Please Just Let Me Buy Things

Games and apps will always try and nickel and dime you, but sometimes they make it harder to just pay them for the thing you want too.

Persona 3 Reload is a remake of Persona 3 FES that just announced they’ll be releasing the epilogue called The Answer that was already included in the original FES but now you have to pay extra for in September.

Now, I’m already really annoyed that they pretended this wasn’t a remake of FES despite including things that were in FES so that they could carve out the epilogue as an extra cost on a $70 game but, what really gets me is it’s not just The Answer you have to buy the whole $35 Expansion Pass to get it.

So, look, I could do the whole spiel about how video game companies and corporations in general love to squeeze every last dollar out of people because they can, but I’m going to meet them where they’re at.

I want to buy The Answer, I want to see the story with the new voice cast and redone with upgraded graphics and quality of life features, and I think it’s fine that that’s an extra charge.

Do I really also have to buy the rest of the Expansion Pass?

The other two waves of the Expansion Pass include some extra songs and costumes I don’t care about, why do I have to pay an extra, what $7-10 or so for that? How much is The Answer actually worth? If it’s actually worth $35 then why even bother calling it the Expansion Pass, just include the songs as free DLC and let people buy The Answer?

Call me old fashioned but sometimes I just want to exchange money for a good and/or service, and I’d really appreciate it if I could do it without being forced to buy other things!

Speaking of, this isn’t limited to video games. 

Tapas is an app that publishes and localizes a lot of Korean webcomics (also called manwha) that I really enjoy. It also monetizes itself in the same way that a mobile game does!

If you’re not familiar with what that means here’s an example:

Let’s say I want to read “Kill The Villainess.” It’s a Wait Until Free Series, which means after the first three episodes you can read one episode a day for free (excluding the 30 or so most recent ones)

Or if you want to skip all that because you can’t wait, you can watch an ad to unlock three more episodes for free. 

If you’re still really interested, you can unlock episodes with ink. It’s 376 ink for a single episode, unless you turn off the confirmation step, in which case it’s 338 ink for a single episode. 

Then there’s bundle deals, so if you get ten episodes at once you get 10% off so it’s only 3,008 ink, and for twenty episodes it’s 25% off so you get it for 5,640 ink, and finally if you want to get all episodes currently available as of writing this, it’ll be 26,508 ink.

How do you get ink? Well, you buy it with real money of course. So converting that into dollars, assuming there’s no sale going on, you’ll spend at minimum $2 for 1,600 ink, which will get you four episodes.

Then for 10 episodes you’ll have to pay $5.00 for 5,00 ink, for 20 you’ll need to buy the 10,500 ink for $10, and for the rest you’ll need to buy 60,000 ink at once for $50.

If you don’t think that’s ethically dubious (albeit legal) you can see how it’s tedious, right? 

This example is a little extreme in some ways. For example I picked a series that’s currently ongoing, so even if you buy in bulk you still have to spend ink on episodes as they come out.

Most people will probably opt to just wait until they’re caught up with the series as well, though it should be noted that a completed series will still make you pay for those last 30 or so episodes, and then you can watch ads to finally get the rest… on the series that allow it.

Yeah not every series even lets you watch ads to unlock episodes.

In some ways it’s more generous than the mobile games it’s clearly taking inspiration from. Oh sure it has all the hallmarks, tempting you to pay real money to get something you want faster, but you can actually get the whole thing for free, possibly even relatively quickly if you choose to focus on only one series.

Still I have many issues with this model: 

One, by using the same method as mobile games, it’s asking for the same thing that keeps that model afloat: whales. The vast majority of people will just wait, but people, often people with mental illnesses like ADHD or Autism that causes them to focus on things intensely, will end up spending money to read what happens to the characters right this second.

These are called Dark Patterns, and they’re harmful because they use psychological tricks to take advantage of their audience.

The fact that the cost of ink for a series doesn’t line up with how much you can buy is another tactic, since you have more leftover, you’re tempted to use it on another series, then when you run out you buy more to see that next episode and so on and so forth.

I know all advertising is technically using psychological trickery to get people to buy merchandise, but it doesn’t all have to be this egregious.

This format also serves to obfuscate the price. Am I getting more out of this than I’d get for the physical version of a similar manga? Well the actual cost of a single episode keeps changing between series and based on how much you buy at once. It’s designed to make you lose track of how much you’re spending and stop thinking about it.

The second major issue is that if you don’t buy in, the experience is deliberately unpleasant. It’s designed to annoy you into paying to skip the inconvenience. I can wait for a new volume of a manga to come out without being annoyed, and maybe Wait Until Free seems reasonable, but why am I limited to three free episodes from ads a day? The ads are the other ways they make money, so why can’t I just watch a bunch to unlock them? Sure I find mobile app ads to be the most annoying thing on the planet, but that’s beside the point.

They’re putting artificial limits on people who don’t buy in to get them to pay to solve a problem they deliberately caused.

And they’re very successful in making the experience really annoying! It’s so much more pleasant to just buy the volumes of series that come out in physical editions! Only a handful of series are, of course, but it’s nice! It makes for a much more pleasant reading experience even when I’m left on a cliffhanger because it’s not drip feeding you parts of the story!

Of course, there are a ton more series I would like to be able to just read, without having to stop to pay for ink, no matter how many I buy in advance, or worry I don’t know how much I’m paying. 

We have monetization models for this! Tapas could be a subscription service! It could even have a subscription service along with individual episodes! Just like people who want to buy The Answer but don’t care about the rest of the DLC should just be able to buy it!

When did we decide pricing things in a way that’s simple and intuitive for the audience to understand and doesn’t make them pay for extra ink or DLC songs they don’t need should come before making a good product people want to buy?

Or more to the point, when did we allow that to be more profitable than making something good, because that’s not how I’m told capitalism is supposed to work.