Plants vs. Zombies on the iPhone is somewhat this way (pay $.99 for the app) and then you earn coins in the game that you use to purchase mini-games and other plants. You can also just buy a ton of coins and purchase all the side games at once (for about $3.99). The reason this is okay is that getting all the extra stuff isn't nigh impossible - in fact it's pretty easy.
Meanwhile, over at Tiny Tower it's a chore to get anything without paying extra unless you invest a ton of time into the game and the 'tower bucks' aren't cheap ($30 for 1000 tower bucks which is a lot but not enough for everything). And they are throwing ads at you for other games they make all the time.
So, if you are going to go this freemium route it'd be nice if the choice to stay free doesn't mean I can't finish the game without an insane commitment.
I really don't see why. If you like the game enough that you very much want to finish it, you probably should be paying†. For those who are money-poor but time-rich, they do offer a free option. But if you have more money than time, they want you to cough a little of the abundant resource up in exchange for the scarce one. (If you have neither money nor time, I would posit that's your real problem, not the pricing structure of Tiny Tower.)
† I don't mean this in a moral sense, but in a "it's a reasonable expectation and quite possibly essential to the business plan" kind of way
I think the complaint was about games where as you progress, the time cost increases until even the most time-rich player isn't prepared to keep paying it. Advertising these as 'free' is kind of disingenuous, even if it's technically correct.
Plants vs. Zombies on the iPhone is somewhat this way (pay $.99 for the app) and then you earn coins in the game that you use to purchase mini-games and other plants. You can also just buy a ton of coins and purchase all the side games at once (for about $3.99). The reason this is okay is that getting all the extra stuff isn't nigh impossible - in fact it's pretty easy.
Meanwhile, over at Tiny Tower it's a chore to get anything without paying extra unless you invest a ton of time into the game and the 'tower bucks' aren't cheap ($30 for 1000 tower bucks which is a lot but not enough for everything). And they are throwing ads at you for other games they make all the time.
So, if you are going to go this freemium route it'd be nice if the choice to stay free doesn't mean I can't finish the game without an insane commitment.