“Be thankful”? No thanks

While keeping an eye out on the forums, I keep seeing this rallying cry of “be thankful for what you’ve got”.

I have a lot of things to be thankful for – but FooPets isn’t one of them. FooPets is not something we’ve gotten by happenstance. Instead it’s a service. FooPets is a business, just like your favourite cafe down the way is a business. It may be your favourite, but if you get the wrong sandwich, you’ll send it back. If they make your sandwich with something you’re allergic to, you’ll send it back. If you find that somebody’s spit on your sandwich and stuffed several hairs of questionable origin in the middle of it, you’ll send it back. If they suddenly want fifty dollars for the sandwich that used to cost five dollars, you aren’t going to get that turkey sandwich, now, are you?

We owe nothing to the company itself. This is the beauty of a free market system. Bad companies will get slapped hard by the invisible hand, so to speak.

Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t spend money on online games ever. Just because one place makes crappy sandwiches doesn’t mean that sandwiches are inherently flawed and useless. In fact, I have an appreciation for the micropayment system, but it is rather tricky to balance a game where players are motivated to play and feel like they don’t have to pay, and a game that still generates revenue. That’s sort of the whole nature of the game: you want the free game to still feel free, so they can actually be motivated to play, but what you can buy still needs to be so interesting that they’re motivated to buy it. Ultimately, this is why I prefer a flat monthly fee: I find most games want to impose a heavy cost, so the game doesn’t feel free, just frustrating.

To keep games from feeling frustrating, I find that companies need to do 2 things: be up-front and give users a way to play completely free.

Being up-front is pretty self-explanatory. If a game isn’t really free, it needs to tell me so. A good example of this is how Turbine has made Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play. They present what you can and can’t do in a nice little chart. They’re even up-front about how you do eventually have to pay if you want to ride a horse in the game. This honesty and transparency is something I really like about them – in fact, I liked it enough to spend about twenty dollars so I could ride around on a shiny pretty horse in the game. That’s far more money than FooPets has ever gotten out of me – and out of you, I bet.

Giving users a way to play completely free is a bit trickier. Many games are incomplete until you buy parts of them – but I’m all right with that, as long as they’re up-front about it. (No “whoops! gotcha!” tricks.) Again, LOTRO excels at this – you want to make a character of a special class? You have to pay. You don’t get to level 10 and then get a “give us money if you want to continue!” button. (Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online is bad about this.)

A much better way to do this is to give the option to switch types of in-game currency. Puzzle Pirates is a great example of this. You have pieces of eight (like FooGems) and doubloons (like FooDollars), and you can exchange one for the other through the game itself – not having to rely on shady trades, the way people love to scam others on FooPets. So why is this a smart move? Very simple: people are lazy! They look at how many pieces of eight they’d need to make some doubloons, and it’s much easier for them to go, “Ugh, okay, it’s worth five dollars to have that now instead of later.” Thus the beauty of the micropayment system.

Unfortunately, FooPets seems to be missing all of these points.

So, shame on them. They don’t need our money.

 

~ Harpalyce