Not anti-capitalist, quite the contrary, you deserve to be compensated for the fruits of your labor at a rate that the market will bear.
However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?
People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.
Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.
However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?
People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.
Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.