One important subject missing (I only watched the vid on the first post) is the multiplayer aspect. Would ppl pay to advance faster on a game if it was a solo adventure with no online ranking? Is there such kind of freemium? I never heard about.

(If not, that kinda shows that is all about shoving players balls at other players faces isnt it? Between that paying minority, that is)

On the other hand, if one of those employees suddenly pulls their head out of their butt and starts doing their best to earn their wage and make a fair deal of things then you make them a supervisor, right?

...

It used to be all about who made the best game, now suddenly people are realizing how huge the market has become and maladaptive behaviors are showing up. Everyone is worried about who is making what kind of money

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In real life that employee is given more work to do for the same pay. The person who gets promoted is the one who can kiss the management's ### the best .

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THIS GUY has made a career out of talking about bad classic games.

In real life that employee is given more work to do for the same pay. The person who gets promoted is the one who can kiss the management's ### the best

And then what happens? I appreciate your dedication to cynicism, but try taking the next step in the logical progression. If one company promotes the competent and another promotes the flagellant, which company will perform better?

THIS GUY has made a career out of talking about bad classic games.

Not really sure why that's relevant. The existence of bad games does not preclude competition among good games. That's like saying that apes disprove evolution because they aren't homo sapiens.

It does sort of demonstrate my point though, because - of the games he reviews - most of them are obscure, and the ones that aren't are best known for being bad. If you got an 8-bit itch, would you look to buy bad games or good ones?

@Khatharr: I don't think making a profit is bad! That's a pretty extreme statement for you to make.

(just kidding)

I'd just like to point out that there have been some games that are legitimately enjoyable (not warmed over shovelware) when played for free, and they offer only cosmetics as premium items. Some of them have found overwhelming financial success with this model, and I don't believe that they're behaving in a predatory manner, since there's no gameplay benefit to the purchase.

MapleStory and League of Legends are financially doing very well, as evidence for what you are saying.

"A new report from SuperData puts League of Legends' revenue for 2013 at $624 million." [1]

"In 2006, Wizet revealed they earned over US $300 million from MapleStory." [2]

League of Legends is estimated to be $964 million in 2014, and MapleStory is estimated to be $240 million in 2014. [3]

Mind you, these games are making huge amounts of money, every year. This is in contrast to games like Call of Duty, which make buckets of money once (the several months after release), and then they need to re-invest alot of money on the next game in the series.

I've played both Maple Story and League of Legends for a bit, haven't paid a cent to either, had access to all the same content even the paying users had, and enjoyed playing them. They were fun games. Not quite my cup of tea, so I didn't stick around, but they were very good games that weren't ripping off consumers.

I think one possible rule of thumb on the ethics question is, are you giving value to consumers in a fair trade, or are you tricking/getting/asking them to pay for things that don't actually hold up to the promise on the cover - in videogames, that promise is entertainment. If it's a trade of dollars for entertainment, are you holding up your side of the bargain, or are consumers left with buyers remorse, or worse, addictions to things they wouldn't actually want to be addicted to if asked straight up before they first played the game.

Part of game design includes designing to create an entertaining experience (though that 'entertainment' doesn't have to be enjoyable. It can be entertainingly aggravating, entertainly saddening, and so on), and so it is not unexpected the games can become addictive and are even designed in semi-addictive ways, like World of Warcraft. I don't consider World of Warcraft, as a whole, unethical. Even games like Portal 2 or Angry Birds can be partially addictive, because part of game design is releasing entertainment in response to input, in different loops.

The question of ethics in game design usually involves discussion about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators (if someone doesn't know what that is, google it, there's been a good number of years of discussion about it now), but I don't believe extrinsic motivators are inherently unethical, and think they are a useful tool in game design.

We had a glut of me-too, lazy games in the early 80s too. That led to the games-crash that nearly killed the industry. I don't know if that kind of mass-extinction could happen again (one can hope, if it limits itself to profiteering freemium games) but I know pretty well that no one will be ironically nostalgic about it -- no one will be buying copies of Farmville dug of the digital desert on Ebay in 30 years.

Create value people want at a price they can afford. Its easier said than done, but its a recipe that rarely fails. Freemium's failing is that it obsesses over creating value first for the seller -- the questions are not how best can we satisfy the customer, but how best can we optimize profits while alienating the fewest customers. You end up with games where you have a few whales who either genuinely enjoy the game, or who's compulsive behaviors are encouraged, and everyone else who grinds along become, essentially, NPCs in the whales' world.

If I made a freemium game, I wouldn't want the graph of paying customers to look like an exponential curve, I'd optimize towards a flatter, more-linear curve. I suspect many of to day's well-regarded freemium titles reflect this kind of flatter curve, though I'm sure there are still whales and still those who never pay in.