The whole freemium model itself is not a problem at all, the problem is the developers that abuse it which appears to be most of them. You only need to look at Valve with Dota2 and also their popular hat simulator know as TF2 to see freemium done right. You never have to spend any cash in these games and it does not effect you experience at all.

What I hate is freemium games where they are pay to win or that you have to pay or wait hours/days before you can play again, this is where the problem starts and is driven by greed.

pay or wait hours/days before you can play again

... you're out of posts. Please wait 4 hours before posting again, or use 100 GDCoin. You can buy 100 GDCoin for $5. :lol:

I hear more and more people call for premium games, also in mobile phones.

Specially parents buying games for their kids are starting to ask for games without hidden fees.

I love one gamers reaction: "Oh no, its free. I can't afford another free game"

I don't think we will ever get rid of the freemium plague completely, but I do think it will become easier to release premium games for phones.

These guys burn through their customers, and those who aren't turned off from games completely, will look for fairer deals.

pay or wait hours/days before you can play again

Which is not a problem per se, I'd say.

It's fair that you can play instantly if you pay (subscription or credits, or whatever) since running a game costs money, too (not to mention developing it). If you don't wish to pay, it's only fair that the ones who do come first.

The thing that isn't OK is calling it "free". Calling something "free" when it very obviously isn't (and really can't be) is deceptive.

They're both smart marketing and a curse. I doubt that they'll ever go away, at least as long as the mobile phone platform remains. My problem with freemium games is that most of the non-puzzle ones I've encountered have sucked pretty badly. A lot of them probably wouldn't have made it onto Newgrounds 15 years ago. I hope that the market segments itself enough that I don't have to get freemium and freemium-esque games pushed to me in app stores all the time.

As is so often the case, South Park really nailed the whole idea.

I don't think it's just limited to games, but it does seem most prevalent there. And yes, super evil, at least to the extent to which it's taken. I don't think there's anything from with doing some demographics, refining your product to make it more enjoyable and therefore more likely to generate income, but there's a line that definitely been crossed in many cases.

Freemium model itself isn't evil as stated, it becomes evil when a company (Zynga) becomes actually running a giant metrics machine and presenting you a game as well as tip of iceberg. Pity these model has quite room for exploitation because of being targeted at "casual gamers".

A mechanic isn't "evil" in itself. It's how it's used that makes it potentially immoral.

League of Legends is free-to-play, makes good money, and yet can be played just fine for free with no gameplay disadvantage.

As is so often the case, South Park really nailed the whole idea.

Speaking of South Park, I really wish they had further developed their Stick of Truth game. I would actually happily buy an expansion to that. Especially if they included a way to remap the keys so it was more playable on a PC.

Also loved the way they lampshaded their own game in several episodes.

At this point, my time is more valuable than my money, as far as games go, and I have a backlog of literally hundreds of Humble bundle and Steam games competing for time with my stack of unread books, exercise, programming projects, getting around to writing for my blog, hanging out with my dog, work etc. Freemium games aren't compelling enough to get a slice of that scarce resource, at any price.

I'm an engineer that works on freemium mobile games at one of the very large companies.

We have pay-to-win. This actually doesn't bother me because I can't empathize with the players of this genre. I would never play this kind of game and I have no idea how the people who play it think or why they pay. They're crazy. Maybe they have fun giving us money. I don't even know. Those players would probably think I'm crazy for paying $60 up-front to play a game where you can shout at dragons.

We have ridiculous amounts of stats tracking and third party metrics libraries eating up our download, RAM, and bandwidth budgets. These piss me off because these libraries are major technical shit-fests with closed source that we can't fix. The central tech guys constantly force new libraries on us without having any idea how much of a bitch it is to integrate their shitty libraries written by interns who SOMEHOW got through code reviews. (Maybe another intern did the code review? I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED!)

We have sharks-smelling-blood levels of frenzied "must add monetization features" mentality in our product teams. These are the guys coming up with features, NOT our designers. Our designers were reduced to glorified data entry grunts because their feature proposals are shot down since they want to make something fun, not provide revenue estimates. The designers who DO come up with money-making ideas are "promoted" to product managers and have the fun drained out of them by competition with their peers. Their smile and optimism: Gone. These guys are the guys I feel the most sorry for because their jobs are much, much worse than mine.

We don't have Facebook stalking... that I know of. If we do, I wouldn't be surprised, but I haven't personally been told to implement a change for a specific user yet. I *have* been told to fix a bug specifially because a paying customer complained, though. We *have* flown our top paying players in to visit the studio and take pictures and chat. I haven't heard of anyone drugging them and scanning their brain structure with an fMRI to find out what makes them tick yet, but that wouldn't surprise me either.

But... it pays the bills. I doubt I could find a different job that ISN'T one kind of nightmare or another. Everyone is either too driven by greed, or too ignorant of how much it costs to make a game that can break even AND is fun (it boggles my mind that games which are not fun can be successful!). Non-game development is filled with ridiculously over-engineered nonsense, written in terrible languages like Javascript, with layers upon layers of "brilliant" support libraries and hacks to make up for its fundamental inability to be used for large scale software development. Nobody wants to use C# or Java because those were written by big scary corporations who will stab you in the back the moment you become invested in their software - so instead, we should invest in shitty open source technologies written by people who think that command prompts are the peak of productivity?

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.