
Google will stop calling games 'free' when they offer in-app purchases - bergie
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/18/5915415/google-adding-in-app-purchase-protections-european-commission
======
dyarosla
I think this is a great move.

It will probably come as terrible news for manipulative game developers. From
first-hand experience working at a company that did this and first-hand
developer testimonials, IAP in "free" games and its design has long been
associated with forcing emotional, heat-of-the-moment-spurred buys from
consumers - ie. You were so close to beating the level that time but you lost
your last life :( Get an extra life right now and you'll kill it this time
around!!!.

Sadly, a portion of total players (1-2% from what I've seen) will fall for
these emotional tactics and spend the money, often more than once. Even worse
is when they later convince themselves that the money was well spent (say, for
an extra life in Candy Crush).

I hope Apple also follows suit, as some sources allude to.

~~~
themartorana
I think we're skipping the non-exploitative companies that rely on this model.
Like mine.

We tried selling a game - it doesn't work. We have a free (ad-supported) and
paid version of our game, and we make 95% of our money on ads.

Adding removing ads as an iAP to the free version, instead of having multiple
versions of the game on the store, saw that go from 5% to 15% or so.

It's RARE to have any true success in the mobile game market. It's even RARER
to have that come from a game that has an up-front cost.

iAP is the new shareware. Anyone that bitches about iAP has to get their head
around this. The market dictates how people are willing to spend money, and
it's via iAP, not up-front costs.

We love making games. We love our job, and our company, and we want to keep
doing it. But there's a hard truth that ad-supported free games have very,
very low ARPU - for us, in the $0.20 range. We're lucky to have millions of
downloads and hundreds of thousands of daily active users, but very few game
studios are.

Someone that buys the ad-free iAP is worth 5x our average ARPU. So selling
people customizations or whatever else iAP is the only way to raise ARPU to
anything sustainable. Gamers don't (and never will) spend $60 on a mobile game
again, and we have employees to pay and families to support. Yes, it can get
exploitative, but if you have a better idea of how small game companies should
survive - real ideas, not trolling - we'd love to hear them, because we would
implement them immediately.

Edit: grammar.

~~~
watwut
The problem is not IAP on itself. The problem is when the apps mislead about
what you get for your payment or when so called "free" apps are unusable
without payment.

In a way, non-exploitative apps (with or without IAPs) are probably victims in
current situation. I guess I'm not alone who simply do not trust anything with
"offers in-app payments" label and avoids it as much as possible. There is no
way for me to distinguish between "real game company" and exploitative
company.

The problem of small game companies is that customers have no way to
distinguish between good and crap game before buying and most of what is found
in app store is of very little quality. I do not know how the company can
solve it without better app discovery features from app stores themselves.

~~~
radley
Yes, but at least the apps are free to investigate. Far less risk / hassle
than paying, downloading, installing, running, uninstalling, and requesting a
refund.

------
CookWithMe
As a non-game app developer, I WANTED THIS FOR YEARS!

Google (and Apple) calling my apps "free" did bring in massive amounts of bad
reviews.

I think this is good news for any developer that wants to offer a "free-to-
download" app with non-exploitative IAPs. Think of a magazine-app: People
should get the app itself for free to be able to choose which issue they want
to buy. There is no emotional engineering going on. You don't want to trick
people into believing this app is useful if they don't spend money - in fact,
you don't even want people to download your app if they won't spend money
anyway. But the app store says FREE...

We had/have major problems with getting tons of bad reviews like "THIS APP IS
NOT FREE, ASKS FOR IN APP PURCHASE!!11".

We played with the description, so it would start with "buy" or "purchase"
(e.g. "BUY THE NEW ISSUE ABOUT XYZ"), which helped a little (although most
people seem to skip the description). We tried screenshots of the point where
one needs to purchase... which is sort of fine for iPad screenshots, but a
waste for smaller phone screens. We do now also offer a lot more content for
free initially, which seemed to have helped most.

I'm hoping for a consistent labeling of all apps (not only games!) that sets
correct expectations for the user when downloading an app.

------
mkaziz
This is the best news I've heard in a long time, but how do they filter the
"disable ads" IAP vs the "oh you spent 3 hours getting invested in this game,
but you can't reasonably proceed further until you buy xxx"?

~~~
slipstream-
Came here to say this. I guess that if devs want their games to be listed as
free they'd need to have two versions of the app, a free ad-supported version
and a paid ad-free version, instead of using IAP.

I have actually seen devs do this, but I can't remember any exact cases.

~~~
bnejad
I feel like its pretty common to see both. I see the advantage in using the
IAP though since you get to aggregate your ratings and reviews in one place.

------
tannerc
As a developer who makes a portion of my regular income from an app offering
IAP, this is concerning.

Sure, the bulk of apps with IAP appear to be spammy and simply attempting to
"cheat" customers into spending money. But for apps like mine, that offer
players a "preview" of fuller functionality and then offer them the ability to
unlock those features for a one-time fee, it feels like morally-balanced
developers are getting the short end of the stick.

I'd love to hear more discussion around this though, from both the perspective
of other developers as well as customers and their experiences with paid,
free, IAP, ad, and "trial" apps.

~~~
tommi
So you develop an app which is preview until you pay and you want to call it
free? As a customer: that's not free!

~~~
anywherenotes
It gives you a chance to try the app without buying it, and convenience of
buying full version without having to go into play store to download new
version, and also deleting the "demo" version.

For example if you sign up for a free MMO trial, you can either cancel it or
just buy subscription - you don't need to re-install the game and reapply any
customization you have done.

Also if it's a kid-game, and your kid is small, they might be super happy with
the one or two free levels, and you wouldn't need to upgrade to full game.

~~~
evilduck
That's still not free product, that's a free trial. Those are worlds apart in
customer expectations.

------
fuzzythinker
I think this is a bad move. They are jumping to an ill thought-out solution
before diving deeper into the problem. Many games are actually really free in
terms of no time or other baitty limits; many are 100% feature and playable up
to a certain level, or the full game is playable with some restrictions. I
would call these games free. The problem is with games that either have time
limits or paid upgrades that popups up frequently or are too easy to click
(spammy and meant to trick kids). We don't want to punish the good guys and
severely hurt their discoverability with this unthought-out blanket rule. In-
app purchase is not evil if done right, it's the way people/companies are
abusing it via spammy or adiction ways.

~~~
jusben1369
Hey fuzzythinker. I think you just defined the problem in a fairly limited way
to support your argument. A game may be very eloquently developed and have a
non intrusive but logical upgrade path after a good deal of time playing the
free version. That can still cause parent's to get a shock (and it usually
only happens at the end of each month) when they find out the "free game" they
let their child download has in fact run up meaningful charges.

~~~
fuzzythinker
Why is that a problem? Setting up password protection for in-app purchases is
easy.

------
cliveowen
Just today I installed Smash Hit and found out that it's pretty much useless
if you don't shell out some money, you have to start over and over from the
beginning because checkpoints are a premium feature. I hope this change will
put an end to this behaviour but I fear developers are always gonna come up
with new ways to trick users.

~~~
TD-Linux
Smash Hit isn't really that bad - basically the free version is a trial, and
you pay one price for the full version.

I think this Google move is more targeted at the sort of games that don't fall
into the trial/paid category, rather the sort that constantly try to bill you
for microtransations.

~~~
gtremper
Yeah, I believe the free trial and full version were 2 different apps before.
Now, you don't have to download a new app to upgrade and can keep game data
from the trial. This seems like a better solution, though the price may be
misleading due to how "free" games are displayed in the store. The new play
store change should solve this.

~~~
watwut
I prefer buying new app. That way I know that I will still own it if I change
the phone and I know the payment is one time only.

------
pjungwir
From a user perspective this seems very nice.

It might be nice for developers too if it starts to train people to expect to
pay more than $0-2 for a game.

I wonder if part of Google's reason is to push people toward advertising
instead?

~~~
dyarosla
Either that, or push the customer base of Google to pay for quality
applications. Sadly, with lack of curation, I would guess customers would be
skeptical of spending money on a non-free game for fear of a poor purchase
(crashes, not working, etc)

------
incision
Sounds good.

Between the restricted profiles in 4.3 and this it's finally reasonable to
hand the tablet over to a child.

Beyond this, I'd really like to see something added to provide a
straightforward alternative to ad-support for apps. Something like a trivial
option to generate ad-free builds for an ad including app.

More than a few times I've encountered a solid app which I would gladly pay a
couple of bucks for, but it's only available as ad-supported.

~~~
themartorana
That's because - truly and honestly - you're in a super-minority. Like I said
above, our IAP conversion rate to ad-free is insanely small, and accounts for
less than 5% of revenue.

Building in the IAP mechanism isn't trivial, and worse, IAP purchases can
easily be hacked (especially on Android). Both platforms recommend you run
your own server that verifies purchases with Google and Apple's servers,
because even client-based validation is easily hackable.

We have IAP removal of ads, but we're VERY successful compared to the average
developer, and actually run our own servers. For the average dev, it's a non-
trivial task. (Apologies for repeating myself.)

~~~
incision
I think we've missed each other here.

I'm not suggesting that these things are trivial, exactly the opposite
actually. I'm assuming that they aren't and suggesting that they should be -
that all the validation and heavy lifting is something that ideally
Apple/Google would handle and enabling the functionality would be trivial from
a developer perspective.

I wonder if conversion of free to ad-free would be better if the offerings
were truly separate?

I'm somewhat distrustful of IAP for this purpose as it has been flaky in my
experience (likely to due to the seller run validation services as you
describe). I'm much more inclined to try a 'Free' app followed by purchasing
the ad-free 'Premium' version than I am to buy an IAP to convert one to the
other.

------
sosuke
We should change the terminology back to old shareware days. If the Doom
shareware floppy could have offered users a way to buy the full game from
within the demo it would have.

So new categories of apps:

    
    
      Free, no IAP, no cost, ads or something else 
      Demos, IAP to upgrade
      Full, could be free but use IAP consumables, ads, whatever its all yours

------
r00fus
Props to Google. This is definitely the right thing to do. Let's hope Apple
and Microsoft follow suit.

There are games out there that are deceptively unplayable without shelling
out.

------
ww520
Are they going to stop calling games with ads free as well?

~~~
malandrew
Search engines too. I really wish there were more services out there that
offered a paid alternative to ads, so that the consumer does not become the
product. This will never happen though because many of the people with the
means to buy themselves out of an ad-laden experience are the people the
advertisers most want to reach. Without that cohort, I would imagine that the
value per impression would drop remarkably.

------
funkyy
Finally. I want to see more clearance in app market like that. App market
owners got lazy, there is little innovation today, just counting profits.

------
kabdib
This is the Right Thing to do.

Might want a refinement where it's possible to have whole-game access and the
purchases are only cosmetic in nature.

------
radley
Currently, iTunes lists the top 10 in-app purchases in the app description,
which makes it easy to gauge what will happen when you use the app.

The Play Store only recently added "Offers in-app purchases" as small print
next to the device compatibility info.

Not sure if Android users will embrace any form of hybrid pricing that doesn't
say "Free".

------
lucb1e
"will stop"? It's been like this for weeks..? Or is that only because I'm
located in the Netherlands?

------
dminor
What they really should do is give some stats about how much money people
typically spend on an app that uses IAP. E.G., "98% of users spend no money,
2% of users spent an average of $3.50", or something along those lines.

------
post_break
Good. I remember when Steve Jobs said on stage "Free apps will stay free" but
I can't track down the exact video of him. Seeing "free" apps in the top
grossing column pisses me off.

------
du
Good news, but I think this should go further. Like showing potential buyers
the average or median amount spend for people who actively use(d) the app. Or
money spend per hour/week of usage.

------
ulfw
Fantastic! Because frankly free - means free. Not 'trial version free - hella
expensive if you ACTUALLY want to use this game'

------
smegel
Long, long overdue.

The absurdity of calling "its free to download bits to your computer but you
have to pay us to use them" free was too much.

------
sjs382
Good. I got tired of clicking into "free" games, seeing "In App Purchases" and
clicking the back button.

------
duncan_bayne
Google has not been doing a lot right, lately, but this is bang on the money
(pun intended). Bravo!

------
Sephr
I wonder how this will affect free applications with IAP-powered donation
buttons.

------
JopV
Please stop calling F2P's "games".

------
gcb4
Google is the new Microsoft. the founders get down from their clouds and shit
happens.

remember the history about why ctrl f in outlook is not search? this is the
same.

probably someone was working a smart system to see when the game either had
purchases or players dropped, and was working out a clever way to weed out the
pay to win one... then one founder got fed up on pay to win bejeweled and
dictated everything with in game purchases is now paid, even if it's just a
donate button or skins.

~~~
wutbrodo
What a hilarious delusion. Do you really think one of the founders (worth tens
of billions of dollars) was having issues with paying 99 cents to get ahead a
level in Bejeweled? And that he would find himself constantly confused as to
which apps rely too much on IAP, since you apparently think he doesn't have
the ability to read "Offers in-app purchases" on the app page?

I know people get attached to the ludicrous narratives they construct about
different companies, but this is beyond hilarious.

~~~
bdcravens
lol Shaq spends $1000+ a week on apps, pretty sure a billionaire founder will
have no issues

[http://time.com/21470/shaq-spends-1000-a-week-on-
apps/](http://time.com/21470/shaq-spends-1000-a-week-on-apps/)

