Micropayments are proven to work but everyone seems to hates micropayments. Software is good when regularly updated but everyone hates on subscriptions, claiming to be OK with one time payment but that business model got almost wiped out because people actually don’t like to pay one the (sustainable) one time fee too.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
I am not big fan of the series so I would not know what is the current situation(maybe now they also do annoying ads? I wouldn't know), but essentially if you want to play all day long you need to chip in, otherwise you wait for life refills. There are also pay-to-win options(consumable power ups) but you don't have to use it. It is a delight for the people who are into the genre, my mother plays the game since years and she is loving it.
What I liked was that, the deal is sipmle: We will give you a game that you like but if you want to play it a lot or be given an easy time you will have to pay. This is in contrast of all the ad-based software out there where the deal is "We made something that you want however we would like you to consider doing something else by clicking on our ads, we insist".
I myself play a lot of PUBG Mobile and it's also an excellent experience. It's free to play, ads's don't interrupt and I can play as much as I would like but If I like to customise my characters appearance, then I need to pay.
Fund the business. Yes, everyone hates on them but there's a reason why every game and every software is switching to "pay for the extra feature or resource or pay monthly" model. I also find it far less fun-killing than the ad-supported ones. The ad-supported games and software(I will count the websites also in this) has terrible user experience as it is geared to interrupt you and make you do something else.
Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first?
This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
I see in-app purchases and subscription models as quite different from micropayments. Micropayments would mean something like Spotify - you pay some amount up front, and the company pays artists a tiny amount for each time someone listens to their work.
A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
It’s the same thing but they pay programmers and designers instead of musicians. It’s actually better because most of these programmers and designers make decent amount of money - unlike Spotify.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.