Freemium games

[Inkingsama]

I've been playing pokemon shuffle. Cool little game, it's a shame that it clearly shows that it wants to get it's hands into your wallet. As of now the game is complete because the developer dropped the game so if you want to try it, you can do it without fear of them doing radical changes out of nowhere.

The only other freemium game that i played was pokemon picross on the 3ds and that one really wanted you to pay up. I remember i got stuck at one level because to get into the next world, you had to pay in-game currency but i coulnd't get the amount needed just by doing the daily puzzles so i dropped the game. It's a shame because i really liked it and now the game is gone.

 

[Gorse]

The only other freemium game that i played was pokemon picross on the 3ds and that one really wanted you to pay up

Nintendo didn’t really get freemium gaming in the 3DS era, and they experimented a LOT. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball was a very fun game, but it really mishandled the weird “haggling” gimmick for buying mini games with real-world money — if you played the game right, all the haggling BS was pointless, and if you didn’t, you got ripped off.

I also had this freemium Pokemon Shuffle game that was EXTREMELY strict about how much you could play every day for free. Later levels got insanely difficult and prolonged, and progressing past a certain point just didn’t seem plausible without coughing up ka-ching. I don’t think they learned how to do digital in-app payments properly until that mobile Fire Emblem game.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

The only "Freemium" game I know is Baseball 9 on Android.

It honestly looked like it was gonna grab for my wallet as soon as possible, but I never spent a single dime on it. It's excruciatingly difficult leveling up my team by grinding, but the game is a lot of fun and doesn't feel unbalanced regardless of how you play it (hell, I even pitched a perfect game on my third outing with the most basic team ever).

 

[Yousef]

Nintendo didn’t really get freemium gaming in the 3DS era, and they experimented a LOT. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball was a very fun game, but it really mishandled the weird “haggling” gimmick for buying mini games with real-world money — if you played the game right, all the haggling BS was pointless, and if you didn’t, you got ripped off.

I also had this freemium Pokemon Shuffle game that was EXTREMELY strict about how much you could play every day for free. Later levels got insanely difficult and prolonged, and progressing past a certain point just didn’t seem plausible without coughing up ka-ching. I don’t think they learned how to do digital in-app payments properly until that mobile Fire Emblem game.

Technically the switch online service is a freemuim service, you get a lot of games for free, just not the ones you asked for or haven’t already played ;)

 

[Inkingsama]

Nintendo didn’t really get freemium gaming in the 3DS era, and they experimented a LOT. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball was a very fun game, but it really mishandled the weird “haggling” gimmick for buying mini games with real-world money — if you played the game right, all the haggling BS was pointless, and if you didn’t, you got ripped off.

I also had this freemium Pokemon Shuffle game that was EXTREMELY strict about how much you could play every day for free. Later levels got insanely difficult and prolonged, and progressing past a certain point just didn’t seem plausible without coughing up ka-ching. I don’t think they learned how to do digital in-app payments properly until that mobile Fire Emblem game.

Yeah, i also played shuffle on the 3ds and dropped that one too because of that. I got the game on release and i remember that the first update fixed a bug that let you drag pokemon that you didn't have into your active party, so people where playing with mewtwo and the like from day one but i didn't know about it. Man, i felt so ripped off when i realized i just missed such a great opportunity to cheat the game.

The rusty real deal thing was bad too. If i remember correctly, they gave the first mini game for free but the next one you had to pay, completely beating the "freemium" aspect. There was also this "game" that was a sticker claw machine or something so you could decorate your 3ds main menu but i thought it was way too much to ask people to pay for something like that.

 

[marky]

I'm playing WWE Supercard from season 1. It's really nice freemium game, because it's possible to reach the highest tiers without paying, you just need to play a bit more and earn rewards available for activity and daily logins, as well as codes for free card packs that sometimes appear on official social media. For example, there are now 12 codes for the twelve days of Christmas.

 

[psvitaforever]

"Gems of War" (we're playing it on Switch, but I think it's also on Steam). There's no need to pay a cent if you don't want to, there's almost no limit of things you can do in a day (PvP, Dungeons, Daily Adventures, Exploring, etc).

 

[bjork]

The rusty real deal thing was bad too. If i remember correctly, they gave the first mini game for free but the next one you had to pay, completely beating the "freemium" aspect. There was also this "game" that was a sticker claw machine or something so you could decorate your 3ds main menu but i thought it was way too much to ask people to pay for something like that.

I kinda liked the aspect of haggling down, iirc you couldn't get the whole thing for free or anything, but you could reduce the price by over 50%? I don't think I've seen it used anywhere else, so all I can figure is it was not a success. I'd love to see it in gacha games, like answer a quiz correctly and get some kind of discount.