Predatory Game Monetization

If games could produce free money, they will not be selling games but producing those coins

Same applies to drugs. Those game are micro-optimized to trick people into paying money for it. No one would ever say "The money I spent on farmville was well spent".

This picture is too black and white. I have no interest in EA games so I don’t know if it appliesto them, but most “social” games make the bulk of their revenue from players paying small amounts every now and then, or ideally on a regular (a bit every events) shedule. The main target is not the whales, it’s the sustainable long tail (though paying players stay a small minority, even 4~5% of hundreds of thousands of users is a big pool).This is basically the “recurring revenue” model, it’s the

What's in it for the game developers? They don't profit from the scam so why would they support it?

Games being one of the most exploitative bits of the industry :/

"The company generates revenue by selling virtual items to a small fraction of its players who wish to enhance their playing experience" should read "The company generates revenue by psychologically manipulating players into spending money in order to progress through the game"

You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right? They're paying money for a chance at winning certain pixels and you're pretending in your head that they're all wealthy millionaires and justifying it to yourself.If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts. You're not fooling me.

The game developers are trying to enable people to part with the cash. That's it. Baiting people in to spending too much (which means people can't afford it, that's why it's too much) is the intended effect.It's a couple centuries to late to be pretending that it's just some tragic oopsie

I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?

Human nature doesn't change over 18 months. From my experience this has been the case for non-Zynga games as well, such as MMO's which allow buying ingame items with real money. People that put real money into the game are releatively rare, but those that do can sometimes put in extremely large amounts to increase their chance of winning and status within the game.