Following on from new EU enforcement, Google has promised to make significant changes to its Play store, recategorising many games that feature in-app purchases as paid-for, rather than free.
While this will throw many games together that once occupied very different sectors of the market and could create real problems for the likes of Candy Crush and other popular "free to play," games that make a lot of money for their creators, Google really didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
The EU directive was quite clear, stating:
- Games should not contain direct exhortation to children to buy items in a game or to persuade an adult to buy items for them
- Consumers should be adequately informed about the payment arrangements for purchases and should not be debited through default settings without consumers' explicit consent
- Traders should provide an email address so that consumers can contact them in case of queries or complaints
The changes to the store are set to take place before the end of September and will also bring to bear user authentication for every single in-game purchase, making sure that no apps make stealth purchases on behalf of the user.
Apple has also pledged to make changes to its app store, but has been far less forthcoming in how it plans to address the issue.
Much of the issues surrounding F2P titles on mobile has revolved around titles like Dungeon Keeper, which were seen as massively exploitative and were found to be really stretching the definition, since the time investment required to progress without investing real world money, was far too high.
