(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

every once in a while I give mobile games another chance and then spend a while playing some game with a pacing deliberately designed to annoy people into spending real money for in-game benefits, find the pacing annoying, and then stop playing because like hell I'm gonna spend this much money on this bullshit (today was the latest instance of that cycle)

and one thing worth pointing out is that: mobile games with premium currency don't, in my experience, practice price discrimination. Steam does. If I buy a game from Steam, I do not pay the same amount an American does, which is good for me because the peso keeps dropping relative to the dollar and I could not justify the expenditure otherwise. This means that mobile games keep facing me with the choice of 'would you like to make this game less annoying for a limited time, for an amount of money you could spend buying several complete games that are not designed to frustrate you?' and I keep saying 'y'know what, no'

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Urgh, I'll admit I can't say I'm a fan of steams currency-conversion thingy, since they just implemented it over here and there are *a lot* of games which haven't set a price in AUD, which means we *can't buy them*.

Mobile games, well, yes. I'll admit I haven't played them in a good long time; I can read on my phone, and that's quite good enough. If there were some which came recommended, I guess?

(Apparently Cultist Simulator got a mobile port, but I don't know how well that'll work)

[sigmaleph]

oh damn, that's bad.

hmm. i could never really get into cultist simulator. I was really excited for it, even.

[brin_bellway]

I often find I enjoy the challenge of playing a microtransaction game without ever spending real money on it, but I suspect the games I've played were not as highly optimised. (I've certainly heard stories.)

[sigmaleph]

there are better and worse offenders, certainly. with some of them i have fun for a while.

[contrarianarchon]

Huh. What games make that an interesting challenge?

[brin_bellway]

I wrote a bunch of stuff here on my experience with microtransactions, but on reflection I think a lot of it isn't directly relevant to the question. I've posted the original infodump on my blog instead.

Basically, there's more strategy to deciding how to spend the premium currency obtained through in-game methods if that's all you get. So there needs to be *some* way of obtaining premium currency through in-game methods, and there needs to be stuff you can do at any given time so you're not just stuck waiting for everything to complete if you can't pay to finish it sooner (so, not Avengers Academy).