How Freemium Has Made App Market An Interactive Trash Box
There is more free gaming stuff in the app market as compared to the paid content. Whereas games like WMS Slots are paid for by the online casino operator, free gaming apps for both Android and IOS aren’t paid for by anybody but the developer.
These are called freemium. Game developers understand that many people balk at the idea of paying more than $5 per game. However, these companies will not make money if they offer their products for anything less than $5.
So why do they offer it for free?
People Will Not Pay for Games
The business model is simple. A player downloads a free game and plays it. However, the player needs to accumulate coins, in-game currency, or lives to advance through the game. And this is how freemium developers earn money. The player has to buy these coins to progress. Otherwise, he has to wait for days or grind the gameplay to earn these coins, which can take days if not weeks to fulfil.
In the beginning, when the iPhone was first introduced in 2007, many apps were paid. However, it did not take long for developers to realise that people will not shell out a lot of money for applications that they have never tried. And so, the companies resorted to the freemium model.
The owners of the operating systems, like Windows, IOS, and Android, do not charge a developer for advertising the app. But the developer has to pay these companies (Windows, Apple, Google) an app store fee. Different platforms charge different rates, but Google averages at 30%.
A study shows that while people will not pay for games, they are willing to spend on in-app purchases. One reason behind this is simple: once a person has tried out the game and liked it, he will be willing to spend to achieve his gaming objectives.
And the other reason? Addiction.
People Are Addicted to Games
Gamers know this feeling. Their day isn’t complete without playing their favourite game. This kind of addiction has been around since the earliest days of mankind, even way before gadgets were made. Today, mobile gaming addiction has become a large problem for many people.
A study about mobile gaming addiction was published several years ago. The study concluded that what determines whether a person is addicted or not is its financial implications to a person’s life. According to the study, the negative financial consequences of gaming determines whether a person is still making rational decisions or not.
And this is where game developers come in. They created games that are based on gambling principles, made them colourful, added a few words of encouragement for every achievement, and finally hooked consumers. They understand this concept of addiction and decided to cash in on it. Forget ethics. Forget morals. Think only about cash. And where is cash, there is trash.
People Prefer Trash More Than Quality
Since displaying the app is free and you only pay when you sold it, it was easy for many developers, including amateurs, to post their useless apps with little to no risk. All they have to do is to create a game and post it in an app store.
The problem here is that nobody really regulates these developers. To make things worse, many developers simply copy the concept of other successful apps and peddle it as their own. And this is what caused the proliferation of garbage apps that exist in app markets today.
Add to that the fact that there are young successful developers who earned millions by building apps. They touted their success in social media and this caused a lot of wannabes to quit college, build apps, and offer them for free in the app market.
Consumers loved this. They would rather play free, low-quality games than pay $5. It is this demand that fuels developers churn out inept apps from incompetent developers.
Conclusion
Today, app stores have become a pit of apps for the brain-dead. There simply is no room for developers of quality games anymore. Most of the things you see are happy looking games that operate between two to four principles – more like gambling without a payout. The problem with this is that those who are addicted to these spend so much money without even getting any possibility of return. They would have been better off using their money in online casinos.
In fact, a study shows that more than half of app revenues come from only 0.15% of mobile users. This means that a mobile game addict out of every 650 gamers accounts for more than half of all the money paid for that game.
If app stores do not do something about it, we will see more of these hopeless developers and their asinine freemium games.
