Google To Stop Describing Games With In-App Purchases As 'Free' 139
An anonymous reader writes After a series of investigations, lawsuits, and fines over how in-app purchases are advertised and communicated to users, Google has agreed to stop labeling games that use in-app purchases as "Free." This change is the result of a request by the European Commission to stop misleading customers about the costs involved with using certain apps. "Games should not contain direct exhortation to children to buy items in a game or to persuade an adult to buy items for them; Consumers should be adequately informed about the payment arrangements for purchases and should not be debited through default settings without consumers' explicit consent." The EC notes that Apple has not yet done anything to address these concerns.
Re:Apple has 'done nothing'??? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only one problem with this is there are a few good games where you can play it all for free and the in-apps are completely optional.
Sure, the vast majority of freemium games are crap and serve only to milk people of money, but there are some (Jetpack Joyride, say) where not paying is completely an option - you're really just doing a time-money tradeoff. Play it often and you can get everything, play it a little and pay up to get the thing quicker.
So it's not correct to say that game isn't free, either - it can be played completely for free.
Granted, I did say the vast majority of apps don't qualify for this, but there's still a few that can be played completely to completion without investing a single dime.
Then there are ones that offer in-apps that do stuff like remove ads - and that's it. Is it a free app, or a paid app? You can use the full thing either way, just one has ad content on it.
Operant conditioning - just like gambling (Score:5, Interesting)
Freemium vs DLC (Score:4, Interesting)
What I wish app stores made it easier to do is to distinguish between apps that offer one-time DLC in the form additional content (e.g. more levels, maps, factions, game modes, etc.) vs freemium apps with repeatable purchases for in-game currency and power-ups (which you need to get around the "free" game's increasing difficulty and enforced waits). The former is fine, and a good way to let people try-before-they-buy, but the latter is a toxic plague of money-grubbing crapware. As-is, I have to do things like drill down into the list of top in-app purchases and read the titles to see if consists of things like "level pack" or "10,000 gems". I'd also love it if they showed what percentage of users buy which in-app purchases, or the median amount of money spent per user on in-app purchases.