I can’t say that I like titles as interrogative sentences, but then again, I do a lot of other things that I don’t like, like spending money on In-App Purchases. This is only a dollar, so what’s the problem anyway, right? Well, I’m going straight to the topic.

Let’s start with a rough definition of in-app purchases for those unfamiliar with this term (I’m not sure if anyone is living in a cave). An in-app purchase refers to items, services, points, coins, anything of value in the game that a player can buy. I myself see this “anything valuable” in 2 categories.

The first is anything that affects your gameplay, or anything that gives you different kinds of advantages over all other players or monsters. Let’s say there are 2 types of currencies in the game and one of these currencies is extremely hard to get, or you only get it once a day or limited in some way. The game offers you this “extremely hard to get currency” in its “app store”. As a dedicated and impatient gamer, you don’t want to collect enough of these coins for a year to get your dream weapon and instead buy this coin using the notorious “in-app store”.

The second category is cosmetics, which means only visual changes or visual add-ons. For example, a pet that goes with you everywhere without doing anything. For example, a nice hat that offers you nothing more than a nice image.

While I hate the first category, I always support the last. Buying something, knowing it won’t do your character or game any good, means you’re supporting the people who spend their time introducing you to the game you’re playing. Or it just means that you like to use images that not many people use! Either way, this, in my opinion, means you’re doing it right.

We have a perfect example that includes both categories; World of Warcraft. You already pay for the game, you pay for the subscription to be able to play, and Blizzard is still trying to sell you something like pets and mounts or some services like visual character swapping or gender swapping, right? Well I support this.

However, WoW is also trying to sell you some important services, like server switching, which I don’t support. I don’t want to be misunderstood here, so let me say that I don’t want every player to switch servers whenever they want. But Blizzard should definitely work on this, maybe one free server change per year is a good idea. Or maybe they should at least lower the price. This is tricky, I know, but if you’ve been playing WoW for years, you probably have characters scattered all over the place and aren’t willing to pay big bucks to get all your characters on the same server. After all, you can’t know what will change in the future. Maybe you have to move your main character to another server leaving some other characters…

That was our well-known Blizzard example. As many of you know, we have much worse examples, especially mobile games and Facebook games. From what I remember, I can tell that this started with Farm Town. Tell me if I’m wrong, but Knight Online or Silkroad or any other game before Farm Ville couldn’t do what Farm Ville did! It’s like these guys just poisoned the gaming industry and walk away like nothing ever happened. Now all the developers and all the companies think that it is quite normal to sell people important things in the game, things that affect the game. No, this is not normal I tell you. Knowing this, I still spent some money on games until I understood that even spending money is very difficult to get what you want, you just have to spend more!

Yes, this is what these developers want. They want you to buy more and more diamonds, for example, let’s call this extremely hard to get currency “diamond”. You buy some diamonds and use them to open some chests and you get some shit, and then you buy some more diamonds to open more chests and you get lucky once! So you decide to buy more diamonds!

One weird example is that you can buy a level 60 skill when you are level 1. OMG… Another example is that you have to wait a month to upgrade your weapon/skill or you have to pay for it. Fair enough right?

Yes, these guys changed the gaming world a lot, to the point that people are even buying abilities for their characters. I used to spend money on games, but I can tell I’m trying hard not to do it again, and you know what my solution is? I ignore games that offer in-app purchases when I see them, or (99% of mobile games offer in-app purchases) I just download them hoping they only sell cosmetics, then uninstall when I see that ugly picture.

Let’s forget about mobile gaming for a second and take a look at the Diablo example. When it was released, people could buy and sell things on the auction house, and Blizzard received a commission for each transaction. What was the game like back then? ****! The drop rates were terrible, literally terrible for a game of this type that was almost only drop oriented, even when you did get an epic item there was no reason to get excited because an intelligence item would probably turn out when you were playing a barbarian.. I can’t even find words to describe how terrible Diablo 3 was at the time. So Blizzard changed it completely. They removed AH and flat drop rates and now D3 is a perfect game for the Blizzard brand. By the way, I spent (wasted) over 100 euros on items hoping I could kill faster and get more items to sell in return. how stupid…

And for those who don’t know yet, I’ll talk about the Path of Exile example. A perfect example for our second category. They only sell cosmetics and also sell storage slots, but let’s ignore that for a while. They generally sell cosmetic stuff. Personally, I could pay to play such a great game, but the game is free. If you like Diablo-like games, try Path of Exile and you’ll better understand what I’m saying.

Well this topic never ends with short articles like this as the list goes on. I didn’t even say anything about kids making purchases using their parents’ credit cards. That would make this article much longer. There are many other related topics that could make this article much longer, but for now I’m done with it.