Video game micropayments
Some video games take a lot of time. RPGs in particular are known for repetitive grinding, fighting random monsters for hours to raise the hero's statistics. A lot of people like the games but just don't have the time to play the repetitive parts.
With MMORPGs, where you are already paying someone a fee for the opportunity to play, complaints often arise along these lines: "It's too much work to level up. I'm not 14 anymore and I can't play the game for ten hours a day. If I had money to spend, I might pay a few bucks to go up a couple levels."
Micropayments have been the next great thing for about fifteen years and have never really caught on. However, there is an opportunity for micropayments in time-intensive video games. We have already seen people trading MMORPG gold over E-Bay whether the developers like it or not, and I've never understood why the developers don't just sell gold and bonuses directly. Now for a segue...
I've been playing a free Flash RPG called "World Of Pain 3" that is badly imbalanced. Each new realm is very difficult until you do some leveling up. To make up for the imbalance, better weapons are overpowered to the point that you can quintuple your damage by improving your weapon. The difficulty of the game's boss fight is an extension of that design.
At the time you reach the boss, the best weapon you're likely to have does about 10,000 damage while the boss has 9,550,000 hit points. You can happily storm the final castle but the boss's difficulty approaches mathematical impossibility; divide his HP / your attack and compare that to your HP * the number of healing spells you can cast / his attack, and the left side is going to be higher unless you do some leveling up and gold farming.
Every time you visit a weapon shop, the game suggests an alternative:
Shop offered by MaxGames.com
New! Get some gold and buy the best weapons of the game!
An arrow points to a "Buy Gold!" button which I assume would lead to a way of exchanging money or PayPal currency for in-game gold if I wasn't playing the game behind ZoneAlarm. To tempt or taunt you, some of the weapon shops carry items valued in the high six figures when the player will have trouble scrounging up a couple thousand gold pieces for a better sword. If you want those super-weapons, you will probably have to spend some real money to buy in-game gold or a flash decompiler like Eltima Trillix.
If time is money, what's the difference between spending an hour to level up and spending an hour's wages? And if you have more free money than free time, and if that part of the game is that boring, spending money might be more desirable.
If video game micropayments get more popular, the downside is that the more that people start to spend money on in-game bonuses, the more likely it is that developers will make their games harder to encourage people to spend money to make the game easier. In the future, you might pick up an engaging, well-reviewed game and find out that it is nearly impossible to win without paying the developers extra money on top of what you paid to buy the game. Content might be locked behind a paywall by making it impossibly hard to get to otherwise or by literally locking it behind logic that will not open until you pay the money. If you want to pick up the game and play it 20 years after the developers go out of business, you can forget about it.
[Edit: I hear that console games with network connections are already starting to use micropayments.]
Sidenotes about World Of Pain 3 gameplay:
Sidenote on improving weapons: I follow the strategy of not upgrading straight from one weapon to the next, but saving money until I need a new weapon and then collecting gold until I can afford the best affordable one. When I said that upgrading a weapon quintupled my power, I was skipping a few weapons by using the same strategy that I use for any RPG of this type. The increase in weapon power is still unusual. In numbers, my weapon strength went from 15 to 90 to 600 to 2,500, and damage seemed to be based on a multiple of that.
Sidenote on achievement: One sign of the game's imbalance is that buying a new weapon allowed my hero to run through earlier realms and defeat what had been difficult enemies in one hit. Defeating difficult enemies in one hit is satisfying if you have built up a more powerful character or if you found a special technique to win the battle easily. If your same-level character can now smite enemies that had been difficult and the only reason is that you bought a better weapon, there is less of a sense of achievement.
For a better balanced game, try Unfairy Tales.
Sidenote on beating the boss: I beat the boss by grinding in the final castle and exploiting a bug in the game. The enemies in the final castle give up to 10 times as much gold and five times as much experience as anywhere else. This brought some of the more powerful weapons into reach and a side effect of getting all that gold was that I gained about 20 levels. The weapon I got raised my damage to around 25,000, which was sufficient.
The bug was the key to victory and is based on that gameplay fact that your cooldown time between attacks is based on your agility, but a different amount of time is calculated for every fight. I discovered that the game recalculates the cooldown time every time you use an item in your inventory. I had been maximizing my hero's agility throughout the game so that I could get in several hits between enemy attacks, and I noticed that the "Ready" bar was moving at a different speed every time I went for a large mana potion. If I did not like how fast the "Ready" bar was moving, I could hit the Inventory again on my next turn. Eventually I received the blessings of R'hash'g the random number goddess and got a result that was so far in my favor that the Ready bar filled up instantaneously. While the boss was fighting a turn-based RPG battle, I could attack as fast as I could click the Attack button. My finger gave out before my mouse or the boss did, but I have nine more! And that is how I nibbled the end boss to death. Without that trick, I would have needed to buy more large mana potions but victory would still have been doable.