The Pay To Play and Pay To Win iOS Games

The Pay To Play and Pay To Win iOS Games

Byrichard

I like casual gaming. I like to play games on the iPhone when commuting or waiting for something to happen. The problem is that casual gaming is about seeing adverts at the end of every puzzle or challenge. For every game of solitaire, every game of Woodoku and more games, you see adverts. 


The problem with these adverts is that they’re awful, and they’re for games that are all paid for by adverts rather than by people who enjoy the games enough, to actually pay for the game. 


Clash of Clans Etc.


I played Clash of Clans and Hay Day for what could be years, until finally I reached a level where the game became unplayable. Everything takes hours to do, unless you pay to play, but if you pay to win you end up in a never ending cycle that could cost thousands of francs, for nothing.


Hay Day and Clash of Clans are games that you can play, without spending any money, and without seeing ads, if you choose not to. 


The Watch Ads to Play Games


Tap Away, Woodoku, Stormshot, Solitaire and others require you to watch adverts after every game, whether you win or lose. They show adverts to other crappy games that also require you to watch crappy adverts for other crappy games in the same series and game style. If they spent time and money on making good, engaging games, they could ask those playing their games to pay for an ad free experience. 


The games are designed to give you just enough reward to play, watch an advert, play watch an advert, play watch an advert. With games like woodoku it feels as if they are deliberately making you lose, to watch adverts. The game feels dishonest, especially since it uses the tetris shapes, without allowing you to flip the shapes to flip the appropriate gaps. 


There is a reason for such crappy games requiring us to pay, or to watch adverts. Cloud services. The game interacts with cloud services. Cloud services cost money, so we are paying for a crappy game, via crappy adverts, when, if the game was available offline, there would be no need for such high server costs in the first place. 


It is a shame that so many iOS games are so awful. It’s a shame that they don’t produce high value games that we can play, and pay for. 


Diminishing Returns


There was a time when every search you did with Ecosia was enough to plant a tree, but as more people used their search engine, so it began to cost more and more requests, to plant a single tree. That’s because the more ads we see, the less value our seeing an ad has. With the “watch ads to play games” model we’re watching ads, but our time is being wasted, and the revenue that is generated from us seeing a single ad is dropping. They are devaluing ads, by forcing us to see so many.  If we play five games we might see five or more ads.  We see ads for games with the same design flaw. 


And Finally


What really bothers me is that the games feel as if they were designed to show people adverts, rather than to provide people with a good gaming experience. It feels as if the game makers are simply producing several dozen games, and attempting to hook people, to watch the maximum number of ads. 

Mobile Phone Games

Mobile Phone Games

Byrichard

Our mobile phones are almost always near us, or on us. The only time we don’t have our phone with us is when we’re scuba diving, driving, unless we count Waze as a game. When I am home alone I usually don’t play mobile phone games because I’m distracted by other things. 


One of the flaws with plenty of games today is that they are pay to win, or pay to play. I don’t like this model. I also don’t like games that require you to follow instructions, rather than play and experiment. I want to play, not follow instructions. 


Games I Still Play


Fitness App Games


Garmin, Strava, Pacer and other apps do provide us with gaming when we walk, run, cycle or more. They count our steps, our distance, our climbing and more. I am currently walking the Appalachian Trail via Garmin, walking the Coffee trail on Pacer and more. I am also competing for step counts with others. Some games require you to be physically active to progress. Others require you to sit still and stare at a phone.


Ingress


Ingress is a game that I played for a while. I travelled to Paris, to Florence, to Fribourg and other places specifically to play the game with other people. It was a great way to meet unenergetic geeks and to explore geographic space. It’s similar to geocaching, but with virtual portals that are monuments, bridges and more. That data was then used for Pokemon Go and other games. 


Ingress requires a lot of walking, or driving. I found that it is quite fun to play while cycling. You can get to distant portals more quickly than walking, but without the carbon footprint of using the car, which is another reason I slowed down the playing. 


The key factor that got me to play far less is time. From a certain level upwards, especially if you live in the countryside it goes from taking days or weeks to level up, to months. If you live in town then it’s easy to make progress, but if you’re in a rural setting then you get stuck on a level for months or years, as I have. 


TrainStation2


At first I didn’t like TrainStation2 because I expect to play a game for the time that I am free for. I don’t like to wait for hours in between actions. You can speed up the game by paying to win, but the flaw in this approach is that you can spend thousands and never be satisfied. That’s how Clash of Clans made a fortune. 


What I like about this is that if you want you can play for 30 seconds, once an hour or less, so you don’t accidentally lose hours a day on the game. 


Clash of Clans


Clash of Clans is another game that I played with passion for years, but eventually stopped playing. The problem with these games is that they are good, when you have a few minutes free at regular intervals, for example when you’re commuting, or stuck in an office waiting for a file to render, or some other task. If you have no moments of waiting then these games are less relevant. 


Hay Day


I have played Hay Day for years but on and off. I used to play a lot but eventually it became more complex and took more time to achieve anything so I stopped playing. 


Asphalt 8


Asphalt 8 is a game that I played for hours at a time for weeks or even months. I logged plenty of hours in the game and it expanded as I progressed. Eventually I played tiles, but it’s still a great game. Cars are intuitive to control and with time and practice you do make progress. 


Rise of Kingdoms


Rise of Kingdoms is an acceptable game that you can play throughout the day when you have some free time. It is a game that requires an investment of weeks or months to progress and although they encourage you to pay to speed things up you don’t need to. 


Games I don’t play anymore


Boom Beach and Clash Royale


I installed it, played a few times, but never engaged fully. 


Pokemon Go


This game is crap. It’s built off of Ingress, but re-skinned for a different set of users. It’s crap because when you throw poke balls it fails more often than succeeds, so you end up frustrated. Worse than that, it encourages you to spend money because the code was written in a flawed manner. 


Cooking Madness


I started by really enjoying this game, until I got to a certain level, and then the game stopped being fun. It stopped being fun because levels require you to use diamonds to get extra time, or to get cooking aids. This wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the fact that after a certain amount of playing those are earned by completing levels, or paying. They say that games are pay to win. This one becomes pay to play. At one point you get blocked and you can no longer progress, without spending 3 CHF, more than once. 


It’s when I saw that I had to pay more than once that I removed the game. I come from the time when we payed to own, not to play. 


Conclusion


I like mobile phone games that can be played in short bursts. I don’t like mobile phone games that are pay to win. I play games when I am in between two activities, rather than all the time. I can go for months without playing much. It depends on how free I am to get on with things. I expect that I will forget about mobile phones games now, for a while.

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Ingress First Saturday

Byrichard

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Saturday I went to Lausanne to play Ingress with over 100 individuals. The purpose of this meetup was to level up lower level players. I would have preferred a more strategic game as we were so many players. I need to find people who want to play strategically.

Ingress is a virtual game played in the physical world where the more of a walker you are the more you will achieve. Every statue and monument in a city becomes a portal. Link two or more portals and you create fields within a fence. You can find more information on youtube.

First Saturday in Lausanne

Byrichard

First Saturday in Lausanne

Now that we are between the via ferrata season and the snowboarding and scuba diving season a distraction is provided by gamers who like to use the physical world and mobile phones.
Dear Ingress agents of Lausanne and elsewhere,

The first Saturday of December (06/12/14), our city will participate in a special Niantic event named #IngressFS (https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts/7oVmNtssWGu). Meetings, fun and competition will be there !

Schedule of the day:

10:00 AM : Cross-Faction Coffee / Croissants at Qwerz bar. Meeting between the players, advices and help to the new players, sharing experiences and explanations for the rest of the day.

12:00 AM : Start of the Level-Up Bootcamp event. AP of players will be registered and the teams will be formed (experienced players with new agents). Note that the Visur Game Mechanic system will reward most handsomely low levels agents.

2:00 PM – ? : End of the Level-Up Bootcamp event. Back at the meeting point (Qwertz bar), the AP gained will be recorded and prizes will be given.

Then : beers, beergress & other activities / surprises for you.
For those who also want to eat together at the evening, we created a separate event which you need to register if you want to come : https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/ccbaf6qv7rjgndtoo0b7upbu5mo

Lausanne was selected by Niantic as the main city for the event #IngressFS December 6, so we should receive kits First Saturday (IFSK-100) you distribute: https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts / Ai7yxoCpq2L ! Agents of all levels are encouraged to participate to have a good day between Ingress players.

Please fill the following form for the organization of the levelup (we will contact the low levels some days before the event to know their new level) : http://goo.gl/forms/CNSz5ZZVMT

Additionals informations concerning the organization will be provided here. Thank you to register if you would like to participate, so that we could have the best organization possible.

Asphalt 6 on Macbook air

Byrichard

I installed Asphalt 6 on the macbook air and the game is easily playable.

I like this game on the iphone 3GS and Iphone 4 and have spent many hours playing on both mobile devices. Now that it is finally available on laptop/netbooks like the Macbook Air there’s another platform on which to have fun on.

One of the nice features is the larger screens, the ease of control and the extra information you can absorb from such a large screen. Yes 11 inches is a small screen compared to a 27inch imac but do you sit at the coffee table in the lounge with your iMac?

There’s also the small matter of price. It’s only 7CHF. If you play 7hrs then it’s worth the money, without a doubt.

as a side thought you could go to the Geneva motorshow and play it whilst sitting in the real thing ;-).

zynga and maxis

Byrichard

Zynga and Maxis are from very different computer gamer times. Maxis came at a time when the game was the source of entertainment. You would build a farm, worry about pests and locusts, about fertilizing the fields and having enough income to build the next series of crop. Zynga on the other hand is a game that teaches you to behave like a machine rather than a human, where repetitive actions are the standard.

Simfarm, among other games was one of those games that you could play for weeks at a time. You would select a difficulty level and according to that difficulty level you would need to use knowledge you acquired through experience. If you put cows next to fields without a fence they would walk through and eat the crop. If you didn’t save enough money then if a crop failed your farm was toast.

With Zynga you can put pigs with crops, animals in barns and more. There is no intellectual aspect to this game unless you’re a garden designer. You plant the fields, you wait a while and then you harvest. This is great if life doesn’t get in the way. How many of you know what you will be doing in two hours, 8 hours or sixteen hours? i kind of do, but my life will not center around such a simple game.

What I liked about simfarm is that it was not mechanical. There was an aspect of game strategy. By obeying certain principles you could progress quite nicely in the game. Zynga has two ways for progression. The first is patience and the second is money. If you pay money then you can have everything immediately. If you spam your friends and they participate then you are rewarded. Do you really want to have to spam your friends to progress in a game? I don’t.

I don’t like this trend, that you encourage people to spend money for a mechanical rather than intellectual game and I think that game makers should take this into consideration. If Civilization V came to facebook then I would play it. I would pay an upfront payment and expect to have the full game.

And this reminds me of a recent documentary on the BBC called Coast. Do you, as a gamer, as a facebook user want games that are teaching you a different form of managment where right decisions bring profit or do you want penny arcade style games that require that mechanical put the coin in the slot type response?

I would like to leave you with an interesting TED talk to help you think about this topic. I watched it a week ago but it’s relevant to the question of time spent gaming and what we should expect to get out of it.