
Europe Wants Apple and Google to Fix In-App Payments Problem - jcr
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/europe-wants-apple-and-google-to-fix-in-app-payments-problem/
======
sergiotapia
Great news. My kids ask me to buy a game for him on our iPad and when I find a
free game, I don't want my kid coming back to me 20 minutes later with a
screen asking to buy more 'tokens'.

Fuck that. Thank you Google for leading the way with this. Free should be free
as in the entire thing for free. Or let me pay for the damn thing once and let
me go about my day.

------
Mithaldu
A small note that bears repeating:

Most of the big money-maker IAPs are so devious because they sell the same
thing that people 20 years ago got from gaming magazines: Cheat codes.

The difference: These cheat codes work only once.

~~~
stickydink
20 years ago it was perfectly normal for kids to be pouring money into arcade
machines in exchange for 5 minutes of gameplay. Then be be told to pay more,
fast, or lose all progress. Doesn't seem very different to me?

~~~
kevingadd
The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins
in to play, and you put more coins in to continue _when you lose_. If you were
good, pretty much every arcade game out there could be completed on one
credit. It wasn't terribly unusual for someone to get good enough to do that.

F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely.
Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill
has _zero bearing_ on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge
you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled
with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours
between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that
nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon-
building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a
zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive
barriers as a lever to get you to spend money.

Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful
they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so
you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed
a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good
enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that
you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion.

In comparison, F2P games are _designed around_ the assumption that players
will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the
game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around
trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who _do_ pay, as
quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit
playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.

------
eric_h
It seems to me as though iOS 8 addresses all the concerns raised here (at
least regarding "[Apple having] no firm commitment and no timing hav[ing] been
provided for the implementation of such possible future changes.")

------
chrismcb
This really sucks because now it will be harder to find these free games. Just
because you can't control you or your kid from in app purchases why must
everyone else suffer?

------
cheepin
I like the idea, but I'm worried about Google getting bullied into policies,
especially on their own ecosystem.

------
NietTim
Yes, this is pretty old news...

------
spindritf
Another non-issue like cookies.

~~~
danmaz74
It's clear you don't have children who play on a tablet.

~~~
spain
Set some parental controls? Don't authorize them to use your credit card?
Don't let them use the device at all if there's nothing else you can do?

I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids but you can prevent it
without any government intervention with a little responsibility on your part.
You wouldn't give your child a credit card and let them loose in a toy store
either.

~~~
watwut
The trouble with parental controls used to be that they worked differently
then advertised. Parent configured password, but there was grace periods of
password-less 15 minutes after each buy which was not explained to user. You
had to follow tech news to know about it. Or, parent configured password, but
the password was required only for app store, not for IAP.

Apple store does not allow you to download anything, not even free apps, if
you do not have credit card set up. So, if you wanted anything on that device,
you had to configure it there.

Essentially, parental controls are getting better slowly, but only lately and
under pressure of regulators.

The other issues are already existing regulations about marketing targeted at
children and when the word "free" is a lie. EU restricts kids targeted
advertisements in general and has rules against lies in advertisements. A lot
of debate is friction about whether app stores should follow the same rules as
everybody else and how to interpret those rules in apps.

~~~
mitchty
I think ios8 will really help out with the whole situation of needing credit
cards to be tied to an account.

Not that that helps right now but I tested it out and it is pretty damn
impressive. Glad I don't have kids right now though so I don't need to deal
with it at all. >.<

------
lifeisstillgood
In app purchases exist because there is no free market for apps - everything
is purchased through two portals, who set the expected prices and act as
unsupervised quality controllers. Because the prices are so low in app
purchases and super-star hits are the only ways to profit.

If there was a free market here, there would not be any need for this,
products would be priced at sustainable levels, and I as a parent would never
ever ever purchase a game that had in app purchases.

I would rather that I could download apps from anywhere and there was still a
rating and quality mechanism. Many options exist for that. But I will take
this as an alternative

I think the European Union has this weird attitude that a free market works
the best and where there is no free market then there should be regulation to
guide the path towards the ideal, or there should be protection against the
excesses of the unfree market. I, in the main, agree. It all kind of depends
on your definition of free and regulation.

~~~
watwut
Free market drives prices down. That is what it is supposed to do. How exactly
is it supposed to fix what they consider false "free" labels on apps? Products
are not priced on sustainable levels, because sustainably priced app will
loose against the one priced as "free".

~~~
fidotron
It's even worse than that.

The way startup funding for the cowboy end of the games business works allows
the well funded companies to give much more away. What has occurred is the
stakes are now out of control. Admittedly a hit game can bring in hundreds of
millions, but to make or market it you'll need to spend a very significant
fraction of that. This has the side effect of encouraging wild conservatism of
design and price gouging as risk minimisation strategies.

The mobile part of the industry at this point needs someone to do what
Nintendo did in the 80s, but it's totally unclear who or how that could
possibly happen.

~~~
watwut
It is even worst then that. Even big AAA hit games are often loose money
projects due to insane development costs. Game studios that produced great
games close every month. Big publishers (EA) have track record of destroying
brought successful studios within two years. Small developers struggle and
close even more often.

Games seems to be extremely hard business these days.

