Don’t trust them. They lure you in with their cuteness, but they’re sketchy trash rabbits underneath

At my old apartment there were alley rabbits. I’d head out the back door for the day and see some rabbits going through a trash bag

Good correction, thanks! I didn’t know about that. I suppose the key there are google play points. Do you know if you could do it separately from that?

Not in google play or iOS I don’t think. Someone else may know more, though.

Store credit is not necessarily simple. There are tons of laws about that kind of thing that differ country to country and in the US state to state. For example in my state, gift certificates can’t expire, so once you give one away as the dev you have to track that on your books forever, even if no one ever uses it. In your free example it’s even worse, because the company has to write that money off as real money, because it can never expire. It’s basically the same as giving away real money from a bookkeeping perspective (at least in my state). Someone with more bookkeeping knowledge can probably give a better answer but that’s my limited understanding of that as a sole proprietor who does my own books.

I would also question if store credit is actually any less predatory than a premium currency. If the premium currency is transparent and easy to understand it’s basically the same thing, no? Hypothetically, if I’m a scummy developer, I could sell $5 in store credit, and then make all the items on the store cost $8. That’s the same result for the player as bad monetization schemes with premium currency. I know in your example you’re saying give it away, but somewhere in there the developer is going to need to make money. They can’t give credit away for in-game currency and hope to stay afloat as a business for long without some deeply predatory stuff going on like in roblox.

At the end of the day I think everything you’re saying is probably feasible in some form for a AAA dev, but not for small devs. Personally I’m also thinking about small devs without an army of compliance specialists and lawyers. I’d like indies to also be able to make money, not just the conglomerates.

For example, saying a system could be worked out to localize an in-game economy is a hand wave. Every game works differently under the hood and in how it paces things, and this would be a huge undertaking to implement and maintain (probably a nonstarter for a small team). It involves more than simple conversion.

Does someone from a weak currency country get different rewards by playing the game than someone from a strong currency? How does that work if that reward is a whole item, not a bit of currency? Do we really want capitalistic shenanigans to extend into the gameplay directly? Personally I prefer that stuff to be cordoned off in the in-game shop.

That’s my take on all that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t work for a AAA dev, so take this stuff with a grain of salt. My experience comes from having to tackle all these issues as a tiny indie dev.

Can you give me an example of one you’ve seen?

The original poster was saying paid currency shouldn’t exist, so I think in that scenario, you could only have vouchers for a whole in-game item. So for example if an item costed $5, then yes you could give away codes to redeem that item.

There’s also an operational overhead to doing it that way compared to in-game currency though, because setting up products in google play/iOS can be kind of a pain compared to adding them to your own systems. Generally the dev wants as much to be under their control as possible because they have more flexibility that way compared to making products in the app stores.

Also worth noting that iOS will block your app if you provide ways to get products (meaning things that cost real money) through ways other than the app store. So that means the dev wouldn’t be able to ever give you something in the game itself if that thing can also be bought. They could only give coupon codes (these are manually generated) for products to use in the app store interface.

I’d be interested to hear an example of one you’ve seen because it might be a way to approach it that I’m not thinking about.

I’m with you on that. Burgers can definitely get too messy sometimes.

There are many many examples of predatory uses of in game currencies, but here are some big reasons devs use them besides being scummy.

• Giving currency for free: giving people real money isn’t something any dev wants to deal with, so giving in game currency allows this to happen. This also applies to games where you can convert free currency to premium currency.
• Local currencies: currency packages can be set to local prices without having to localize the in-game economy itself. This simplifies development a lot.
• Weak promotion support on distributor platforms: believe it or not, iOS and android have incredibly weak promotion and sale support. By giving in-game currency, it gets around that failing of the platforms because the game can do whatever it wants with the in-game currency.

Transparency is good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You nailed it about the gameplay in your guess. It was very cutting edge when it came out. The animations on the plasmids were especially memorable I recall. It’s interesting to hear that part doesn’t hold up so well.

I’d highly recommend you play 2 as well. It’s quite different but I thought it was the best of the series gameplay-wise.

If you like the setting I would also recommend you go on to play BioShock infinite and specifically the DLC for it. I won’t say why, and I recommend you go through the base game first (very cool in its own right), but the DLC is really going to tickle your fancy I think.

That top hat guy is massive if that’s a regular elephant

Things like apkmirror are doing god’s work as far as I’m concerned. No problems with them at all.

I was really shocked at the speed of it. Very surreal experience.

This stuff is way over my head, so sorry if this is a dumb question: if it’s using only historical weather data, wouldn’t it be bad dealing with changing weather? Like climate change?

Totally agreed on that. Sorry didn’t mean to derail the thread. I just thought someone might be interested to know about the automated stuff.

Sounds believable. We definitely didn’t download it so I couldn’t say for sure.

I learned when I released an unsuccessful mobile game a couple years ago that there are apparently automated piracy sites out there. I say that because we found a seemingly hacked version of the game on some sketchy app sites just a week after releasing it (and nobody knew about our game, so I highly doubt it was done by hand).

Oh I see. Sorry for the off-topic response then!

It’s a shame that multiplayer games really struggle with paid models these days. It heavily cut into a player base if things aren’t free to play. That kind of forces all but the biggest releases to turn to other monetization models in order to keep the base game free.

I think it’s tough with card games because they come from a physical form of lootboxes. Being expensive is kind of baked into their lineage. Collecting cards is a big part of the fun, and if you made it very easy to do I think it’s hard to say whether people would enjoy them as much.

I don’t play any collectible card games anymore because I don’t want to pay for it anymore, but there is something very entertaining about the model even if it’s easy to argue it’s a scummy business model by today’s standards.

I haven’t looked into this game beyond your description, but it does sound like a pretty weird model. Do you also have to pay for cards on top of that?

I remember kind of disliking the arena system in hearthstone because I liked the game mode a lot, but as a casual player it was really hard to get to play it much. I guess they wanted to keep people from spending all their time there since you didn’t need to buy cards to play. I much preferred magic arena’s drafts where you pay an upfront cost but get to keep all the cards you played with. Much more accessible for casual players and more satisfying, too, since you always get something out of it.

What the heck is a live action Lego movie

If you want to double down on the puzzle aspect, check out Toki Tori 2. It’s a metroidvania side scrolling puzzle game. The wild part of it is you basically only have 2 moves, but you have to figure out how to use those moves to solve puzzles in the environment to progress. There are no actual hard walls like in a regular metroidvania, it’s just your understanding of how you can manipulate and influence objects in the world that gates you from getting to new places.