Found these via DaringFireball
See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ($0.89 in 2013 dollars) to pay for just a few minutes. The entire video games industry comes from this model. Kids these days.
The problem with this contention is that in the 1908s there was no choice. So the “quarter for 3 lives” model would not translate well. Imagine if you launched a game on IOS and it was an IAP every three lives. There’d be an uproar.
We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn’t even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn’t mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up.
I spent a little time with a Dublin-based company a couple of years ago and the CEO exhorted me with tales about how their game was completely data-driven. I played it and I found it trite at best and just simply tedious at worst. They had developed a heap of content and then wrapped a statistics engine around it. If you think about it they had spent a fortune erecting barriers and walls around the content they had created. And it was awful.
In the end, it’s all about the game.