Creatures Caves

Actually, yes, I do feel FR is a ripoff. I have played many similar games to FR, and FR is poorly structured and asks FAR too much money for its pay features compared to the rest of its industry (meaning web-based "pet/creature site" games). But that's just me. :p I would have used a number of other similar sites as a better example of that paradigm being used effectively, fairly, and at reasonable prices - FlyingForHome.com is a Thoroughbred racehorse simulation which uses the dual-currency setup, for example. There's also Wajas, the first game of that type which I personally ever played, which is a bit pricier but I never felt its prices were unfair per se since most of what is up for sale at high prices are things that are very much "special extras" not really needed to play the game, plus a lot of the commerce there ends up being user-driven anyway, so the prices for things are more often set by supply and demand than directly by the site's administration. Or so it was for the seven years or so I was playing Wajas, anyway. No idea what it might be like now.

I even used to work for such a site, Felisfire.com, and I did my best to make our prices and system as fair and functional as possible. We needed income to support the development of the game, but we also wanted people to be able to play the game for free without missing out on anything meaningful just because they couldn't afford it. Here's how we did it. We had energy/EN as our 'soft'/in-game currency and Orbs as our 'hard'/pay currency. Then I provided ways to earn both through the simple course of playing the game - Orbs were much rarer, of course, but everyone had at least a chance to get them without ever having to pay for them. And I frequently ran special events in which Orbs, and items normally costing Orbs were available for free, the items often in rather large quantities - this 'seeded' the economy with those items and kept trade between players active and brisk, which lead to a lot of people buying Orbs when they would not have done so otherwise in order to participate or facilitate this player-based economy. In short, rather than just making some "special" items cost real money, I made everything potentially available for only the "soft" currency, and created -incentives- for people to want to go beyond that on their own rather than trying to lure and manipulate them into it, if the difference makes any sense?

For example here's how one of my seeding events worked. Like most such sites, every player had their own profile page which other users could visit. This was the event for Halloween, and it would run every year for a week during late October (once or twice I started it on Halloween and let it run into November because I was late with the development :p) During that week, every player's profile gained a new button toward the top saying 'Trick or Treat!'

Once per day per profile, you could click the button on another person's profile (not your own). You could only press the button on a given profile once per day of the event (it reset at midnight) but you could visit as few or as many profiles as you wanted on any given day, the only limit being how many people were logged in (since people not logged in were considered to be 'not home' and therefore their button was not pressable). This was a particularly brilliant part of the event, IMO - it encouraged people to not only be logged in and active, but to browse the profiles of players they might never have glanced at otherwise. And people often liked to share the events they had gotten from people's buttons. Thus people were encouraged to get to know each other and to develop a stronger social net between players.

Anyway, when you went to an online player's profile and pressed Trick or Treat, a script ran that generated various pre-written events. You'd be taken to a new page showing the result of your action. Half of the events were 'tricks' which generally consisted of a silly story of you being pranked or suffering some minor misfortune - everything from being given fake candy to having pumpkins launched at you by catapult... sometimes the pet accompanying you would eat stuff in people's yards or otherwise get in trouble... it was really fun and one of people's favorite parts of the event was collecting the Trick texts. XD Some of the 'tricks' did give small things, especially in later years as I began running out of ideas for new tricks, but nothing very much and never the prized candy items that were the main focus of Halloween. The Treat events were the good stuff - you could get a small amount of EN (soft currency), or very rarely an Orb (hard currency), but items normally sold for Orbs were also in there, including a few that could only be gotten on Halloween.

Basically the Treats provided a huge variety of cool things. If you played only casually, you would probably not get very much, but people who took full advantage of the game (and most people did their best) would accumulate massive hoards of stuff, including multiple copies of otherwise rare and Orb-expensive items. Then in the great tradition of Halloween, when the event was over for the year, people would pass the time until the next major item-seeding event (Christmas) by swapping and selling such of their Halloween loot they didn't feel like keeping. Since everyone had different taste, this wasn't a case of people keeping all the good stuff and trying to foist the 'junk' on others. In fact, in this way, I was able to ensure that certain otherwise rare and expensive items were available for more reasonable prices year-round in the player economy, as people bought, sold, and traded amongst themselves.

Now, that could be difficult to calibrate, and sometimes not enough of an item got seeded, or too much, but for the most part it worked really well. It's especially useful because success in the event has literally nothing to do with how long you've been playing the game or if you've spent any money on it or not. Every single player got the same pool of events when they pressed a button. So you could be a really long time player who'd put hundreds into the site but if you didn't spend much time ToTing you wouldn't get very much out of it. Whereas the newbies and the poorer but more enthusiastic players could put in an hour a day and walk out with armfuls of great stuff. The time-limited nature of the event kept it from overspawning too badly, and also the fact that I could tweak the rarity/likelihood-to-appear of the individual Trick and Treat events as the Halloween event was ongoing, to make them happen more or less often if there seemed to be a balance problem.

Overall it works like this. This stuff is hard to balance, but I did my best and I feel like I did a pretty good job all things considered based on the results. Because the Orbs themselves had a -reasonable- value in the 'soft' currency, and could be bought and sold by players using the 'soft' currency, people were easily able to barter amongst themselves for Orbs. A currency exchange value was rapidly developed. I released just enough Orbs into the game to sustain this economy and keep its prices reasonable (if the cost of an Orb got too high the system would break down). Then people also began buying Orbs specifically to sell them to other players, which was a huge economic engine driver and allowed people with less RL money to more easily afford the Orb-costing items in game - they could save up their EN, use it to buy Orbs, and then buy whatever they wanted that cost Orbs. A lot of people also collected stuff that was worth Orbs and resold it for EN, in order to then buy more Orbs, ultimately making a profit. In short, rather than littering the game with stuff like, "Hey, check out this ultra neat new item, only $$$ Orbs! Buy today or you'll miss out forever!" I simply tried my best to develop items that people would be interested in, released them into the game, and let the player economy hash it out. I had some simple, basic, unchanging official prices for things bought directly from the game, but the official stores were honestly more of a convenience than anything else in my strategy, to make certain items perpetually available at a fixed price, which provided some standards and stability to the user economy. But for the most part people did business among themselves.

Basically, people had a choice of how to approach the game, and I did my best to set it up so that it was a meaningful choice and not the pseudo-choice you often see in newer mobile-type games (which really annoys me). Instead of being like, "Yeah, you COULD go without buying stuff, but it's way harder and more tedious so you basically have to invest your life in the game to get anywhere without paying for stuff," it was actually, genuinely, a system where it was possible to earn things in a REASONABLE period of time without having to spend real money, or you could spend real money to get some things, but not so much that the people willing to spend money were able to out-play or dominate the people who did not. In fact many of our "richest" players, in terms of in-game holdings, were people who had never put a dime into the game. And yet we also had people who cheerfully put hundreds of dollars into the game over time, of their own will, without ever feeling forced into it. And we made enough money to support the game's development, even enough to put some extra in the bank many months. It was a good system.

Of course, the site now doesn't reflect my work since it's been run by others for years... so please don't look at it now. It's embarrassing. -.- Not trying to claim I was the best HA the site ever had or anything, there's a reason I lost my job there, but the people who've taken over it since then have made some very poor decisions, objectively manifested by the fact that the game is no longer earning enough money to support itself. Sigh. It sucks seeing that much of my life and work go that way... but that's another topic. -.-

My point is just that microtransaction systems don't have to be a ripoff and can definitely be done in a way that is profitable for the company AND the players.

And yes, Creatures really was that expensive - that's why I was never able to get C3 back in the day. :p

In the end I can't help but agree with GimmeCat's most recent post. The odds are very high that we will get something that sort of superficially looks like Creatures but which lacks the core elements we all value. And honestly, all else aside, now that I'm thinking about it, more than anything else, that'll be simply because those core elements, quite frankly, are costly enough resource-wise for a desktop machine. I'm using a fairly weak borrowed box right now, to be fair, but it's not THAT weak, and I still have serious lag problems trying to keep more than about 15 Norns if I also have any real number of added agents and metarooms. All that stuff running each takes its bit of processor power, and in total it can add up to a lot.

Can cell phones really handle that sort of thing, or even tablets? I know there are some laptops powerful enough to do it but a laptop these days is practically a desktop anyway.