"great content"

That's HIGHLY subjective. Lots of things work, doesn't necessarily make them good. How is it great content for free when it's locked behind gem and extreme time gates?

The freemium space is such a mess that you'll download something interesting and it's telling you within minutes that unlocking this tile will take 22hours. Only 17 gems to unlock now! Candy Crush supposedly set levels to be almost impossible without bought boosts, after just a few. Never installed candy crush so can't comment directly. Let's not forget the total piss take that was Dungeon Keeper on mobile.

Yes we've all read the blog posts on how to monetise, and the first purchase is the hardest so get it the day they install etc etc. Taking the piss defines the freemium space.

Older freemium games had a much more ethical balance. Things like Temple Run managed to let you play a decent game for free. Then pay for more. Must have worked well enough as they decided to make a TR2.

I won't even install freemium games any more.

"Pissing them off just kills the golden goose"

Meanwhile pissing off everyone who knows them with the Candy Crush "I want to get a level unlock", "Woo I reached level 2" Facebook spam is fair game presumably?

I've bought several games when I can buy them outright. I wish there were more ports of classics like Bard's Tale, which I bought, to Android - Pirates, RealMyst etc are all ipad/iphone only.

I want a game I can buy, not a bloody subscription. We didn't buy subscriptions or gems for the kids either, no matter how much they whinged.

> Meanwhile pissing off everyone who knows them with the Candy Crush "I want to get a level unlock" Why do you get piss off when a friend is asking you for help in a game they like?

I used to play MMORPGs and stayed connected - without playing - just to help people in my clan with questions on quests and similar things, as I knew quite a lot about the games. It was time consuming, but it felt rewarding to help other people.

What makes so specially bad the Facebook requests?

You obviously found playing MMORPGs fun or interesting, even if you grew tired of it. On top of that, you were voluntarily opening yourself up to these requests. Random mobile-game Facebook spam is different, because it's unwelcome and they're asking you to do something you never wanted to do. If these people had instead been constantly coming by your house uninvited asking you to contort yourself into painful positions for their amusement, you'd probably have been less welcoming towards it.

> Why do you get piss off when a friend is asking you for help in a game they like?

If the messages were going to the Candy Crush community i couldn't care less, as they'd at least then be pushing the messages to people interested in that game. Of course that would completely destroy a community with the volume they push.

I'd not mind an ask from guild or MMO community to help out, or even talk about build advice or whatever - if it's a game I played, and I'm in the community I care at least a bit. Asking for help in WoW when I'm in Lotro or vice versa isn't anything other than spam.

It's the same as auto-ding plugins - they're damn annoying unless you're 11. I don't care that you level++, please don't tell me.

I'm sure most the players don't realise how spammy it is, and often there's a pattern in the UX to heavily encourage the FB push by default/mistake, or get extra gems for sharing.

"I am getting tired of people complaining that this is a bad thing. "

Get used to it. It IS a bad thing. Taking advantage of addiction like this is immoral, plain and simple.

"Freemium monetization works: developers get paid and consumers get a lot of great content for free."

And the people who are addicted and end up spending insane amounts of money that they probably can't afford to spend?

I dislike the model for this reason:

1. Game devs have an incentive to make the game crappy unless you pay 2. When it comes time for you to pay, you have to support all the freeloaders.

I would venture a guess that most games could have higher median "fun" and still only charge $2-$5 . Instead of charging one person $10k and 5k ppl nothing.

just my thoughts though, no science/data to back it.

> When it comes time for you to pay, you have to support all the freeloaders.

Digital information has never, and will never, work like that. The price of movies is not influenced by pirates. The price of music is not influenced by how much radio stations charge to wholesale play it. There is absolutely no limit on supply of said information, the only scarcity is the revenue to produce it.

If you make a game for 100k, it does not matter if you have 10k buyers at $10 each, or 1 million players where 1 in 1000 spend $100, you recoup your costs either way. The only difference is that your 10k player game is seen as "dead" or "unsuccessful" if its competition has 1 million players, and on mobile stores that prioritize install base, the former will always lose in market growth.

But money made and money lost on a game have nothing to do with one another. You lose money when you cannot recoup the developer hours to make it, and you can only gain or break even on money that users spend on it after release. The closest you can get to "losing" money is bullshit MAFIAA propaganda about how all the pirates / freeloaders would have bought the game if it cost money, when we can demonstrably see here, and in almost every other instance, that if you paywall things people want for free they will very often just go for other things rather than stick around paying for yours, and that the conversation rate of pirates / freeloads - especially in mobile gaming - almost certainly does not offset the increased userbase and word of mouth you get from them to attract whale customers.

Freemium players who don't pay aren't "Pirates". Also they take up server resources (and complain even louder than paying ones when the occasional defect happens).

I never equated freemium players with pirates, just that the surrogate equivalents for other digital assets is piracy, because the rights holders of those other products want money per copy.

While sharing movies over torrents does not incur a cost to the producer, running servers for a game does. The model is different, and thus i do not believe your points apply.

There are examples of successful freemium models: Warframe and Path of Exile. In those cases, point #1 is mitigated by the customers themselves keeping a very close eye on the game's development. If they feel like the developers cross a line they are very vocal about their displeasure and the developers will tend to roll back the change. That "line" is usually when you have to pay to accomplish a thing at all, rather than it just speeding the process along. If the slow/free path is too arduous, then there's a problem.

The key point here is that the developers want to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with their customers. They're not just churning out a product and expecting people to give them money for it.

I actually started playing Warframe a couple months ago and have been pleasantly surprised by the game's level of quality while still having a relatively player-friendly business model. I've only spent around $30 and that's been more than enough (along with a very mild grind) to get me through a large chunk of the game's content without feeling pressured to spend more. In most mobile style games, you may as well toss your $30 into the wind for all the good it will do you. That probably won't be enough to get you the one card/hero/item/whatever that you actually want, let alone allow you to be competitive within the game.

It seems the problem is finding 5,000 people to pay you even $1.

I think one reason people don't like it is because it's not "fair." Bunch of freeloaders get stuff, people with too much extra money get taken advantage of... We need to get over it. Paying-big-money-up-front is even less fair because you have to shell out cash for a game you may or may not like. Plus, you can only get people to buy games this way with a huge marketing budget.

It's strange that so people people whine about mobile games being freemium but nobody mentions League of Legends: A completely free PC game that has made an obscene amount of income on little more than avatar skins.

> It's strange that so people people whine about mobile games being freemium but nobody mentions League of Legends: A completely free PC game that has made an obscene amount of income on little more than avatar skins.

You also have to buy characters. Like in many "free" games, you can earn currency to buy the characters through playing the game, but you get it very, very slowly. I'm still missing dozens of characters after four years, and that's even paying money for some of them (thanks to gift cards).

I call this a "grief" economy. The more grief you want to skip, the more expensive it is. The problem being that the maker is intentionally adding grief. To me that sounds annoying at best and malicious at worst.