Never heard of the facebook stalking technique or pretending to be attractive girls, sounds pretty creepy, is that not illegal?

When I first heard of the freemium model years ago I though it was an extremely dirty lowlife technique to use to try and lure money out of people, it's reminds me of payday loan companies here in the UK, or all the other financial sharks out there trying to pry money out of you in one way or another.

It's the temptation they try and lure you with, obviously, they can always say, 'it's your choice to pay', but I suppose some people with a more additive personality, gamblers mentality or need to think they are above 'everyone' else will cause various amounts of grief somewhere down the line.

It probably(maybe not that much) creates some kind of tension for the younger ones also, i.e 'my dad just bought me 10000 gems how many gems do you have etc.' in other words it can classify people into classes of salary. But then you could say that about thousands of products in the market and this has been going on for many centuries.

We live in a consumer world, so many products out there this is just another product.

As said above however, premium games will generally be much cheaper than freemium as freemium games have been designed so that there is usually not much point in say buying 100 coins for £1.99, it will advance you such a little way in the game that you really need to keep buying and buying more credits. Although it's pretty tempting to have the odd £1.99 purchase. I am actually surprised that the government haven't put some regulations on this to a degree, or maybe they have. I think Supercell were/are making something like $900 million a year.

Overall I would have to say it's more a curse than a good thing, how could it ever really be a good thing.

Honestly I'm worried that that article is more fiction than fact, and people are just buying it because it hits all the right buttons. When it got to the part about Facebook stalking it really began to reek of shit-that-didn't-happen to me.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time someone told lies to push an agenda or inflate their sense of self-importance...

Maybe I'm cynical but that doesn't surprise me the slightliest how abusive the freemium game companies can be. As a user though, if you don't pay for a game or a service, you have to expect there to be a catch, and these days it tends to be your privacy. When I put files on Google Drive, I expect Google to put their nose in my stuff to better their abilities to sell me shit that I don't need.

Where I think it goes out of bounds is when they start exploiting whales. If someone's willing to spend 5,000$ or 10,000$ on cosmetic rewards for a freemium game on iOS, I don't care how rich they are; that person needs help. Tracking vulnerable people on Facebook to extort them thousands of dollars should be a crime - and it probably already is in sane juridictions.

I don't care how rich they are; that person needs help.

Don't worry - they'll get it all back when that Nigerian Prince finally pays out... :lol:

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.

Thanks for sharing, that was quite and interesting read!

And I think it highlights something important to remember that people, especially gamers, tend to forget:

While there are certainly evil people out there, few of them are evil enough to sell their grandmom given enough cash in return.

Almost EVERY company on the planet is "evil" enough to do just that. At some point when enough employees are involved, personal responsibility diminishes and the need for a constant cashflow and the greed by investors increases, the magic happens, and what was a conglomerate of nice, sane people with only the best intentions turns into a big evil corporation killing people for profit.

Its the ugly side of capitalism, and it doesn't make you a commy to admit that. Free markets do NOT fix everything, they tend to destroy more than they fix. Not that 5 year plan communists style economy would do any better in general, but at least SOMEONE can make decisions there to perevent most of these evils (of course to get into that position, you have to be quite a d*ck )

So yes, given the opportunity, most companies would do the same. The only companies that act differently are the ones with their coffers already lined with cash. And their coffers are most probably lined with cash because a) they didn't always acted to the same high morale standarts they do today, or b) they are not acting to the same high morale standarts in reality than they claim to be.

You don't get rich by having an awesome idea and selling it to people at the lowest possible price. You get rich by having a great idea and then finding out just how much money you can ask for it before it gets too obvious.

Is just asking more than its worths for your product comparable to abusing gambling addicts inability to hold on to their money, tax fraud, stealing water and selling it for high prices or polluting third world countries? Of course not. But its the start on the road to higher revenue, which more often than not leads to questionable or outright criminal practices in the end.

Most of us work for an "evil" company. Their evil might be small, and we might not recognize it. But money is like food or water. You don't "make" it... you take it away from others, as it is a limited good. This is, IMO, the only reason why people can get wealthy... somebody has to starve for it, as new money cannot be injected into the market without creating inflation. (I recognize that this is a very limited view of economics, and I am in no way an expert... )

Free markets, increasing competition in a lot sectors and the inability of politics to step in and put the economy on a leash where needed has just taken this very basic capitalistic principle to new heights.

TL;DR:

Its not the people working in companies that are abusing the freemium model that are evil. If there even is such a thing, it is the company that is "evil"... its capitalism that is evil, politics that do not stop it, whatever.

It doesn't mean people shouldn't be feeling responsible for their companies actions... just following orders is never a good ethical defense. But on the other hand, don't throw rocks at the people working at the company when you should rather stone the company itself.

This in itself is a cheap strategy used by many companies to save their companies necks. Yes of course its only that one guy that made a mistake, no, most employees are doing a fine job. Yes of course it was just this CEOs decision, nobody but him that is responsible. Admitting that your company has deeper running problems with a good portion of its employees, because of wrong hiring practices, sloppy policies or unrealistic revenue targets, hurts MUCH more than just admitting you made a single wrong hiring decision with this one guy that just lost you 2 billions. And might actually kill the company one way or the other...

Blame the consumers. No one will touch your $0.99 game, but making it freemium and charging $100 to unlock each level somehow makes it more alluring.

Definitely reminds me of the 80's video game industry crash though.

....

I work for a midcore studio making freemium games and this post is spot on.

I do believe this will be my last job in the games industry. If I'm going to work for a bunch of greedy bastards I'm going to at least get paid for it. Or do consulting for games. The pay rate to nonsense I've heard from these guys is pretty staggering. If you can't beat them then you might as well join them.

I do believe this will be my last job in the games industry. If I'm going to work for a bunch of greedy bastards I'm going to at least get paid for it.

This is sad to hear and says to me that the drive to freemium and cheaper apps is pushing talent out of the games industry :(

I do believe this will be my last job in the games industry. If I'm going to work for a bunch of greedy bastards I'm going to at least get paid for it.

This is sad to hear and says to me that the drive to freemium and cheaper apps is pushing talent out of the games industry

Don't think this has much to do with freemium and cheaper apps. Cheaper apps might be destroying some markets for premium games, while having no effect on freemium games. And Freemium might be giving the whole industry a bad image.

It might be what woke stupid_programmer up to the realities behind his employers motives....

But the real reason for this and other problems is the constant striving for higher and higher profit. Which, to some threshold is good... for the developer, the consumer, and society. But there is a thin red line where striving for profit becomes damaging for the consumer, the employee, society, and in the end the company itself.

When shortterm profit is all the company high-ups care about, because that is all the investors nowadays care about, things look grave for customers and even graver for the employee. Longterm profitability needs MUCH more care to be taken of company-customer and company-employee relationships... your customers must be more than sheep to you, and you cannot hire and fire to your hearts content any longer.

This is going on outside of freemium games (EA anyone) and outside of the games industry... Its just that with fremium game companies, it starts to become more obvious, similar to a casino or gambling machine company... you no longer can hide behind the thin veil of "just wanting to produce the best expierience for the customer" when you design the whole expierience around frustrating said customer into spending.

But the intent is the same with many companies around the world... planned obsolence, crop that needs to be treated with the chemicals from the same company, splitting a game up into DLCs that add up to twice the price of a full game. All to some extent made to make additional bucks off the stupid, the desperate, and the psychological weak.

I can only hope that people start to vote with their wallets, and start to look beyond shiny graphics and accessible gameplay. And that employees in the game development sector start organizing themselves the way employees in more traditional industries did.... altough looking at the IT Sector and the significant lack of such a movement, I have my doubts.