The Pay To Play and Pay To Win iOS Games

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.