An interesting piece on Gamasutra discusses one developer’s decision to go to the Free-to-play model.
When it comes to mobile gaming, a free-to-play model is becoming the most socially accept method of accessing new games, with the noted downside that the monetization of mobile gaming is a big turn off from many games. In one game that I posted on the site, a saw a comment on Kotaku about it that stated that a turn off was “hitting the paywall too fast”. For a free-to-play mobile game that I own, Clash of Clans, the time it takes to making and improve my village tempts me with paying more workers, but I refuse to pay for things that should have been in the game before (beyond on-disc DLC type stuff, it actually beneficial to the design of the game to have some of these features in).
Unfortunately, it is just really hard to justify any purchase on a mobile device for a game. With a large surplus of games of various qualities, anyone who can program can throw out something and people don’t like getting ripped of. Customer reviewers are pretty unreliable, whether they are positive or negative, and there is no way to take it back or even some kind of compensation for returning it, its just stuck on your mobile device. I have this game called Galaxy of Fire II, that looked cool because it was a spaceship game, and I thought like Rogue Squadron. I hate just about everything in that game, and so I barely play it. So now I rarely give a mobile device game a chance unless it is free, and I think in the long run, despite being popular, it really is just the wrong device to make creative games or anything that resembles a core game, regardless of quality.
