In-app Purchases are a Cancer

I remember buying the original The Sims back in the day and getting excited over the Pets expansion.  What I didn't expect was a trend soon to follow where many games would be segmented into various DLC packs to make up a game that in the end once you added the cost altogether would be as expensive as buying a brand new PC.

This trend of buying extra content doesn't just stop with games that I will now refer to as "incomplete games" like The Sims franchise, but is used in many games such as MMOs and phone app games for buying optional items.

Now personally I don't mind games like MMOs where buying extra content is optional and not game breaking if you don't buy it.  What does bug me is games that gate you and massively slow down your progress or require you to use items that can only be purchased from an online shop using real cash.

For example I used to play Grand Fantasia, a cute anime style MMO that was free to play, but every time your gear broke you needed to buy hammers to fix it that were only purchaseable from the online shop.  Your gear would lose durability or break for almost any reason, like during combat, dying, or trying to upgrade your gear, and the chances of it breaking during an upgrade was pretty high so it was inevitable you needed to repair it eventually.  There was also a pet system where you sent a pet to run errands such as gathering materials or crafting items, however these would often come back sad having failed their errand and if they got too sad they would run away.  The only way to make them happy again was to buy them sweets which, yep you guessed it, were purchaseable from the online shop.  In the end even though this was a free game you were still gated with the need to spend lots of cash on virtual consumables in order to progress.  What was even worse is these items weren't a guaranteed success themselves.  You could fail to repair your gear and lose your hammers, requiring you to buy even more.  This game was trolling you into pissing your money away for nothing.

Nowadays if you look around the web you may come across the odd puzzle game that is legit free to play and isn't bombarded by intrusive adverts or paywalls, but sadly the same cannot be said for the Google Play Store.  Almost everything requires you to pay a premium or is infested with adverts and in-app purchases, especially recreational apps such as games.  There's thousands of them and they all have the same thing in common:

"You used up all your gems!  Click here to purchase more gems to continue playing or wait 12 hours to earn enough gems to play 5 mins worth before we gate you again."

It's annoying, it's overdone, and even if you buy those 100 gems to play enough to last you 10 mins before you get gated again you'll still have to watch the same 30 second advert every time you solve a puzzle.

Honestly I'm all in for paying a developer for their hard work especially if the product is good, but most of these apps are just copies of each other and have nothing special to them.  The ones that require you pay monthly to use them annoy me even more, especially if there's only 1 feature I'm most interested in but is blocked behind a paywall with a bunch of bloatware that's of no use or interest to me and there's nothing else that's being developed that justifies a regular subscription.  I would much rather the developer asked for a donation to unlock the extra feature and I chose how much I'd be willing to cop out for it.  If I think the feature is really good I'll pay what I can afford, and if it leads onto development of other useful features I'd be willing to pay further, but I will not pay an annual subscription for just 1 feature that comes with a bunch of sounds that I can download for free from Youtube.