Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-5012038-20130518014717/@comment-9723936-20130521000507

Everywhereusername wrote: Anybody in this thread and other threads who is complaining about Mobage making things harder for people who don't spend money on the game needs to check their entitlement and cultivate some perspective.

Mobage and the other companies behind this app are businesses. Their reason for existing is to make money. The game ends if they don't make money. Their owners and staff don't recoup their investments or have jobs if they don't make money. That's a lot more important to them than whether a bunch of whiny teenage freeloaders are happy, just as it would be to you if you were in their shoes trying to pay your own bills and do as well as you could for yourself.

They're giving you this free product (that wasn't free to develop or host or maintain) as a loss leader. If you don't want to spend money on its optional features, don't. But then don't complain that they're screwing you. You don't have to play this and they don't owe you anything. If anything, you owe them. But they're not here bitching at you about it because they understand the risks and rewards of this model of free game with optional in-game payments.

Take it for what it is and stop playing if you don't feel it's worth it to play as a leech or a miser. I'm a leech who has spent nothing and has only harvested free Mobacoins via other game download promotions, which I've been happy to get, and if they effectively box me out with their revenue-optimizing tweaks, well, that's just that. It's how life and business work and I can pony up if I want better goodies. It's my choice to do what I want with my money and I decide what's worth what to me. It's the same for you.

Mobage will find a balance that works best for them in terms of retained user base vs. revenue and everybody else can just deal with it. Go make your own game if you think you can run it better and are happy to give freeloaders more stuff. Otherwise just enjoy the game or move on.

I have no problems with mobage making money, and having premium content.

But what you fail to realize is that 85% if not more, of the playerbase are free players. Lose that much of the playerbase bringing in their friends and telling everyone how awesome the game is; or worse, writing bad reviews so that noone new comes to download it, and you lose ALL revenue.

And what they are doing; IE: making it impossible to upgrade cards, having no content outside of events, changing the rewards system to prevent giving out raid cards, making the upper range of point rewards less than the lower range, splitting up the rewards cards for events, etc... is going to eventually lose the whole game. Fast dimes over slow nickels.

If you keep the larger amount of the playerbase happy, they bring in more and more friends, and you make more money in the long run. But doing blatant money-grabs like this only tells the playerbase that WE are not cared for at all. Only our wallets. And that will cause the majority of us to go find another free game to play.

In a game like this, you HAVE to balance how powerful you make the pay-for options, or it dies. Sure, make some money off of those people that want to pay for some upgrade options. But forcing players of a "free" game to spend money on it just to remain competetive? One way ticket to death.