It seems as though in-app purchases have become a universally accepted constant when dealing with mobile apps, both free and paid. Of course, developers need to earn money for the time and resources spent creating new apps, but is there a line that separates making an honest living and scamming users out of content that should be free? I have played numerous "popular" games with ridiculous limitations on how long they can actually be played before requiring some kind of artificially imposed wait. The only alternative to this wait, of course, is an IAP that either reduces or eliminates it, sometimes permanently, but usually not. Why is it acceptable nowadays for games to actively hinder players from playing them if the players do not continuously feed them money? Furthermore, I've heard plenty of horror stories about games marketed to young children featuring exorbitant in-app purchases, leading to parents bewildered by a large bill after leaving their child to play with the app. While it's true that the parents should monitor their children and can use parental controls to disable in-app purchases, it seems like this is a fairly blatant ploy by app developers seeking to take advantage of unsuspecting children whose parents who fail to do these things. I wouldn't consider myself old by any stretch of the imagination, but "back in my day," Flash games were some of the most popular app-like games on the Internet, and they were funded almost exclusively by ads, rather than forced microtransactions. So many massively popular apps nowadays are directly descended from Flash games of the past, yet the business model has changed entirely. Now of course, I am generalizing quite a bit in this rant. There are plenty of apps out there with IAPs that are completely optional and well worth the price. Unfortunately, these seem to be in the minority. The games hitting the front pages of various app stores (likely in part from mass advertising with all of the money they earned through IAPs) rarely follow this admirable strategy. What are your opinions on this matter? Is there any way the mobile gaming community can discourage these shady practices? Are there any good or bad examples of apps with IAPs that you have seen recently?
