Mobile gamers: this is why we can’t have nice things
Some recent mobile gaming highlights:
Angry Birds Transformers launches. It is a surprisingly good game, retaining the series’s penchant for wanton destruction, and wrapping it in a playable and engaging mechanic where you auto-run along levels and shoot directly at targets. But it’s a freemium game, heavily and arbitrarily gated with all kinds of timers, IAP and ads. People complain: they just wanted to play the game.
The Silent Age‘s second episode arrives, hugely expanding the award-winning adventure title, initially downloadable for free. Those who pay $4.99/£2.99 to unlock the full story are treated to a compelling and beautiful gaming experience. But instead many people complain: they just wanted to play the game—for free.
And now paid game Monument Valley has been updated with a new set of gorgeous Escher-like puzzles to explore. The ‘forgotten shores’ is roughly the length of the original game, at least as visually stunning and inventive, and costs roughly half the price. Again, people complain. They don’t understand why they just can’t play the new levels immediately; the developer is, apparently, “greedy”, and those who bought the game are now busy downrating it on iTunes. Their original four- or five-star experience is now only worth one or two stars, because the developer had the audacity to want income for months of effort, in order to fund further games that those who bought it would presumably enjoy in the future.
On Twitter, developer ustwo half-joked:
Seems quite a few people have gone back and 1 star reviewed Monument Valley upon update because the expansion was paid. This makes us sad. That’s it, we’re giving up the premium game. Next time we’re just going to sell you 500 coins for $2 instead.
It’s hardly surprising everyone took the comment at face value. Why wouldn’t they? Developers take months crafting something, and they need to pay the bills somehow. But too many mobile gamers don’t want to pay; but they also don’t want IAP gating or adverts. They want something for nothing.
I don’t know how this plays out, or how it can be fixed. It’s too late to put the entitlement genie back in the bottle, and I suppose developers have to weather the idiocy storm and just hope enough people remain to make their efforts worthwhile, whether that’s from buying apps with price-tags, or paid upgrades, or from flinging a few bucks into the IAP well in order to make a freemium title less hideous. What I do know is that we’re still seeing the most innovative and exciting of gaming platforms continue to get a kicking, all because of greed—but from consumers, not developers.
The takeaway seems to be that people who pay larger-than-usual money up front for games don’t like in-app purchases.
If I were Monument Valley’s developer, the lesson that I’d take away is that I should have released Monument Valley 2 with these new levels, instead of in-app purchase.
The XCOM franchise did this with the Enemy Within expansion, and I suspect it’s for this reason.
I won’t pay for big money games on the App Store as there is no clear way to get refunds. I’ll buy them on Google Play as I can get a refund within 15 minutes if the title is no good or won’t work. Xcom is a case in point. It cost me £11.99 and i’ve still not been able to download it as it needed more than 4gb of space even though it clearly stated that it only needed a couple. I tried for ages to get Apple to refund it and then gave up.
Exactly what Chris said. To complain about “entitled” gamers is to blame your customers and the marketplace for your mis-steps and poor messaging. MV’s players are clearly happy paying for content (they bought the game, after all), they just have the expectation that app updates are free.
I wrote more about this here http://www.brainflak.es/monument-valleys-expansion-should-be-a-sequel/
Jim: The problem there might have been that App Store sizes are downloads, not install sizes — something Apple really should change (both should be displayed).