Problems in Game Land: IAP Fees Get Gamers Up In Arms

01. Angry Birds 2 - Rovio

The second game in the Angry Birds series from Rovio to make the list following AB: Space is AB2...

This one so angered gamers and made them so vocal that the developer team for the game actually felt the need to go public with their response, justifying their actions and position to news outlets like the BBC!

The 12th game in the Angry Birds series (not counting the spin-offs), early player reviews for Angry Birds 2 were what is diplomatically called “mixed” thanks to the decision to permanently attach extra lives for play to the in-app purchase scheme.

You read that correctly! To play the game once the initial lives are lost the player can either PAY, or be forced to wait increasingly annoying amounts of time before additional lives are added and the game can be played again.

Connecting the ability to play the game to your wallet in such an annouing and in-your-face manner is the sort of mistake gamers expect from new game makers, not from veteran studios like Rovio, and that makes the matter all the worse (and ensured it earned the Number One slot on our list).

The blowback from this decision was so severe it almost immediately impacted projections for profits for the quarter, with angry gamers turning away from the merchandise and game offerings from the company to demonstrate how they feel and, not surprisingly, provoked a reaction from the studio.

In an interview with the BBC, Rovio's creative director Patrick Liu explain the decision to hook game play to pay-to-play in so bald a manner.

Using vague observations Liu appeared to be suggesting that since Angry Birds 2 is free-to-download, and free-to-play, the players have no right to feel bad about the decision to charge players to get past the forced play delay timers, and no right to comment about it.

The gamer reaction to this? When you tell us that a game is Free-to-Play, it needs to BE Free-to-Play! When you put a delay timer into the game and force players to attach their wallet to that timer, that is NOT Free-to-Play according to the very vocal gamers who are protesting the move.

Portraying the charges as “Overly Aggressive” gamers point out that last year the company made profits of over $200 Million off of the franchise, which begs the question how much is enough? Those feelings are gaining serious traction among gamers and particularly mobile gamers.

Rovio's response? Roughly translated: If you don't like it, don't play.

Conclusions

The issue of IAP in freemium games is one that is complicated by the fact that there is nothing really wrong with them. It is not so much the IAPs that make people angry - it is the tactics that some games and their publishers use in order to maximize their profit levels and the revenue that they acquire via the IAP systems in their games.

One thing that we should not get angry about is when a studio and the publisher invest time and money into making really great games that they choose to support via IAP - because without that system we would never have had Tapped Out, or Sims:FreePlay, or Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, or Boom Beach, or any one of hundreds of games that we play - and CAN play - without ever spending a thin dime!

The best way to look at these games - and how we choose to look at them - is that the IAP scheme that has been rolled out in them essentially pays for our ability to play these games for free.

That's right, what we are saying is that the gamers who choose to pay for IAP in these games are basically subsidizing the game play for the gamers (which includes us) who choose NOT to pay.

Now that said, there should never be problems or issues like parents discovering thousands in charges made by their kids - witting or not - for IAP. The industry needs to self-police and find ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

They NEED to do that. Because history has plenty of examples to prove that when an industry - even an entertainment industry like video games - creates a problem that makes registered, tax-paying, adult voters angry, if that industry fails to take steps to self-correct the government will do it for them. And having the government step in and start regulating video games is not something we, as gamers, want to see happen. Ever.

We don't have a solution to this problem other than to tell you about it so that you - and especially gamers who are parents and the parents of gamers - can take a proactive stance on the issue, and know to be aware of it so that it does not jump up and bite you unaware.