Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play

These patterns do really take away the feeling of joy, fun and sense of accomplishment of playing games and replace them with pain, stress, fear and probably, every negative feeling you might think of. It's sad to witness the tragic shift from "pay to play" to "pay to win". You might be interested to watch this video entitled Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play: ▶ this video , which has been referenced by many YouTube analysis, and for good reason. Also, this paper was a nice read for me: Predatory monetization schemes in video games and internet gaming disorder (link)

> These types of purchases are common in mobile game revenue models where the base game is ‘free-to- play’, but the player is encouraged to spend money to make unimpeded progress in the game I miss the old 90's days at the arcade where we were stacked horizontally in a queue waiting for our turn, holding coins in our hands. We've been forced to trade the "pay to play" purity of skill and community for the predatory economics of "pay to win." This evolution is well-explained in this video (▶ this video), entitled "Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetizing mobile game players with free-to-play." which has been cited in countless YouTube analyses, and for good reason. It perfectly captures the sad reality of modern gaming culture and how deeply monetization has replaced passion.

I’m not too familiar with gacha games, so I was intrigued. I thought the criticism of EA’s former CEO was funny. But the rest of the article felt like a lot of term-dropping and examples that aren't linked together into a cohesive theory, so I’m kind of disappointed. I think this industry talk about monetization (▶ this video) and Tynan Sylvester’s book “Designing Games” were a lot more informative. For example, the blog post says this but then doesn't really elaborate on what any of the clauses mean ("repeatable design levers", "without compromising the core gameplay experience"): > A healthy long-term monetization system should therefore have repeatable design levers that can be used to reliably generate demand without compromising the core gameplay experience. In contrast "Designing Games" has a whole section on fixed/variable reward schedules, e.g. (pg. 210): > We can avoid such shelf moments by superimposing several fixed ratio schedules. Consider what happens when the player can get a dollar for every 10th chest, a diamond for every 10th rock mined, and an arrow for every 10th goblin killed. ... The player shifts focus back and forth between activities, never missing a dopamine-driven beat. I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned “stamina” mechanics as something that makes these game addictive. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently you’re limited to perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some additional stamina/actions, but this creates FOMO if you don’t log in every day.