Fenen

In your arcade games and mobile games do you as developers acknowledge the incentive you have to make the game difficult / cumbersome in parts to push the player to spend money?

I feel like the free to play monetary platform puts the money and fun aspects completely at odds with each other in most implementations and it has completely soured me to most games that use it. What's to stop you from adding obstacles or monotony to make more money?

Lately I feel like most mobile games are just trying to rip me off. Make the game fun enough to get you hooked and then go full Skinner box and milk them for all you can. Even if it is 100% ad driven I just know that in some conference room somewhere they are deciding how many / how often they can display an ad that the user will either willingly suffer them or pay to remove the annoyance.

At this point I'm more likely to just buy a game outright because I don't trust game developers not to do this to me.

So how do you settle on a rate for advancement? Too fast and you devalue the reward, too slow and you frustrate your users.

In my experience, they tend to feel parabolic. A lot of rewards early -- give them the first "hit" for free, something that gives an advantage. Then ramp up the difficulty over time and when they run out of reward advantages they give you money for more.

The big question is whether you balance the game with the rewards in mind such that it eventually becomes overly difficult to complete objectives without them.