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"Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

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Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#201

Post by Karunamon »

smsm42 wrote: post #175
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Need' is tricky to define in this case. Many 'freemium' games are very different experiences based on whether or not you pay via additional IAP. From what I gather, not having actually played it, Dungeon Keeper is about the most extreme example of this. It sounds like you really do need to pay in order to play the actual game , as opposed to playing something which many would describe as not really being the game .

Do you really want EU bureaucrats examining each game and deciding how playable it is with or without certain item? If the game is that bad - uninstall it, write one-star review for it and be done with it.

This is what worries me. I absolutely do not want the government involved in, of all things, classifying the genre of a video game.

Sure we all know the type of game this is targeted at. The time-sink freemium farmville clone that makes it just a little too easy to buy those gems/coins/cash/whatever that makes the timer tick down faster.

What if the IAP in my game is just to remove ads? What if it's solely cosmetic?

Governments do not have the best track record when it comes to comprehension of nuance and basic reality.

I'd like to think that a person is smart enough to tell when their OS pops up the payment dialog that they are under no obligation to click "yes".

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#202

Post by yuubi »

pja wrote: post #104
diziet wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that should be pretty simple to test. Do you have any more details?

I believe that it's not so much that it specifically gets hard after you've paid (although that's a neat dark pattern that I wouldn't put past some of the current crop of App game developers frankly!) but rather that after a certain point it simply gets too hard to progress without paying. So the developers draw you in with what appears to be a skill game that you can enjoy playing, and then after they've got you com…

> I can't remember where the article is that I read about all this though.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949... ?

> Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush Saga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a “river” that costs a very small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A player may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjoyable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guarantee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what is on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payment is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of the river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players.

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#203

Post by Nursie »

paulhauggis wrote: post #131
ithkuil wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. There is always a point where everyone of us starts being not sophisticated. Each time somebody tells me that we shouldn't protect stupid people, I remember not feeling very smart in front of pages of legalese in insurance and banking contracts. I keep thinking, yes they are probably going to screw me, but somebody is working to prevent them from screwing me too overtly.

I guess I didn't realize the average person was that stupid. I play games with in-app purchases. It's pretty easy just not to pay for them. If the public is this bad with something as simple as in-app purchases, why should we ever legalize drugs? This is a serious question.

People are that dumb. Even smart people.

The drug question is difficult precisely because the balance kf protection and rights is complicated by the fact that prohibition creates massive problems of its own.

This is why there is no simple fix that makes all the harm go away and we should focus on trying to mitigate as much as possible. To me it seems that legalisation and regulation woukd help, but we'll always need services to pick up the people who get into trouble with it.

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#204

Post by dools »

I've said it before and I'll say it again: in-app purchases are the premium SMS scam of the '10s.

Companies making a killing on IAP these days are no different from Jamster mobile club and its kin.

Regulations will catch up soon enough but no doubt by then some other avenue for bilking kids out of their cash will have presented itself by then.

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#205

Post by watwut »

Karunamon wrote: post #201
smsm42 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want EU bureaucrats examining each game and deciding how playable it is with or without certain item? If the game is that bad - uninstall it, write one-star review for it and be done with it.

This is what worries me. I absolutely do not want the government involved in, of all things, classifying the genre of a video game. Sure we all know the type of game this is targeted at. The time-sink freemium farmville clone that makes it just a little too easy to buy those gems/coins/cash/whatever that makes the timer tick down faster. What if the IAP in my game is just to remove ads? What if it's solely cosmetic?…

First, the whole document concerns itself with what is called "free". If you do not label your game as free and do not market your game for children, then you are out of document scope. Do what you want.

More nuanced, according to their first position, you should be able to market game with removable ads as free (unless they cover whole screen or make game unplayable). You would be able call the game free with cosmetic in app purchases too, but you probably would have to make it clear to customer prior downloading eg. "you have to use default avatar unless you pay 1$" somewhere in description.

You could even lock content unless money are paid and still call it free, as long as customer was clearly told what parts are available and what parts are not available. (Hard to understand one liner in the middle of 20 pages long terms of services does not count).

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#206

Post by pbhjpbhj »

smsm42 wrote: post #175
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Need' is tricky to define in this case. Many 'freemium' games are very different experiences based on whether or not you pay via additional IAP. From what I gather, not having actually played it, Dungeon Keeper is about the most extreme example of this. It sounds like you really do need to pay in order to play the actual game , as opposed to playing something which many would describe as not really being the game .

Do you really want EU bureaucrats examining each game and deciding how playable it is with or without certain item? If the game is that bad - uninstall it, write one-star review for it and be done with it.

>Do you really want EU bureaucrats examining each game and deciding how playable it is with or without certain item? //

No. If a player has to at any time in the game spend in order to unlock, extend or access an area or feature then the game is not "free to play" it's "maybe free to play".

It's deceptive to label it as free.

To me this is a natural supplement to the EU unfair business practices legislation.

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#207

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ghshephard wrote: post #63
mikhailt wrote: post #4

This is one of the areas where I wish EU would punish Apple for. Their free app of the week is often so-called free games but they almost always have in-app purchases that's required to take full advantage of the game.

Are Candy Crush and PvZ 2 Free? I've been playing them for 4+ months and haven't spent a dime on them. Other than the bandwidth to download them, I would certainly consider them free.

You can play them for free, but advertising them as "free to play" is deceptive as that implies that you get equal access to the whole game without expense.

"Can be played for free" is not deceptive but doesn't push the right buttons to manipulate people in to engaging before you hit them up for cash; they can see it coming and so many won't play.

Mandating better information for consumers seems unlikely to be wrong in almost all cases. [A counterexample would be if it's prohibitively expensive for companies generally to give the information].

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#208

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Joeri wrote: post #153
joesb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I have lots of friends who played to the last level of Candy Crush without buying any IAP. The game is not impossible to beat without IAP.

How many hours does it take to reach the last level? Doesn't that game have over 600 levels? At 10 minutes average per level we're talking about 100+ hours, which is several weeks of full-time occupation. If you have lots of friends who did that, we're talking about collectively months of FTE. If those had been paid hours, how much money would they have earned in that time? I'm not going anywhere with this, just wond…

There's a perl script that will talk to the server and complete the game ...

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#209

Post by pbhjpbhj »

microtonal wrote: post #28
jasonlotito wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really want the government getting involved here? I mean, what's next? Attacking SaaS and PaaS for their "free" tiers that really don't provide you with much and you have to actually pay to actually get some real use out of it? Take some responsibility and stop asking the government to be your nanny.

This is clearly a difference between the US and the EU. Most EU citizens (including me) think it is fine to regulate the market, e.g. if it is misleading. Such games are often misleading, since they are not really free. The 'Free' label is just used because people will impulse-install a free application more quickly than a paid application and in the end an addicted gamer will probably spend more through in-app purch…

App stores should provide a graph showing expenditure marking the [expected] average and SD per fixed time division (month say), that would be one of the least deceptive and least customer hostile ways to present IAP apps.

Examples:

* Game costs average $1 per month, SD 20¢; OK cool.

* Game is "free" costs average of $20 per month, SD $5.

* Game is free. Average $0 per month.

* Game is 99¢ fixed. Average $0 additional per month.

Even better they could give a playing time [weighted average] too. Then you could compare:

* Game is "free" costs average of $20 per month, SD $5; $1 per hour of play.

* Game costs average $1 per month, SD 20¢; $2 per hour of play.

Seems about as likely as getting the supermarkets to clearly display the cost per kg of all food items.

Re: "Free-to-play" misleading advertising in Europe

#210

Post by jkrems »

diziet wrote: post #13
jkrems wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody was saying that games should be free or that iAPs are about to be illegal. But labeling something "free" that isn't really "free" is misleading customers. Games shouldn't be free since games aren't free to produce. But it's a reasonable expectation that games that are not free are not labeled as "free".

Are apps without iAPs but with ads to be considered 'free'?

"Free" as opposed to "paid" refers to one specific resource (money) being paid by the user to the developer. So yes, they are free in that regard. Otherwise you could start to argue that loading screens make an app non-free because they cost you time.
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