Hi all,

I have just finished reading this article about the lengths freemium producers and their publishers will go to extract data from their userbase.

I was rather disturbed, although not at all surprised, to find out they employed such tactics as befriending whales on facebook pretending to be attractive girls, lurking in the background to find out tastes and behaviour profiles so they could adjust the games IAP to appeal specifically to that whale.

I was also a bit concerned by the fact that they claim to know your income level, where you work, when you go to work, and presumably other places you go and when you go there too. This extends far beyond play patterns and is of course as we all know shared with advertising networks.

Have these games gone a step too far? Something not mentioned in the article, which states that we could prevent this by buying more premium (rather than freemium) content, is that certain apps still market all your data even though you bought the premium copy. For example "Talking Ben The Dog" by outfit 7, who have no qualms about continually marketing and pushing ads in the face of premium purchasers, treating them as whales. (Edit: It now seems theyve gone a step further, turning the paid app into a free app, reinstalling everyones paid apps as free with ads, with no way to get rid of the ads and IAP. Ugh, i'm glad i uninstalled that muck years ago)

What are your own thoughts on these practices?

I too think its disgusting and disturbing, and some companies are worse then others.

Makes me sometimes hesitate to even tell someone I work with mobile games, because everyone associate them with that crap.

Transforming a premium app into a freemium app without reimbursing previous premium is 100% dick move, and other companies have gotten quite a lot of flack for it.

You can just hope they f*k up their own brand enough that they go away.

The prevalence of freemium also messes with consumers minds, making them think that premium games are expensive (when most of the time it is the opposite)

Hopefully, more and more consumers will become aware of the advantages of buying premium games, and non-consumeable content, and we can have a revival of that business model.

To be clear, I'm talking about the infinite sale of digital "consumables" in freemium games.

I think it is totally fine to sell extra content, as long as this content is reasonably priced.

Its good for both the company and the consumer.

I say you as a customer and gamer hold the power here. Don't like to be treated as content in the game for the whales pleasure if you don't pay, or a whale to be harpooned if you pay? Just evade ALL freemium games. Pay for what you play. And if these devs still try to stalk you or push ads in your face, wipe their game off the face of your harddisk, and never buy any of their junk again... ever.

Seems like many people today start to forget something that is as true as it was many decades ago: there is no free lunch.

If you get something offered for free, start to ask questions. There is a chance that you do get a very good deal, either because the guy giving you free stuff gives it to you because he is just generous / doesn't need the stuff anymore / just wants to raise awarness for this thing.... but chances are better that there is a hidden cost, be it your data, you owning the guy something from now on, or worse...

If you see a for-profit company handing out free stuff, you can scratch many things off the list. They might do it to advertise (samples, demoes, whatever), but if you do get the full version outside of a competition or similar advertising related event, look for hidden costs.

If you do not want to pay the hidden cost, refuse the "free" stuff. For many people, handing out there data has no big impact. fake or spam E-Mail adresses can be created in minutes, fake names and adresses are still not so easy to detect. If you need to give the correct information, of course you need to prepare for the spam.

Which brings us to the second bit of lacking common sense: never hand out your real e-mail adress, facebook or Goggle+ id. Create fakes if you need to, or avoid using stuff that forces you to use your facebook login.

I have a hard time understanding how important facebook has become for some people, but I have a harder time understanding how a) you can accept frind requests from complete strangers that just happen to have a nice looking profile picture (there is Tinder for that guys ), and b) how playing "Newest Awesome Mobile Fad 2.0" could be so important that you would gladly hand over your facebook login and with it all your data without a second thought.

Personally, I found 2 things to work pretty well for me:

1) If something is freemium and I like it (Which means a good game and low spam-level on the e-mail I provided), I will pay for some premium stuff. After all I am using a product that is to my liking, and I would like the developer to continue providing the product for me... hence I regularly "donate" something over the course of me playing the game.

Of course that doesn't stop the dev from getting greedy.... but if enough people act that way, at least the dev doesn't NEED to resort to desperate means to generate an income.

On the other hand it means I will never touch anything I see from the start I do not like, I will not play games from notorious spammers and wrongdoers, and everything that I didn't like will be wiped from my disk quickly.

And I have my 2 spam mail accounts... I do not care how much spam I get there, I will rarely check them. Of course I avoid logging in with my facebook account.

2) If I do not agree with a devs practices, I will never ever buy anything from the dev anymore, or any dev linked to it if it is a publisher.

That is why EA games will never ever receive any cash anymore from me, and any dev that uses EA as publisher (or is an "EA Puppet") will meet the same fate. Means I miss out on good games I wanted to play like Mirrors Edge, but on the other hand I will never, ever have to deal with EA Origin anymore. The customer support of that thing is like... non-existant. If you have a problem, you are f*cked.

And as an added bonus, I do not support one of the most evil companies on earth... right after Monsanto and Glencore. That might be a pretty subjective opinion... but having such an opinion is my right as a customer

TL;DR:

While I don't support this practice and think it is disgusting, it is what happens when capitalism is given free reign.

And on the other hand, the customer still hold tremendous power in preventing such practices from happening to HIM. Using common sense is not "trending" at the moment, but it would really help in this case.

Transforming a premium app into a freemium app without reimbursing previous premium is 100% dick move

When you say "dick move" you surely mean "totally illegal"? I'm surprised a company could even do that without facing a couple of thousand lawsuits

claim to know your income level, where you work, when you go to work, and presumably other places you go and when you go there too

.

That information can be bought from one of dozens of data brokers that exist. Most of the time it is crap skimmed off of social media sites, phone registries, and government records.

Transforming a premium app into a freemium app without reimbursing previous premium is 100% dick move

When you say "dick move" you surely mean "totally illegal"? I'm surprised a company could even do that without facing a couple of thousand lawsuits

I hope you are right.

Maybe some talented lawyer should set up a class action lawsuit.

Individual consumers are probably not likely to sue unless they have had big losses or personal injury.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the laws are about as murky here as they seem to be in all other places involving software and digital stuff...

What exactly would be illegal about changing the price on a product for future customers? Of course if you split your 10 chapter game into 1 free level and 9 paid DLC, and then blocked off access to those 9 to customers who had bought the whole game, then you would have issues. But if you check terms and conditions they normally include lines about effectively changing features, otherwise developers could never patch or update their software.

I forget which company it was, but years ago there was apparently a bug in their Point of Sale software that miscalculated tax, and businesses were rather upset when later versions of the software calculated it 'wrong', that is to say the bug was fixed and the values were correct.

But to me, I just find that the "freemium" and dlc push is the industry effectively pissing in its own waterhole. Sure, the water levels are rising, but eventually things are probably going to go badly. I now spend a fraction on games compared to what I did five or ten years ago, and the industry as a whole is doing its best to drive me away. (I've spent twenty or thirty times as much buying camera gear in the last five years as I have on games.) Too many games have burned me for one reason or another. I would happily pay $5-15 for a solid mobile game, but I hate being nickel and dimed to death or playing pay to win. And given how many junk games are flooding the market, I'm simply loosing interest as a whole.

And it isn't just small startups producing shovelware tutorial rips. I've yet to see a mobile game from a major studio that isn't effectively a waiting simulator you can buy your way through. (And I've completely sworn off Ubisoft PC games, because the last few games of theirs I've bought I've never actually gotten to play more than a few minutes of due to their app specific patching method. When whenever I have a bit of time to play the damn things, most of that time is taken up by downloading the internal patch which wasn't included in the auto applied Steam patch, or while I'm waiting for said internal patch to download I'll have gotten distracted by something else and moved on.)

What exactly would be illegal about changing the price on a product for future customers?

That isnt illegal, what is a problem is that google play offers to automatically update apps. If they've replaced the premium app (with everything unlocked) with a freemium app that requires IAP, then the minute you upgrade you lose all access to what youve paid for already. It's like they expect you to pay again...

What exactly would be illegal about changing the price on a product for future customers?

That is not the same, though.

Imagine you buy a product (say, a book for your portable e-book reader) from a book dealer (say, a big US American one), and a week later they have issues with the copyright owners and/or publishers and whatever, and they delete the book from your device without warning you. Obviously, they'll explain to you why they had to do this, and you get your money back.

Now, in this case, you connect to the internet and suddenly the product that you paid money for goes "poof" (surprise, sucker!) and you get a vastly inferior product which displays ads. Which is exactly what you paid money for to avoid in the first place, and they are keeping that money.

To me, this sounds like a clear breach of contract.

Of course Microsoft is doing a similar thing with the telemetry updates to Windows 7, and nobody seems to be sueing them.

So I guess there must be a legal trick how you can get away with it. Or maybe it's just that you have to be impertinent enough and get away with it. But that didn't work so well for Volkswagen, it seems.

The legal 'trick' is that you reserve the right to change and modify the software. As long as the software is still similar and contains the core features of what was initially paid for, then there isn't much grounds for a lawsuit. Technically most ToS also reserve the right to outright terminate things at any time.