What about great games that have completely optional IAP? I'm currently playing through Bad Piggies (by Rovio), and the IAPs are only there to make the levels easier (which defeats the whole purpose of the game IMO, but nobody is forcing you). I'm OK with other people paying if they want to get to the end faster, as it has no impact on my way of playing.
That still gives game makers perverse incentives. They'll profit more if they make their levels too hard and too annoying. No matter how much they claim to do the right thing, there's no real way to prove it either way, and the presence of the perverse incentive ensures that most game makers in that situation will do the wrong thing.
So no, that would defeat the point of this. If perverse incentives are not removed, they will pervert things.
I've been heavily playing Counterstrike: Global Offensive lately, and I've found that it has truly honest, unbiased IAP. You can buy skins for weapons that make them look cooler, and high-end skins will also add StatTrak, which let's you see how many kills you managed with a given weapon. That's it.
You can get the same items via play, but there's a thriving real-money market around them, with items ranging from cents to hundreds of dollars.
IAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy.
Valve has been the canonical example of 'honest' IAP for a while; sadly they're starting to enter scum territory.
Their recent Snow Globe promotion leveraged a lot of evil psychological trickery and misleading information to simultaneously maximize how much money people were spending while minimizing the value they got out of it. It's no surprise that as soon as the promotion was over they expunged all traces of it from their website...
To summarize it: the snow globes were a limited supply promotional item with vaguely-stated mechanics and an unstated expiration date.
They encouraged people to do certain things to generate snow globes, and made it possible for some people to stockpile them in advance. Then with about 24 hours notice, they announced that all snow globes were going to be permanently removed from users' inventories, which drove the steam marketplace price of snowglobes up dramatically as people went about trading them to try and complete sets of snowglobes. When they finally got killed some of them were trading for as much as $5 USD each.
All this for cards that literally don't do anything: The only use was to collect a set of 12, which would give you a chance at a random item from a list of utterly worthless decorative goodies (the list had a FEW good, valuable items on it, but only a few), mostly from games nobody plays.
Eh? I remember the snow globe page specifically saying that the cards would be removed at the end of the sale right when the sale started. It was why my interest wasn't that high.
Valve has solved this by crowd-sourcing cosmetic items through the community. In Team Fortress 2 (which uses the same kind of skin/item system as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) 90% of the items have come from the community, who then also get to share in the profits [1].
IAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy.
Exactly right. IAP has absolutely enabled really, really bad behavior, but it's not the cause any more than the existence cars is the cause of automobile accidents. One facilitates but does not imply the other.
Kingdom Rush, and the followup Kingdom Rush Frontiers, both have strictly optional consumables and permanent heroes you can buy, and are absolutely fantastic games available on Play, Amazon, iTunes, and in Flash (for free!) at http://www.armorgames.com/.
I've seen a couple of free-to-play games where you collect in-game currency to buy powerups, and the currency accrues at a somewhat less than satisfactory rate (not "3 months of grinding to get one item," just a bit slower than you'd like), and you can buy packs of currency with IAP, but you can also pay like $3-$5 to permanently double your pickup rate. So the people who are willing to pay $20 or $50 or $100 to have everything right now can do so, and the people who just want to pay a few bucks and get a complete game also have that option.
There's still problems with it, but I like it better than most pay-to-win shit.
