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.
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
