Allegedly Free Game: Difference between revisions

* [[Gunbound]] is a relateively mild example. Most equiptment can be bought with real life money or in game money. While there are plenty of powerful equiptment that can only be bought with live money, there's equally powerful in game purchases that you can make if you work hard enough at it. Interestingly there's also equiptment that you cannot buy with real life money and must grind in game currency to get.

** Or at least, it used to be. But Gunbound seems to get traded around by a bunch of different sites, and in the most recent version players who pay real money not only reach ridiculously powerful avatars, but get special cash-only items that can heavily unbalance the game. It's gotten bad enough that the "avatars off" server has a decent following once again, and frequently using cash-only items is widely considered to be a dick move even by people WITH cash avatars. When even your most devoted users stop falling for it, it's time to give up.

* ''Imperion''. Oh, sure, you can play your game for free, if you want to be raided ceaselessly and smashed into the ground by the three guys in adjoining systems who paid so that they could have increased resource production, instant building, additional building slots, and cheaper auto-trades. Basically, free players exist only for the pay-players to prey upon.

* The iPhone and iPod App Store used to specifically forbid the use of in-app purchases in no-price applications in an attempt to prevent developers from getting around Apple's 30% sales fee. Unfortunately, Apple have changed their regulations to also get 30% from all in-app purchases, which are now allowed in apps of any [[Buffy-Speak|expensiveness]]. So "free" iPhone games often have this, or at least encourage you [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|to buy some upgrades]].