In app purchase

LeSedna

Mat or Mateo
Jan 20, 2008
5,391
2
38
Montpellier, France
in-app1.jpg


I can't be the only one hating/boycotting this new 2012/2013 trend !

If it is a productivity app with an in app purchase to unlock its features, or add an extension, I'm fine with it. Like my Navigon GPS, I decided I would fancy the Europe maps update plan instead of some limited number of maps because I'm using it just every other day offline, so I paid for it from inside the app, that's fine and quite practical.

But if you have to pay 0.99 every other day/hour/minute to use it or play with it, it is ridiculously annoying and I feel raped everytime I am asked to pay 0.89e ! I religiously uninstall any game or app that uses the in app model as their main/only one and unfortunately this is the majority now. It's also funny sometimes to calculate how much the game would cost if you wanted to unlock everything. There is this popular (even though shitty) race game on iOs (can't remember the name) where if you unlock everything with your credit card instead of playing 943 days non stop to get to the same point, the game ends up costing you something like 200 or 300 dollars. An iOs game !
 
I started an app business on the side last year, and we're about to start development on our 3rd app. i agree that as a user it can be annoying to download a 'free game' and then have to pay to unlock certain features. but at the same time as a developer, it's kind of the only option left when users are unwilling to pay even 0.99c for a game. For example with one of our apps, we might get 100 paid downloads in a day at 99c, and 7k downloads of the free version. At this point we make the same or more off of ads in free apps than from paid downloads...

The IAP model works well because it gets users to try the game at no risk, and then if they really like the game, they'll spend money on it. I don't see what's wrong with that. I'm assuming you (and others) have more of a problem with games that market themselves as being totally free, yet are full of IAP's.