I’ve had a bunch of people alert me to Stuart Campbell’s latest gaming piece, When games aren’t expensive enough. He presents a counterpoint to the negative reaction regarding Real Racing 3’s business model, which has irked many gamers.

That app is the latest in the well-regarded (although, in my opinion, somewhat dull) mobile ‘simulator’ racing series. Instead of being sold at a premium price point, it’s gone freemium. The app throws up relatively arbitrary doorslams, which you can get past by throwing money at the game. Reviews have so far been decidedly mixed, with Eurogamer being the most scathing.

Even broadly positive Real Racing 3 reviews (such as TouchArcade’s) grumble about the freemium structure, and so it’s surprising that Campbell argues of EA’s decision:

[It], contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

His argument, though, doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. He rightly notes EA’s financial model is essentially designed around gouging and that Real Racing 3 will make a lot of money. But the conclusion is flawed:

their existence is mana from Heaven for the rest of us, because they provide the long-term means by which the price of games can finally come down, at the sole expense of stupid people. By having braying cheats with too much money contribute most of the funding for big-budget “free-to-play” games, the likes of EA secure the funding which lets them make normal games cheaply.

The mistake is in thinking EA has any intention of continuing with making normal games, when the company’s CFO has explicitly stated all future EA games will feature microtransactions. Even the likes of Tetris aren’t safe. A year ago, I wrote about the new iOS Tetris and how it was wrecked by microtransactions, and the upcoming Tetris Blitz appears to be far more heavily in the freemium space. When these games make money, why will EA ‘risk’ making any ‘normal’ games that are released for a fixed price and that lack gouging? And when iOS device owners regularly baulk at a new game costing a few quid, why will other companies risk not following suit? Why wouldn’t they instead gradually chip away at gaming’s soul and replace the bits that fall off with components from a cynical, hateful business model?

Cambell argues:

[Every] penny they’ll happily hand over is a penny that the rest of us don’t have to pay in order to keep a stream of videogames that cost less than a bar of chocolate coming our way until the end of time. […]

So hurray for Real Racing 3. It’s a shit game that sucks money out of dimwits and to all intents and purposes gives it to you and me, so that we can spend it on vastly more enjoyable ones that cost literally pennies. Why would you be upset about that?

But in reality, we’ll just end up with loads of crappy games and nothing to spend money on, because everyone will be obsessed with gouge-oriented freemium garbage that’s a business model first and barely a game second.

At the time of writing, most of the top grossing games in the App Store are freemium titles: games that are free to play, but that hinge on a business model that more often than not requires money to be semi-regularly fed in, either to speed up the game or to get through regular doorslams. I’ve written about freemium games before, highlighting my distaste for the model on the basis that it’s too often abused.

Occasionally, this isn’t the case, although that’s mostly when a game is more akin to an old-school demo (and therefore more accurately labelled as ‘free to play’ than ‘freemium’, if there’s a distinction to be made). For example, Gridrunner Free gives you a unique game mode and a single IAP upgrades the game to unlock everything else. Letterpress restricts you to a couple of simultaneous games, but, again, a single upgrade unlocks everything.

However, even when you enter into the realm of upgrades and ongoing cash injections, there’s no reason why gouging and grinding has to be front and centre. Hero Academy has a smart system where you buy new teams of characters and aesthetic customisations, but you can play without them, albeit without the same level of variety as those who choose to pay. And despite its hateful £59.99 ‘gold package’ (to my mind, any game with a disposable 60-quid IAP needs to take a good, long look at itself), Royal Revolt is a hugely enjoyable romp that you can play through without spending a great deal of cash to speed along upgrades. In fact, it’s perhaps the first game of this sort I’ve played where I thought it could do with more roadblocks, because it was being a little too generous. (I also felt the same about Frisbee Forever and its sequel, both of which I threw a few quid at, purely on the basis of the enjoyment I’d gotten out of the free games.)

On Eurogamer recently, Dan Whitehead reviewed Ghostbusters. Whitehead seems to be of a similar age to me, given that he references David Crane’s 1984 tie-in (which, let’s face it, was amazing if you had a C64 and were about ten: *stabs space bar* GHOSTBUSTERS!), but this also means he’s old enough to remember not only when gaming lacked modern-style freemium business models but also when it was heavily based around ‘pay to play’ a.k.a. arcade gaming.

Whitehead tears apart Ghostbusters, his review being summed up by the concluding paragraphs:

You quickly realise that there’s absolutely no point to anything you’re doing. You grind through identical battles dozens of times to scrape together enough credits to earn the right to grind through more identical battles. It’s a prime example of that upside-down design mentality that requires the ‘game’ element to be so slow and frustrating that the player feels compelled to pay in order to skip it.

In the comments, he’s then accused of being anti-freemium. Perhaps, argue those in favour of the model, Eurogamer should be asking people who love buying a 70-quid barrel of Smurfberries to review the likes of Ghostbusters. But making that accusation on Whitehead is missing the point he so clearly makes in his review:

There’s a world of difference between a game that uses micro-payments and a micro-payment model that is simply delivered in the guise of a game. If Ghostbusters has any value at all, it’s as an illustration of this important point.

In the comments, he further elaborates:

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a freemium model, and many games use it wisely to great effect. There is something very wrong with ‘games’ that are simply mechanisms for payment, dressed up as ‘gameplay’ in the limpest possible sense. That’s what Ghostbusters is. Take away the payment model and there’s simply no game there—just an endless series of mindless tasks with no positive feedback loop.

This is something people misunderstand when comparing freemium titles to arcade games. The latter were sometimes vicious in their difficulty levels, gulping coins, but the games were always about skill. Get good enough and you could survive on a single coin. That, to some extent, was the magic: a well-tuned game would reward your investment; and although from a manufacturer standpoint you could argue it’s not savvy that a game would potentially earn less per play as it aged, older games would regularly make way for new ones anyway, enabling the cycle to repeat.

However, I do nonetheless divert slightly from Whitehead’s views; he states:

This is why the example of arcade machines is flawed—those games were fun, whether you put 10p into the slot or £10. The input-feedback loop was completely different because progress per coin was skill based. You don’t need skill to beat Ghostbusters—just reams of patience and money to burn.

Although this is an opinion that aligns perfectly with my own preferences, it’s not an opinion I consider relevant to all modern gamers. In many cases, people seem content—even happy—with an experience rather than an old-school arcade-oriented title, demanding puzzler or slice of challenging strategy that demands skill for success. They’re happy to tend—the gaming equivalent of mindless gardening, where you go through the motions. However, I believe that even in this space, there still needs to be reward, and companies must take care to not enforce grind.

Even looking at Ghostbusters from the point of view of someone who enjoys freemium games, Whitehead’s review calls out the truly negative, hateful aspects of the production: grinding through nondescript scenes dozens of times to merely see more of the same; making progression so slow, frustrating and annoying that a player pays to skip through. Even without skill, a game can offer progression, fun, delight, beauty, and, as I’ve said, rewards—a return for the investment of both your time and your money. Without at least those things, freemium titles still represent a massive threat to not only iOS gaming, but also to the entire gaming ecosystem. Within a few years, the most exciting medium in history could be little more than potentially infinite Little Infernos* installed on people’s devices, sucking bank accounts dry in return for what ultimately amounts to nothing at all.

* Little Inferno is an experience-led game that riffs off of freemium games, almost being one, but with in-game currency generated solely by the items burned on the Little Inferno fireplace. It’s proved divisive, but it’s one of the finest productions I’ve seen in recent months on the iPad, and I very much recommend it and staying the course. If you get frustrated by the combos, I’d even argue you won’t lose much by finding some hints online, because the game’s pay-off is wonderful. Also, judging by reviews I’ve read, some people (who presumably like their freemium games) are ecstatic purely with the burning and not just the underlying story, which is amusing.

In an earlier post today, I suggest Nintendo could be another Sega fairly soon, offering its IP on the App Store. Tap! deputy editor Matthew Bolton (who knows more than a bit about gaming), countered on Twitter:

I’m not so sure about Mario on [the] App Store. Nintendo’s technical meticulousness in Mario is unparalleled outside of racers… the controls’ responsiveness is tuned to perfection, and touchscreens are laggy. It’s an Apple situation

I agree. Touchscreens are fantastic for certain types of gaming, but not Mario-style platformers. (That’s not to say there aren’t decent 2D platformers for iOS, but they certainly don’t match Super Mario in terms of, as Matt put it, ‘technical meticulousness’.) But there is a solution: a third-party controller.

It’s not like such a thing is without precedent: I’ve written about iOS games controllers before, and although they’re something of a niche, Nintendo has the hardware savvy to produce such a thing, and the IP clout to encourage plenty of people to buy it. Of course, the company would lose control elsewhere, notably in terms of device hardware. But if Nintendo’s forced into a Sega-like position, its games on the App Store and a Nintendo controller doesn’t seem like the worst alternative.

I’ve written about Nintendo before. I used to be a huge fan of Nintendo in mobile, from the original Game Boy through to the DS. However, from the GBA onwards, I noticed a pattern, in that I’d increasingly end up noodling about with homebrew and emulators, through first-party games slowing to a trickle of recycled content, and third-party games largely being expensive crap. iOS then spoiled me. In just a few years, Apple’s hardware went from being quite interesting to utterly essential for anyone with a genuine interest in gaming. It reinvigorated the indie space on mobile, forced innovation through its lack of traditional controls, and although there was a gatekeeper, it was one that was far more likely to fling you the keys to the store than Nintendo or Sony.

Every quarter, we now hear some kind of bad news from Nintendo: its hardware isn’t selling as well as it hoped, and the profits the company is making aren’t high enough (or, in some cases, don’t exist at all). Marco Arment recently covered the various options for Nintendo, and his conclusion was much the same as what I said last summer: Nintendo cannot or will not deal with the challenges required to truly compete in the existing mobile marketplace, and there’s a good chance we’ll see the company exit hardware and become another Sega.

Arment’s final words, however, were particularly interesting:

I don’t think Nintendo has a bright future. I see them staying in the shrinking hardware business until the bitter end, and then becoming roughly like Sega today: a shell of the former company, probably acquired for relatively little by someone big, endlessly whoring out their old franchises in mostly mediocre games that will leave their old fans longing for the good old days.

To some extent, “endlessly whoring out their old franchises” is precisely what Nintendo’s business model on mobile has been for years. New console? Quick: crank out another Mario Bros. platformer that’s almost identical to the last! Rinse and repeat. Still, as the company responsible for so much innovation to mobile gaming with the DS, I’d like to think Nintendo has something brewing—something amazing that will kickstart its fortunes on mobile again. However, I’m not going to be shocked if we see an official Super Mario for iPhone on the App Store for $9.99 in a year or two.

Welcome to the world, Caliber Advantage, yet another iOS games controller. It’s more or less the iCade Mobile, but for the iPhone 5, and with added analogue nubs. According to Slide to Play,

iFrogz is working with Epic Games and Chair Entertainment to ensure that at least some titles developed using the Unreal Engine 3 will be compatible.

Well, that’s great. I’m sure “at least some titles” being compatible with yet another expensive controller is what the world needs. It’s perfectly sensible to keep fragmenting the already niche iOS games controllers market, because what ever gamer likes is a drawer full of controllers that only work with certain games. Even better when a single new controller will cost 70 quid, and will last only as long as the form factor of current Apple devices does. (iCade Mobile found this out the hard way and is currently available at fire-sale prices.)

To be fair to iFrogz, perhaps it can pull this off. Maybe it will get on board hundreds of developers and finally turn an iPhone into a games system with a physical controls option. But the iCade’s been around for a long time now, and even that easy-to-implement system only has games compatibility stretching to dozens of titles (some of which are, admittedly, retro compilations that bundle many games into a single app). Unless iFrogz somehow manages to totally revolutionise this aspect of the industry, it’s just going to be another Duo Gamer.