mobile game monetization is fucked
shocker, i know. it's honestly half the reason i don't ever play mobile games. however, i have recently been finding myself playing apex legends mobile. this is entirely because the game has controller support but no input filtering, so i get to bully touch screen users all day (it's basically legalized cheating). being that i don't particularly care about the game much, i haven't put any money into the game, especially since it is an entirely separate product from the real (good) apex.
however, tonight i decided to do some light investigation into how bad it is and it's pretty not good! like with most games of this sort, it starts with the deliberate obfuscation of how much the paid currency is actually worth. this is old hat at this point, but as you go up in price tiers you get "bonus" gold, which makes determining what $5 or $10 is actually worth difficult.
then we get into the primary form of monetization for free to play games these days, the battle pass. i don't really care about the quality of the pass here, but it isn't that great if you're wondering. what i am interested in is the pricing of this pass. this to me is where we solidly exit the realm of "quality" free to play games and enter into pure mobile audience exploitation, since this sort of price shenanigans is usually reserved only for mobile games.
as you can see here, the basic way to purchase the pass is to spend 799 gold, with the higher tier pass (which just boils down to free levels and a useless avatar frame) is 1599. the pricing here is deliberately exploitative in two different ways. the first is that they've clearly designed the pricing of the currency packs to make it so you always need to pay more than you should need to. the basic pass, for example, seems like it should just cost 8 bucks, if we're assuming 100 gold = $1. however, the smallest bundle of currency you can buy gets you 280 gold for $2.99. that plus the $4.99 pack of 500 gold get you 780 gold. now you fucked up and have to pay in another 3 bucks to get you over the hill. you got cute thinking you were gaming the system so now you're spending $11 instead of just giving up and buying the $10 pack to begin with. 🖕
this gets even more comical with the plus version of the battle pass. i'm not going to get down into the nitty gritty again but suffice it to say they essentially charge you a fee of being forced to do 3 seperate transactions to get the 1599 gold necessary for the cheapest possible amount, that being $18. or you can just spend 2 bucks extra and do it in only 2 transactions.
the final twist of the knife comes in when you realize that, because they made the price of both passes end in 99 instead of a round hundred, there's always going to be some amount of points left over that functionally doesn't exist anymore. while there are things in the shop that can be bought for as little as 30 gold, it doesn't change the fact that almost none of them have a price that ends in anything other than a 0.
speaking of, lets talk briefly about that shop. in the console and pc space, loot boxes have become a 4 letter word. even overwatch, which was always (wrongly) described as a game that "does loot boxes right", is abandoning them in overwatch 2. not so in mobile f2p. save for a few items in the store, functionally everything you can spend real money on is some form of loot box. they are often not described as such, but they are still a wolf hiding in that sheep's clothing. sure, all the good items you could want have 0.5% chance of dropping, but lucky you! you can't get duplicates. how generous.
on one final note, i just wanna point out a weird thing i noticed: when trying to buy a "regular" loot box, you can't see what it actually costs. nowhere does it tell you what a pack costs to purchase. if you want to find out how much you will get charged to buy one of these things, you need to first have enough money in your account to buy one in the first place. this seems to me like a design oversight but still. very baffling.
to be clear, i don't think this is uniquely terrible on apex mobile's part. in fact, i'd honestly argue this is still better than diablo immortal or literally any gacha game in existence. i feel like i'm being shaken by suge knight for change but i can still play the entirety of the game without putting a cent in. i just think it says something that even something i'd call "pretty good by chinese mobile game standards" is still something that would get endless headlines on a platform that "matters" like consoles or pc.