Parental Responsibility

A couple weeks ago I wrote a piece where I threw out my opinions on the “freemium” game model for developers. I then had a Google+ Hangout with the other people involved with FTI, went to bed, woke up, had coffee, and read the news shooting around the blogosphere. Low and behold there’s a new story about someone racking up a giant bill on the very “freemium” games I was praising in that article. Check it out here. This is getting ridiculous, something needs to be done about it…and a lot of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the parents. I’m not 100% familiar with the in-app-purchase system over on iTunes, but I know on Google’s Android system I have a lot of control over how much – or how little – security is required before my credit card it charged. This security is all part of the way Google handles the in-app purchases. Every purchase you make has to go through the Play Store, where it is checked out through Google Wallet. This gives me the same control over in-app purchases that I have over purchasing any other item with Google Wallet  – I can’t imagine the iTunes store integration being any different in that respect.

In most of these stories I read about the parents running to the virtual store demanding a refund. They didn’t mean to spend thousands of dollars. They didn’t know that their kid had access to their credit cards through these app marketplaces. They didn’t understand how these new-fangled marketplaces worked. Feel bad for them, give them their money back, and get the card companies to charge-back the funds for the poor parent who just didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

Boo. Hoo. Call me an asshole, but I really have no sympathy for the parents. None at all.

All throughout my life adults have been telling me the importance of knowing the consequence of my actions. I was supposed to understand what I was doing, before I did it. Not afterwards. They always spoke about this thing called “personal responsibility”. Know what else? “I didn’t know” was NEVER a good excuse…not once the entire time I was growing up do I remember saying “I didn’t know” and getting off the hook for whatever I did. Not. One. Time.

I know the world of technology is new to a lot of people. I understand that, and I sympathize to that. I also know that there is a plethora of resources designed, not only to help people understand how a lot of the new technology works, but also to help people excel at using it properly, and safely. To parents I give the following advice: seek out this material, use it, learn from it, and understand what you’re doing BEFORE you do it. Take some personal responsibility for yourself because that’s really the only way to protect yourself in ANY circumstance. In the case of the article I linked above the parent is trying to use the fraud protection on his credit card to get reimbursed. Fraud is when someone illicitly gains access to your credit card and uses it without your permission, not for when I hand you hand your credit card to someone and walk away. Guess which scenario we’re talking about here…I’ll give you a hint: it’s not fraud.

I’ll cut off my rant here, but what do you think. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know either way, I like to know what other people think. Tweet at me @CallChrisNow. E-mail me at chris@chriscall.me. Comment here. Reach out to me and let me know what you think, it’s one of the great things about the internet, let your voice be heard.

Freemium Ain't All Bad, Folks

The mobile market has been impacting a lot of traditional markets in ways some people haven’t considered. Off the top of my head I can think of a few impacted sectors right now: credit cards, standalone GPS units, and point-and-shoot cameras, all changed in massive ways by something so small. Even something as broad as the internet – a creation that pushed major innovation in the world of mobile computing – influenced itself, by those very devices and the way people use them. But one change has been making headlines lately – the new model in the gaming world known as “freemium” designed to support the developers not by initially purchasing the game, but instead through the use of add-on “micro-transactions”; small transactions the user makes within the game itself. This model has been used in other arenas before, but it’s making a massive push in the mobile gaming market…and that people have some strong opinions about it.

A lot of people have been complaining about this model, and that’s understandable…but not for the reason people expect. It’s understandable because of the speed at which the gaming industry has adopted the new model. It’s understandable because the general consumer hasn’t had a lot of time to adjust to the new model. It’s even understandable because the games are marked as “free” in the store instead of “freemium” or “micro-transaction supported”, and that can be a little misleading to customers. It isn’t, however, understandable because you “want the game to be free.” Remember people: developers put real work into developing the games you enjoy, don’t bash them for expecting something in return for that work, they have bills to pay too, just like you, and who doesn’t deserve to be rewarded for creating something that you enjoy so much?

If you ask me, the freemium model works…and to be honest I really enjoy it. I love being able to get a feel for a game before I have to commit any of my money to it. I love being able to experience the game the way I want to without paying for things I don’t want or wouldn’t use. I also love that more and more of these games are beginning to work really creative ways of utilizing the freemium model within their games – take Real Racing 3 for example. A lot of games allow you to purchase in-app “gold” that can be used to accelerate gameplay, but normally this means skipping an artificial timer that doesn’t have any natural place in the game. In Real Racing 3 you can use this gold to speed up repairs, or part deliveries…things that actually take time in the real world. It feels better, it feels natural, and it makes the game that much more realistic.

There are other advantages to the freemium model too; since it hit the markets as a major player in the mobile world Android developers have been complaining of the ease with which users have been able to pirate their games – some even going so far as to avoid developing for the platform entirely for fear of lost profits (I’m looking at you Infinity Blade). By requiring purchases in a game to be made through a server off in the cloud somewhere it becomes much more difficult for a person to pirate the experience that the developer would otherwise be providing. Sure somebody could find the game file on the internet, but that doesn’t give them anything more than someone could freely get form the application market directly.

It isn’t all happiness and sunshine though, there are some flaws with the system. Personally, I look at these as growing pains more than anything. The system is still relatively new…certainly more so than the traditional “buy a game, play a game” model we have been using for the entirety of gaming history. Most of the games out there currently using the freemium model make it far too easy to accidentally purchase upwards of a hundred dollars worth of in-game content with a single click, and getting a refund can be difficult or even impossible. Sure we can chalk it up to knowing what you’re getting yourself into before you press the button, but does it really need to be that easy to drop a hundred dollars on a game? There has been more than one instance of kids hitting these buttons not understanding what they’re doing and spending hundreds of dollars in the process, (read one here) and that’s something that needs to be fixed. A combination of changes by the developer and some responsibility from the parent should be enough to fix these issues in what I otherwise consider to be a promising model for distributing digital content.

What do you think? I know this is a hot-button topic, and I’d really like to hear your opinions. Leave a comment, connect with me on Twitter at @CallChrisNow, or send me an e-mail at chris@chriscall.me and let me know how you feel about the “freemium” market. Do you like it? Hate it? How can it be made better? Is there a better model out there? Let me know! I look forward to hearing your ideas.