The colossal influx of ‘free’ games
Do you remember when the word ‘lite’ would be a tag on your old iPod games?
Everyone loves free stuff, people love free stuff even more than they love cheap stuff, I would even go as far as to say that the jump of love between something that costs a penny and something that costs nothing, is exponential relative to that margin. I suppose it’s more prevalent in a generation of serial worriers, ‘What if my bills cost £30.01 this month? I did have the TV on standby on Tuesday night…’.
Anyway, it was rather less cleverly sold in the old Apple days, where they would allow the download of ‘Doodle Jump LITE’, ‘Tap tap LITE’ and ‘Lightsaber LITE’. They would cut you off and ask you to vacate like a capricious lifeguard just as you were starting to have fun. That, or they would only give you one level, with padlocks etched over levels 2–100. The evolution of this in mobile games are reworks or ‘skins’ of RPG games with the exact same recipe, where they recommend you upgrade a building and then give you a timer for when it’s worth coming back, which is usually in a few hours’ time. By the way, when I talk of these game skins, you may have seen recommended ads for things like ‘Game of War’, ‘Kingdom War’, ‘War of Game’ and ‘of War Game’. In these games you upgrade barracks and complete objectives, until you realise you’re bored out of your wits. *Pssst* (You can usually buy crystals to speed up the wait time).
Today’s catalogue of free games will be far more familiar to the average reader: Fortnite, Warzone and most recently Fall Guy. Fortnite was most certainly that kindling to a firework display of Battle Royales, free games, and of course, free Battle Royale games. Battle Royale follows the concept where lobbies are created of 60–100 people, all competing, with one winner.
The main point of this article though.
Are these really free games? I would counter that they are free to download, but for so many people their pockets will not remain undisturbed. On their first full year, Fortnite made $2.4 billion. The game was free. The culture of it all is now far more devious. The games prey on addiction, and for impressionable children, that’s almost a certainty, and then offer cool looking variants to their character or props. If you are not a gamer, in which case I solute your attention span, you may estimate that kids with no income would rarely be swayed by something as trivial as a virtual hat or even a dance (yes that costs money). You would be wrong.
I’m back. Just had to google ‘Fortnite dances’, if my internet cookies are watching, please be gentle. The average cost of a good dance (stop it) is about 1000 ‘V-Bucks’, which is roughly the cost of the battle pass. That costs £7.99/$9.99, so that is the equivalent of 240,000 dances bought in 2018, by children. I should add a disclaimer, I am not promoting the game by saying its name over and over. Usually you’d say, ‘other Battle Royale games are available’, and they are in their millions. Anyway. Why are kids buying such weird things, they know economics well enough to know they can buy quite a lot of sweets with that. What it is, is that those who don’t indulge in the microtransactions of these games have actually slipped into the minority, those who don’t are judged as a casual and looked upon in quite a disrespected way. Anyone that is dressed as a default character or who only does default dances are actually categorised and segregated somewhat. Of course, it’s moreso just a projection of how awful we are as humans than the game’s fault.
It’s definitely not illegal to use addiction in children in order to make billions, I’d say it’s immoral, but many things sold today is thrusting a handful of dirt in your face and shrewdly convincing you it’s a must have. Should we be outraged?
