yet to spend any money on IAP in apps simply because I haven't seen any implementation I find acceptable.
  - dilap 10y ago
    maybe my childhood has given me an overly rosy view of arcades? :) agreed theres plenty of bad implementations of iap, but i think with time people are figuring out how to do it well. i must confess im not much of a gamer in adulthood, but eg i think space team and clash royale are both excellent apps w/ iap. (as a side-note, most online advertising is much more aggravating to me than purchases!)
    - croon 10y ago
      Funny you should mention it, but I've played a fair amount of Clash Royale as well (level 8 at upper arena 5). I still have a hard time recommending it though. It's such a great game in there, but I feel the IAP and the structure around it is what plagues it. Pacing it to gouge money to unlock chests, no max levels on cards (especially in tournaments), selling epics and chests etc. I wish there was or I could come up with better ways to monetize it other than hats, but the game could be SO much better, and I would feel good about sinking money into it. The only thing that would happen, were I to put money into it, is that I would maybe bump up an arena or two earlier than otherwise, but then I would be in the exact same spot there instead. There's no end to the gouging, where gouging != possibility to put in more money.

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

by merb 10y ago

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.

mentalpiracy 10y ago
I have come to see the same. I want to reward game creators for giving me enjoyable entertainment, and taking the risk by going free-to-play rather than forcing me into an up-front purchase. I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.
vidarh 10y ago
> Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats. Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun. In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke. The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.
osi 10y ago
free to play, with no gameplay restrictions is an excellent model. when you can then do IAP to get "extras", it's a great "pay what you feel it is worth" type model. another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.
- donkeyd 10y ago
  Also works well in CS:GO. The skins add nothing to the actual game play, yet people like the value they add. Just a shame that it brings kids into a gambling state of mind. Would've been nicer if you could just buy them outright.
  - croon 10y ago
    You can, it's an actual market. The price is just high, because the chance to get them is low. If you could buy them for what I assume you expect to be a lower amount, they would not sell nearly as many chests, or no one would want the item anymore because it's no longer rare.
nemo44x 10y ago
> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game. The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly. I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above. For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.
- jpreiland 10y ago
  also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective
  - nemo44x 10y ago
    Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving! But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?
  - 10y ago

madeofpalk 10y ago

Pokemon Go has a really interesting mechanic for this - one of the in app purchases you can buy is for a 'Lure' that you can place in your physical area (in game) that attracts Pokemon for all people in the area. So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.

snuxoll 10y ago
Something most people don't know either, you get 10 coins a day for each gym you have a Pokemon set up to defend (up to a maximum of 10 gyms) - giving you up to 100 free coins every day for just playing the game. And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either (and they are pretty common even in my suburban area, there's three on the ~15 minute walk to the convenience store down the street) there's little reason to spend money unless you are sitting in your house all day playing instead of actually walking around (which is by design). Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.
- organsnyder 10y ago
  > And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either Based on what I've read and my own experience (including a month as a beta tester), this isn't quite accurate. There are a few items that can't be harvested, including incubators, lures, lucky eggs, and backpack upgrades. Those can only be purchased.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Bah, you know what, you're right. Still, 100 coins a day from defending 10 gyms (not hard to do if you are in an urban area) is enough to pick up any item in the store (minus the storage upgrades), at least. Lures are really nice considering they benefit everyone in the area, so if you are nearby a group of players lure trading can be a pretty good deal.

icoder 10y ago

Could be, but in-app purchases often rely on very skewed spending behaviours. In other words, you alone may not be the best representative here, at least not with the 'whale' that is found for every 1000's of "you's".

dilap 10y ago

why? do you also refuse to put quarters in arcade machines?

LyndsySimon 10y ago
... not when I own the hardware :)
croon 10y ago
Not parent, but for me: Yes, I do. Arcade machines led to terribly designed games then, and running a game on purchases leads to terribly designed games now. This is not to say that there can't be good free-to-play games with IAP, but the vast majority of the payment models is terrible in game quality (not talking about success). I honestly have a hard time coming up with a good example of an app, but in the PC space, excellent examples of quality free-to-play meets success is TF2 and Dota 2 where you can't buy an advantage yet they are hugely profitable. I've spent at least 200 bucks on dota 2, and regret nothing. I have yet to spend any money on IAP in apps simply because I haven't seen any implementation I find acceptable.
- dilap 10y ago
  maybe my childhood has given me an overly rosy view of arcades? :) agreed theres plenty of bad implementations of iap, but i think with time people are figuring out how to do it well. i must confess im not much of a gamer in adulthood, but eg i think space team and clash royale are both excellent apps w/ iap. (as a side-note, most online advertising is much more aggravating to me than purchases!)
  - croon 10y ago
    Funny you should mention it, but I've played a fair amount of Clash Royale as well (level 8 at upper arena 5). I still have a hard time recommending it though. It's such a great game in there, but I feel the IAP and the structure around it is what plagues it. Pacing it to gouge money to unlock chests, no max levels on cards (especially in tournaments), selling epics and chests etc. I wish there was or I could come up with better ways to monetize it other than hats, but the game could be SO much better, and I would feel good about sinking money into it. The only thing that would happen, were I to put money into it, is that I would maybe bump up an arena or two earlier than otherwise, but then I would be in the exact same spot there instead. There's no end to the gouging, where gouging != possibility to put in more money.