

Ask HN: Did pay-to-play games really ruin the gaming industry? - PublicEnemy111

My question is why are the &quot;exploitation&quot; techniques employed by TCG of the past widely accepted while mobile games, such as clash of clans, cause an uproar in the community and have a bad rap? The general idea I get from reading articles about pay-to-play games is that they are the first to use this evil business model, but this is simply not true. Why has clash of clans angered the community to a near boycott while TCG remain as a nostalgic reminder of our younger years?
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wmil
Because the most common format isn't really pay to win, it's pay to avoid
grinding.

Gamers have weird psychological issues with grinding in games.

Some of them like the delayed rewards from grinding and feel that people who
don't are lazy and lack a work ethic. This group finds paying to avoid
grinding immoral.

The other major group hates grinding in games. These people see the pay to
avoid grinding option as the developer asking for money to not be an asshole.
Mid game. So they aren't thrilled about it either.

The other issue is that grinding isn't supposed to be a big deal in games
because the grinding activity is supposed to be enjoyable. The F2P market is
designed around it not being enjoyable.

~~~
PeterisP
To add on your point - the "grinding" is designed to be very different.

If for whatever reason your game concept involves parts of grinding (say,
extending game length; allowing less-skilled players to gain extra power by
extra grinding to complete challenges they otherwise couldn't; providing less
intensive background time to facilitate communication/chat in a MMO; etc),
then in a 'pay' game you still try to optimize the grinding actions to be as
fun as you can make the grind to be; but in a F2P game you would optimize the
grinding to be _intentionally frustrating_ in order to push players over the
edge of paying.

And that whole concept of mutilating a fun activity to be frustrating is a bit
evil.

------
MortenK
Some of the differences between trading card games, shareware etc and pay-to-
play:

1) The older models have transparent pricing, whereas pay-to-play have opaque
pricing. You can tell the price of a deck or full version of a shareware game,
but you can't tell how many IAP's you'll need over the lifetime of a pay-to-
play game.

2) When something is "free!" but actually not, it is a bait and switch
technique ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-
switch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch)). This leaves many
consumers with a feeling of being tricked.

3) IAP's are often transient replenishables such as gems or gold. A trading
card or full version of a game, you own permanently.

4) It's hard to trust that pay-to-play games isn't specifically designed to
make you part with dollars. Players come to doubt the fairness of the game
rules. Even for "honest" game makers, there will be suspicion of foul play in
the game mechanics.

5) Pay-to-play games, like slot machines, make their money from 10-20% of
users called "whales", who are susceptible to gambling addiction. Using
psychological tricks to extract money from such people is very shaky,
ethically.

When games promote feelings of suspicion, exploitation and even psychological
manipulation in the majority of players (i.e. non-whales), you get this kind
of backlash, as in the case of clash of clans and other pay-to-plays.

Has it ruined the gaming industry? Not in my opinion - I think (or hope) pay-
to-play is a fad which will devolve into a niche. As people become aware of
the shady tactics being used, they'll tend to avoid them. Or at least
gravitate towards those pay-to-plays, where it really is possible to have a
decent game play experience without paying.

------
drawkbox
The pay to play games like the old Arcades that took quarters and tokens
didn't, mobile free to play won't either.

Free to play is a market reaction and people do play them and it is becoming
the only way to get revenues as a game developer. But there are plenty of
other games out there and games for every consumer, free to play, premium,
etc. In most free to play games most people pay less than premium games, it
allows games to reach the people.

The thing about the current free to play market is some do it well like Valve,
Halfbrick etc that add to the fun of the game usually through customization
and vanity additions, but others it is part of the game design and much like
social games where it is metrics over gameplay. It just serves another
consumer, even if that doesn't interest old school lots of content and pay up
front gamers.

Done well, in a way it is a return to the Arcade but much more cool in that
you can customize the game and get more from it with additions, which do cost
time/money to produce. Games also want you to play for a long time now, or
many times in small increments, where before arcade games were made harder to
skimp on content and get more quarters.

[http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/6/5386788/when-was-the-most-
ex...](http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/6/5386788/when-was-the-most-expensive-
time-to-be-a-gamer)

------
mcv
Actually, I quit Magic: the Gathering exactly because of its pay-to-play and
pay-to-win aspects. The deck-building is absolutely fun, but I didn't want to
keep sinking money into it. But I still love a friendly game with others.

I don't think Clash of Clans is pay-to-play or pay-to-win. I don't pay a dime
and am perfectly able to play it quite effectively.

The real problem with many of these free "social" games, however, is that
they've turned micromanagement into the actual game. Quite often, there's very
little strategic choice to be made, you just need to check in regularly to
give new orders because you can't queue your orders.

Back in the '90s, people used to complain about the micromanagement involved
in many big games. Designing your empire in Civilization is fun, choosing
spots for new cities it, selecting new research is, but managing every
individual city and unit gets really tedious after a while. And for some
reason, this modern genre of games has removed all interesting decisions from
their games and turned the tedium itself into what the game is about. You
can't queue stuff, or at least not a lot, and you have to earn the privilege
to avoid a small part of the tedium of micromanagement. Less micromanagement
has become the reward for playing. And yet without it, there's practically no
game.

Clash of Clans is not remotely the worst in this; designing your defense and
organizing your attacks are still interesting parts of the game. But without
those, you'd get a game like Hay Day which has practically no recognizable
game underneath all the tedium.

But all of these games, including Clash of Clans, eventually have to make
money for their developers, and they do so by making the game less fun than it
needs to be, and you can pay to skip the unfun parts. And some people are
suspectible to that, and end up paying. And the real evil of it is that they
prey on addictive tendencies to get a few people to pay a lot.

But in the end, the games are intentionally designed to be less fun than they
could have been.

------
AgentGreasy
There is something to be said about the problems that have resulted from the
very issue of pay-to-play. The problem is that its not just simply possible to
classify it as a "pay to play" game, there are differences in quantification
of their value add and their platform of playing - and its basis of its
commercialization.

With MMOs, you have a very clear 1:1 value of purchase. The yielded "product"
is the sustaining of the very service itself. No different than your internet
service, cable TV, etc. These games have found that this isn't necessarily a
sustainable model, as there is (as we all know) a clear disparity between
those that can afford the monthly fee and those that cannot. Eventually if the
game loses its overall worth, either by content, quality or service, then
those that are minding the budget will leave with little convincing. That's
the reason they went to the new micro-transaction model. By offering varied
levels of shiny, the tab so to speak is picked up by those who can afford an
excess... in effect carrying those who cannot, and allowing for all to play.
In turn, the popularity of such an environment establishes word of mouth... as
everyone wants to play with their friends. The ecosystem develops, and thus
you have a reasonable model. This has worked for LOTR:O, STO and SWTOR. Even
EVE online has adopted a model that is in the middle, whereby a user who is
sufficiently established in the real world can purchase time for others, and
establish their own fortunes in game thanks to the work of those who can't
afford it in the medium but can afford it in the virtual.

In these cases the difference in overall representation is simple: You do not
gain anything by the value adds except novelty. On the rare occasion you will
get something of strength/power, but its not a permanent superiority: its
merely early access. The entire reason it has become the model of success it
is, is due to its availability to the masses in a harmless form: you get to
pay for cosmetic differences only. This was actually the source of quite a bit
of humor in season 1 of PA/PVP's The Trenches comic. There is nothing
technically or physically better about the item, it only looks different or
sounds different. But, it costs money... and it is unique. By being unique,
one feels special - and by that it becomes valuable. That 14.99 item now
becomes the monthly fee for someone else.

The other model, however, employs the opposite effect. This is the most
visible one in the mobile world. Money buys you superiority. It may be in the
form of bonuses (double exp, faster earning of money, whatever), or in the
form of tangibles such as weapons or stronger characters. The most obvious one
is the current games whereby you establish a limit on 'turns.' Those turns
govern your advancement, access, worth... the person with money can move
infinitely, the one without sits and waits. By the end of the week, they have
no competition.

The goal in both is to make money. That is the business and that will always
be business. The harm, is that its no longer a playing field where you're
playing a game. Its buying the win. Since the business model works (they
profit, who cares about the person?) the gaming industry shifts so that it
continue to make that profit. Thus, you have DLC - the game is incomplete the
first time you pay for it, so to play it you have to buy the rest. Though, you
don't have to. But, an entire ecosystem is playing the cooler stuff... and
you're sitting behind.

This business model is new. The reason its different from TCG, is TCG itself
requires a tangible asset - you cannot play without the cards. Magic is
nothing without a deck. To build a deck you must buy the cards. Invariably
this means that to build a good deck, you must increase your chances to obtain
a valuable card - thus you need to buy many boosters and decks. The model
itself is simple, but its not exactly able to be changed - if cards are merely
an imaginary item that one draws on their own, then the deck is never
different. It reduces the unexpected and you remove the need for that extra
bit of strategy. The ability to build a good deck is not necessarily tied to
value, only the chance is increased the more you buy. The chance is always
there - its never a zero value. In the pay to play games, the value is always
tied to your success: there is no chance to your "strength" it is only your
stats, items, level, money... whatever.

A good example of the difference is to compare it to a similar platform. There
is a game in the app store(s) called Age of Warring Empires. It's your typical
"build a city" "get 'cards' of various strengths representing characters'
'level them, build armies, attack others.' Well, every single one of those
things has two ways of advancement: money or time. There is no way to get the
best items without spending money. None. The only way to win, IS to buy the
win. In magic, sure you have to buy the deck... but for all intents and
purposes, there is a non-zero chance that first box you get builds a deck
worth winning.

------
mbreese
I never played trading card games... I even had to look up what TCG meant. So,
I'm not the best to suggest why they were better accepted. But if I had to
guess, it was that everyone one had a shot at getting the best cards. Even if
you only had one or two packs, you could have gotten a super rare card. If you
had a hundred packs, you still may not have gotten the "golden ticket". So,
money didn't necessarily correlate 1:1 with advantage.

In games like Clash of Clans, etc... You can play without paying. But it is
just depressing to have an opponent attack you, where you can tell that they
have effectively bought their way in. They didn't spend the time to
effectively build their city, wait for their upgrades, etc... instead, they
just bought a ton of gems and used that to make their city.

So, the users who don't just buy their way can feel cheated by the game. They
put in a lot of time into their cities, but they can just get crushed by
people who just bought theirs.

Sure, the authors can get more money, but it just ruins game play for the rest
of us. Even in games like Candy Crush - you _can_ win without paying extra,
but for some levels it's almost impossible to complete without using bonuses.

Source: I've played both Candy Crush and Clash of Clans to the point where
they weren't fun anymore largely because of the pay-to-play nature.

~~~
mcv
> In games like Clash of Clans, etc... You can play without paying. But it is
> just depressing to have an opponent attack you, where you can tell that they
> have effectively bought their way in. They didn't spend the time to
> effectively build their city, wait for their upgrades, etc... instead, they
> just bought a ton of gems and used that to make their city.

I don't really see the problem there. It's no different from players who
simply got in earlier and got a head start. Games where some people join later
are unavoidably going to have these kind of inequalities. To me, it doesn't
matter if someone is stronger because he played longer, or because he bought
his way in.

But if he bought his way in, he's probably less experienced than his strength
suggests, and I might be able to defeat him despite his theoretical strength.

And MtG is far more evil in this regard. That one rare card in every pack is
exactly meant to drive addiction, and get people to pay one more pack hoping
for the rare card they want. In a way, MtG pioneered the pay-to-win game play,
and plenty of people resent it for that reason. Though, in its defense,
Magic's success may have been an accident; they may not have been
intentionally taking advantage of addiction, and many of these modern mobile
game companies definitely are.

But the main difference is that in the end, Magic is fun. If you just play
opponents with a similarly limited collection, playing with less cards may
actually be more fun than having everything. But many of these mobile games
are intentionally designed to be less fun, to have lots of micromanagement and
tedium with very little actual game underneath, and you can pay to skip the
boring game play.

~~~
mbreese
I guess the difference is that in some games, you are pitted against other
players at the same "experience" level - to level the playing field. So that
very experienced players aren't able to just kill all the new players
immediately. However, if you have a player that has bought their way in, they
will have a low experience level, but resources that are better matched
against higher levels. So, if you don't buy in, you will be at a severe
disadvantage.

------
fragsworth
It's entirely a matter of how the user is introduced to spending money in the
game.

Trading card games require an initial purchase - most people purchasing them
are aware of what they're getting themselves into. You know there are lots of
rare cards that you'll never see, and you're fine with that when you buy your
deck(s). For one thing, this filters out a lot of people who would gripe about
having to pay. But also, if you play enough to really need the best cards,
usually you've accumulated enough cards that you can trade with people to make
any deck you want. This places a sort of spending cap on the game, after which
you can compete with the best players in the world - which can be a pleasant
surprise to players who haven't thought that far ahead.

Modern free-to-play games start out free, then surprise users with ways to
spend money in the middle of the game. As you play on, even if you do pay, you
discover that there is no limit to the amount you can spend - and you see that
there will always be better, more powerful users who have spent more than you.
Lots of users become bitter about this once they've invested some amount of
time (and/or money) in the game world.

------
DanBC
My problem is that games can now no longer ask for an honest price upfront and
not use manipulative tactics to extort extra money from players.

A car racing game should be advertised at $X, with DLC like extra tracks or
cars being available for more money.

But manipulative tactics mean the player will be forced to grind a single
track many times to get something that allows them to continue. They can pay
to avoid that grind. Worse artificial delays are often built in and an IAP is
provided to circumvent that artificial delay. Using our hypothetical race game
as an example there might be a supply of tyres. Each time you enter a race you
use four tyres. Tyres are replenished at a rate of one every hour, unless
you've paid for an IAP - "tyre factory upgrade: never run out of tyres - $Y".

EDIT: plenty of people have bad memories of collectible card games and talk of
feeling manipulated and exploited and addicted.

------
TophWells
Let's talk about Team Fortress 2, Valve's first big F2P game.

The model is this: If you play for long enough, you'll receive new equippable
weapons at random times. You can trade these with other players, craft them
together to create different items, or simply buy them with real money. So far
so standard.

What's interesting is that the non-default weapons are all balanced against
each other. In theory, players who grinded for a long time or paid real money
are still on an equal footing with players who joined the game yesterday -
actual skill at the game notwithstanding. In practice, mistakes are made (the
Soldier's default melee weapon is a lot weaker than all the available
alternates, although the alternates are all roughly equal in power), but the
idea is there.

And there are items that can only be earned through the shop, or as part of
one-time giveaways, or by earning achievements in different games. But all of
those are either completely useless (hats and badges), or cosmetic variations
on existing items. Their value is not that they make the player stronger, but
they simply tell other players "I have something you don't have".

TF2 demonstrates that pay-to-play can be done right. It's simply a matter of
striking the balance between creating something that lots of people will play
and creating something that earns a lot of money per player. Unfortunately, in
the mobile world, 10 mediocre apps are a lot more profitable than 1 excellent
app, so there's little incentive to create quality. That's the real problem,
not pay-to-play.

------
csours
This is an interesting discussion, but no one has mentioned the physical
aspect of trading card games.

When you purchase a pack of cards, you now own them; you can hold them in your
hands, arrange them in binders, sell them on to someone else, etc.

With free to play games, you buy some gems or coins and then spend them in the
game and they are gone! You can't sell them on, you cannot take them out again
later and look at them. It feels more like burning money than buying
something.

------
mbesto
Before seeking explanation, I would suggest defining what one means by
_ruining_.

------
je42
I think a lot of commentators expect from a f2p game to behave like a pay
upfront game. Game and bizmodel need to be in sync. Both models have game
designs that work better in the respectable monetization model. F.e.
Payupfront games usually have flashy graphics. F2P often use tcg mechanics.

I wonder why you would like to pay up front for a promise rather than trying
to play a game for free and if and only if you think it is worth it pay some
money.

I believe we can all vote with our money which model we believe is best. Let
the market forces figure out which model will be dominant in the next ten
years.

------
kayoone
Ruin the industry ? No, but it changed the industry nonetheless. Imo most pay-
to-play games aren't really games in the truest sense of gaming. A game like
Clash of Clans or Candy Crush is played by millions but would it do well in a
real game review ? Is it real fun at the core to entertain gamers ? No,
because those games are more like playable advertising entertainment than real
games. There's a place for both though and some pay-to-play games are worse
than others.

------
minimaxir
There's a _huge_ difference between the TCGs of old and the modern freemium
games. TCG is part gambling, part gameplay, and even the gambling is optional
with preconstructed decks (Magic the Gathering in particular has pushed
premade decks recently with their Duel Decks series of produces). Freemium
games, however, are _entirely designed_ to exploit human psychology to nudge
their users to spend money.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
But do they not both operate on the same business model? IMHO I think you are
giving TCGs too much credit. Yes, they have far more lore and real playing
time, but strategy can only take you so far as a player. That plus the random
nature(or gambling as you put it) of the packs only further adds excitement
and ultimately, addiction.

~~~
exile7
I've always maintained that the moronic land/mana system in MtG was designed
to facilitate their business model. The increased randomness it introduces
obfuscates their pay-to-win design.

~~~
wmil
Not by design. TCGs didn't really exist before MtG, they stumbled into a
successful business model.

~~~
TophWells
Originally, yes, but it's been two decades since Alpha. I think by now they
have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and why it works.

------
hotdox
I dont know current state of things, so I speak in past tense. MTG was very
balanced. Every uber-card had uber-cost and needed proper protection. Also,
there was a cap on number of same cards in your deck. So you couldn't
extensively abuse mid-power cards too. As a result, you can counter expensive
deck by not so expensive one. Game was in most parts about proper tactics, not
deck.

------
transitionality
The biggest problem is that these games are categorized as free in app stores.
This is false advertising.

A new category (maybe called "freemium") needs to be set up for games like
these, so we can avoid them wholesale.

