I still somehow have a little trouble with the way this in-game purchase works. As a child I used to go to play at the arcades, and of course when you fail, you have to slot another coin into the machine. This is probably quite similar. However, even as a child, I knew I am going to spend some money, within my budget, on playing games. There were no free games.

It seems like a subtle difference, but there is an element of luring-in with something that is marked as free, but actually encourages you to pay later.

Also, the coin-operated arcade (due to technical reasons I guess) offered a reasonably predictable price model. You play until you fail, which is usually a few minutes. If you're really good, a bit longer. You weren't given a chance to buy extra ammo or turbo-charge your car if you add two coins, and then later get the mega-pack for five extra coins and so on...

UPDATE: just to make it clear. I'm really speaking as a complete outsider to this world. I don't play any kind of games, and apologies if I'm making very wrong assumptions based on little knowledge in this area.

Games usually were designed with an easy first level and a big ramp-up in difficulty, and yes, you could pay for continues.

No free tier of course, arcade owners certainly didn't want their machines being squatted by non-paying players, but the easy start was definitely a hook, and they definitely played the sunk cost fallacy. After you put in so many coin, you don't want to stop there right? You can put in lots of coins if you are not careful. They clearly solved the "play for hours" issue too, all games I knew had an ending after less than an hour, and you had to be really good to get there without continues.

And sure, the games were meant to be enjoyable, but so are the mobile games. The only significant difference is that you own your phone, so you running the game costs the publisher nothing. Arcade cabinets are expensive machines and owners don't want you to keep playing if you are not paying, so they have to balance their settings so that you don't stay too long on a single credit, but at the same time, make sure you want to come back for more. Mobile games only have the second requirement.

Of course, only talking about video games, arcades often have prize games that are borderline gambling too.

The trend in modern arcades seems less predatory though. You can get 10 minutes of game play for a credit no matter how skilled you are, as long as you select the right difficulty. There is less of the "get hooked on the first level and spend all your coins" attitude. The counterpart is that you won't play for much longer if you are really good.

Video games are for-profit companies and these days they are in heavy competition with each other and all the other distractions around.

I can easily spend about $40-50 to go to a movie with the family and if the movie sucks it feels like a waste of 2 hours. Same amount of money on a game will get you 10x plus more time of entertainment.

Now why did i need to be informed of this? Because i live in germany where arcade machines, along with slot machines and similar, are banned from public establishments; because yes, this stuff is exploitative.

Now, that said, there are also some real differences between software for your home and arcade machines: The arcade machines were real upfront about what's going on. You paid a coin to play, and you paid a coin to cheat. There was no pretension of free and no obfuscation of the transaction. further arcade machines were made at a time when the hardware was not affordable for the home.

> In my current project, skill still reigns supreme

That's a tall order. Please do me a favor and go through the article and make a list of techniques you see that your game does NOT employ versus those it DOES employ.

Also, a question. I play a game because the gameplay is enjoyable. Is there ever any point where the game says "no, you cannot play unless you wait or pay"? Note, i did not say progress, i said play.

> it will be up to the market to decide whether we deserve money for what we're doing

That is the entire problem. Just like arcade machines back then you are extracting money from those who are either not mentally capable of or lack the experience to make a fully rational decision.

As for suggestions, really damn simple:

1. Don't sell cheats.

2. Allow me to make a down payment to purchase the entire game, in two possible modes:

2.a) if most of the calculation involved in a game happens on a customer machine, just allow me put down a single lump sum (guild wars, roaming fortress)

2.b) if most of the calculation involved happens on a company server, allow me to pay a regular fee (eve online, and i'm really fucking sure there is NO f2p game that even approaches the amount of computation their servers do)

You can stack on all kinds of naff f2p bullshit you like, but plenty of games which were made with more effort than any f2p game are profitable on these models, even in the mobile space.

Of course, the incentives were also a little different. Old arcade, for example, games wanted you to drop in more quarters. So they had to find ways to make you lose. But not just lose, lose when you're just close enough to the next level.

Also offensive is the use of sound in these games to ratchet up excitement like a slot machine.

Your argument is however valid for single/cooperative arcade games, where the design is to gobble as many coin as possible.

Yes, with repetition, you can eventually learn to beat Ghosts and Goblins on a single quarter, but the game is not going to just let you do that on the first try. Games of that era are designed to lure you in, then kill you with something completely out of nowhere after your 3 minutes are up and it's time for the next person in line to put in their money. This self-reinforced when you saw someone who had put in the reps getting really far on one credit, so you would think you can do that. But no, you can't. You die at the end of the first stage like everyone else.

It's not gambling, but it's still designed to extract money as efficiently as possible.

The real exception is gambling games.

And I did think along the same lines (in a very minor way) with arcade games. Pinball - where skill let you prolong a game gave way to video games (like pacman or tetris you mentioned), which quickly got too hard to keep going. And it went further when games like gauntlet kept you feeding quarters in a pay to play way.

But at that time, we got atari and nintendo and so forth. Pay once, play for a long time. Kids grew up with this, and parents worried about the cost of a cartridge.

But the current crop of games is free, yet blatantly money oriented. Plants vs Zombies pre-EA vs post-EA comes to mind. Add grinding and then pay to not grind.

Yes, a little rose colored. But in vegas you can actually register as a compulsive gambler and the casinos will not serve you.

And you would often die before satisfaction. Arcade games were usually comically simplistic, there usually wasn't much to it aside from the mechanical difficulty and it was often unintuitively difficult. There'd be an unofficial minimum spend because certain challenges weren't realistically surmountable until you had already encountered it or you had spent a decent number of lives practicing. Except for in the beginning of the playthrough. Arcade games were never too difficult at the beginning because they wanted you to hook you into the game, sounds a lot like mobile games. 25c for a teaser period of easier gameplay isn't very different in practice from the free-to-play hook that you so decry.

When people talk about "old school" difficulty, they are referring to that kind of punishing difficulty rampant in early video games inspired by arcade games that made money off of lives. Except that when you're paying a fixed fee for unlimited playtime, it doesn't make sense to punish your players. Video games soon became a lot easier and more continuous.

The dynamic is identical, pay-to-win is simply more refined & time-efficient. You say the arcade games were cheap. So are mobile games. So are video games. The vast majority of players in these mobile games never spend a lot of money, a lot of them never spend any money at all. It's just that in arcades, if you want to unlock certain levels of content and progress, you don't just pay for it, you pay for a lot of tokens for the privilege of spending a lot of time mastering a particular game.

Just like mobile, a lot of kids with generous parents could drop a lot of money into the arcade. You mentioned that you were poor. If you were poor with a mobile game today, your parents wouldn't let you spend a lot (if any) either. In fact, you could get away with not spending a single cent.

Arcade games on the other hand were still fun and challenging even if you took away the psychology behind stuffing in quarters. (no one has console slot machines)

I think it's important too to distinguish between a micro-transaction for something like a skin or a hat that has a cosmetic effect, versus "pay to win/pay to not grind", versus "pay every 5 minutes regardless of whether you win or lose" etc. My remarks on micro-transactions and difficulty creep is less about how profitable they are, but rather how the changes feel to me.

In writing my first post, I had a thought to compromise between the old school approach and the current paradigm: what if every game loop cost 1 credit if you win, 2 credits if you lose, and 100 yen buys 2 credits? If the challenge fits into my flow state so that it's at the upper limit of my competence, I would have an explicit 50 yen incentive to win in an engaging challenge. The game devs and proprieter would still make some guaranteed income on my play time. If no one has ever posited this idea before (and I'd bet someone has, and probably tested it, and maybe it doesn't work well for them), I feel like calling it "win to save".

It could even be an interesting study - players of games often won't keep playing if they feel they can't win, so the designer would have to be careful not to nickle and dime the player by setting them up for expensive failures. On the other hand, an engaging way to keep players paying could be to set them up for challenging victories that are very quick and efficient, to get them into the next loop faster... There's a lot of dimensions to this, more than I'm willing let alone able to put into one comment.

I agree arcades are a fantastic place for rhythm and dancing games. I hope you have a great day.

Arcade games were certainly meant to be enjoyable, and to keep you playing, but they were nowhere near the dark-pattern psychological minefield that modern games - especially mobile games - often are.

IAP and coin-based gameplay is not skill based, it's addiction based, which is NOT something you should encourage: the reward loop is completely different, fear-of-missing-out and scarcity-based gameplay do not create any positive effects, save maybe training your child to be a future patron of casinos and similar establishments

> Video games, at their best, offer everyone an equal chance to overcome the same challenges on an equal playing field. “Pac-Man,” after all, didn’t let you add extra quarters to purchase immunity from the ghosts.

I mean, in a way they did. If you had more quarters to spare in Pac-Man, you'd be more likely to make it further than your cash-strapped compatriot.

But then again arcades peddled these types of "pay to win" mechanics long before the App Store, and so probably aren't the best example to use in an article like this. NES era games would be more appropriate I think.

Frankly, the addictive part is in the randomness of the payout. What the payout is isn’t particularly important. The fact that games don’t payout money could be seen as worse - you have zero chance of recovering your expenditure.