“If real money was used - and no successful game developer does this - then the consumer would see their money going down as they play and become apprehensive,” writes Shokrizade. South Parks’ “prince of Canada” says it himself: You use fake money so that players don’t realize they are spending their actual cash. This technique alone is effective enough to make consumers of any brain-development level spend money.”Īnother example of free-to-play developers trying to use players’ brains against them is the alternative in-game currencies. The same type of achievement loss is in effect in. “If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. “To the brain, this is not just a loss of time,” game designer Ramin Shokrizade wrote in a blog on Gamasutra last June. If your character dies, all that loot is lost … unless you pay a dollar.

So the game typically throws a very tough boss in front of the exit. You have the stuff and it’s in your bag, but you need to get out of the dungeon first or else you’ll lose all that stuff. In Puzzle & Dragons, players go through dungeons and collect all kinds of awesome loot.

Developper GungHo Online knows how to put players into situations that create “fun pain” where the player is uncomfortable and often finds that spending money is the best way to relief that discomfort. At its core is a Pokémon-style monster-collection gameplay loop where players want to keep grinding to find and improve their dragons. Ostensibly, this is a colorful and simple puzzle game with role-playing elements. Take the Japanese megahit Puzzle & Dragons for example. This creates games that play you as much as you’re playing them. It goes to the heart of this business model: the incentive for free-to-play developers isn’t to figure out ways to thrill customers - it’s to figure out ways to put players into situations where they want to spend more money. In the episode, Canada’s minister for mobile games explains that if developers make the games “truly fun” then players would have no reason to pay for microtransactions. And South Park is right about free-to-play games.

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