> 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.