I have this theory that I bounce around sometimes. My students often take issue with it, but I think it might be generational for them. It might not be, so I’m going to offer up the theory here to people closer to my peer group.
Also I must preface this by saying that in the five years I’ve been sort of observing and forming this theory, IAP has gained a stronger and stronger foothold. But at least among some social circles, and particularly among a certain kind of gamer, it’s still considered shameful to pay for IAP.
This has never made sense to me. I can understand the shame of Pay-to-Win, and I can understand the fear of going insane and spending too much money (in the days of pay-by-the-hour AOL I once ran up a $500 internet bill I had to negotiate down). But two things from my own life experience/own understanding of how games work lead me to have respect for IAP when done right.
- Game designers and developers deserve money. If a game is free-to-play but has affordable IAP ($5-10 a month, under $20 to remove ads, etc.) that’s how the creators are getting paid. It’d be really hypocritical to teach people to produce games for a living and not believe in paying people for their labor.
- This is the more squishy one, and the one that doesn’t make as much sense to some of my students. I think it might be due to the fact that they didn’t really grow up with arcade machines. But put simply– arcade games were always pay-to-play. I grew up poor, but my friends and I still dropped $5 a night into arcade machines from our spending money (we worked for a living). If you figure we went to the arcade after school every day M-F, that’s $25 a week, $100 a month, into a coin collector for the right to play games.
Now IAP aren’t exactly the same, of course. You’re not renting the machine like you would at an arcade. You own the machine. And yes, you are buying virtual things that don’t have a physical analog. But In a strange sense, this is actually a better material deal for you than the old school arcade machine. I’d drop $5 into Mortal Kombat and walk away with nothing other than the experience and some new knowledge. If I drop $5 into Clash Royale, I will have whatever that $5 bought me still in my account, accessible for as long as I play the game. And in reality, this isn’t all that different from paying $15 for the right to utilize a WoW server and have characters saved, an act that isn’t considered shameful at all.
So my curiosity is this: how many people buy IAP in games, and if you do it, how do you consider that spending to work? Is it expenditure for momentary entertainment (like quarters in an arcade cabinet), compensation to a game’s crew for putting together their product, or is it succumbing to the system and allowing for a cash grab?
I have done my share if IAP (a bunch if you count WoW and Hearthstone). I’ve never, however, eclipsed my high school paper route money spending of $100 a month on micro-transactions. And yet sometimes I feel guilty, as a grown man, for spending $10 for currency in a game.
Why?
I’m still trying to figure that out.