The profits of mobile games far eclipse those of console games, reaching nearly quadruple console games’ profit, with an outright majority market share of the video games market in many regions. However, if you were to (hypothetically, I’m not legally responsible for your phone’s confiscation if you take it out in school) go to your Google Play Store or App Store or whatnot and look at their games, the vast majority of them are free, and the ones that aren’t are usually worth well under $10. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest selling video game console in history, and its two launch titles, the similarly incredibly well-selling Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, are worth $80 and $70, with a $20 DLC released two weeks ago. Console games in general have increased in prices in recent years, yet are consistently outpaced in revenue by mobile games. How are usually-free mobile games able to compete with, much less outcompete, these incredibly well-selling console games? 

Well, if you’ve ever played one of those “free” mobile games, you know the answer. Between progression that slows to a crawl without paying for timers to speed up or hearts to reset, in-game currency bought with real-world dollars, and the game’s coolest cosmetics locked behind a subscription paywall, these games operate by taking away the fun of a game — developing skills, building stats and resources, progressing the narrative, and expressing oneself through customization — and charging the players to bring it back. Many contain elements of gambling as well, so that players cannot even guarantee that their real-money purchases will help them in the game. Many intentionally reserve flashier cosmetics and more powerful items for paying players. Microtransaction-based profit models (colloquially called pay-to-win) are incredibly predatory towards players, and, as such, incredibly profitable.

Magnet students’ spending habits put this on obvious display. Students reported spending more money more often when games were “free” than they did on just buying games. An alarming number of students said they spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on in-game purchases. The largest amounts spent were on a few popular games, Roblox, Brawl Stars, and clash Royale. Meanwhile, the most popular game to buy outright was Minecraft, and most who bought it reported only paying a few dollars for it. Overall, in-game spending was vastly larger than on-game spending. 

This business model makes a lot of sense from a profit standpoint. Buying games costs a finite amount of money, but there is usually no limit to how much one person can spend on microtransactions. Spending spread out over a period of time is more difficult for players to conceptualize, and therefore dissuade themselves from. Children, the target audience for many of these games, are usually less patient than adult customers and have more difficulty understanding the value of money. Beyond that, there is a concept in consumer behavior called the “zero-price effect” — the difference in demand between an apparently free product and one with a very small up-front price is astronomical, far more than the difference between a high-price product and a low-priced one. Games with no up-front price, therefore, have a much easier time getting popular even if players are forced to fork out for a “free” game to have any fun.

The practices of mobile game developers to encourage players to spend money are often viewed as dishonest, and rightly so. They are built to influence players into spending money through every possible avenue. They also make it more difficult for honest developers to compete. Paid games without microtransactions, however superior in quality to their free competitors, will always be less profitable, and their developers will struggle to match the popularity and resources of the developers of “free” games which ironically often cost their players more. Even Bloons Tower Defense 6, a successful paid game endemic to mobile devices, supplements its ability to consistently release new content by charging impatient players for additional Monkey Money (which, to its credit, can be acquired relatively easily by playing the game for free). In a similar vein, After Inc. lacks ads or microtransactions (although it does have several paid DLC expansions), but its success is almost entirely buoyed by the popularity of its predecessor, Plague Inc., which ran ads and charged $1 for a “premium” ad free version. To clarify, I personally don’t mind paying a dollar to remove ads (as long as it’s not a subscription), but this just goes to show how difficult it is for a mobile game without ads or aggressive microtransactions to succeed on its own merits. 

In reality, monetization is a spectrum. On one end, there’s Monopoly Go!, a digital slot machine designed to get its players addicted with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into its marketing. On the other end, there’s Balatro, a virtual card game made by one guy that costs $9.99 to download and gets a batch of free cosmetics every couple months. One is gambling with the skin of a mobile game stretched over it, the other uses the aesthetics of gambling to create an actually fun mobile game. Most games, however, fall somewhere in between, and where one person draws the line is far from where another does. For my part, I’ll tolerate gameplay DLCs as long as the game feels complete without them, and appreciate it when mobile ports are cheaper than their PC counterparts, but am thoroughly nauseated by Battle-Pass type subscriptions and will never pay for something I could get by playing. 

So, what do I think should be done about this? I personally don’t think it’s right to dictate how people spend their money (and that people ought to be a bit more reluctant to spend money on mobile games in general), but if you want some suggestions, I have a few. Firstly, the money most people spend on in-game purchases could usually buy multiple other, better games. Secondly, never buy cosmetics as a status symbol. Thirdly, putting your phone on airplane mode will prevent games from running ads (this is what got me through PvZ and PvZ2). Finally, if you buy games for your PC, and you wouldn’t mind using touchscreen controls (or have a controller), there’s a good chance you can get it on your phone or tablet for a third of the price.

Anyways, that’s all from me. I’m off to see if I can reach Ascension 8 with Ironclad.