Perhaps you’ve never paid to speed up your process, in which case, good for you! But lets now look at the episode in question, S18E06, “Freemium isn’t Free”. If you’ve played any of these kind of games before, you are probably aware of how it works.

If you just pay us €0.49, you can skip the waiting time for your carrots to grow. Don’t like waiting? We have something to solve that. Build a new house or crop, here, wait 24 hours to reap the results. Next to having to invite your friends to progress, these kind of games often feature excessive waiting times. Other notable examples of these ‘freemium’, or ‘pay to win’ (P2W) games include Clash of Clans, Tiny Hotel, and the notorious ‘Simpsons: Tapped Out’. You had to invite friends to progress, and of course your friends could see which level you were at in order for you to boast about your ‘progress’. This ‘invite-your-friends’-formula was later copied by King for their game ‘Candy Crush Saga’, which needed you to invite X number of friends to be able to access certain levels. The more friends you had playing the game, the more content you got access to, i.e., the better your farm was compared to others’. I myself never felt tempted to participate in the mania, even though my inbox was overflowing from invites to the game by ‘friends’. At one point it seemed like everyone was playing that game.

One of the first notable freemium games was the Facebook-game Farmville. In this blog post I will explain why by taking some quotes from the episode, but first, lets look at the nature of these freemium games and some notable examples.

Because whereas Totalbiscuit only speaks to the core gamers, South Park reaches a much wider audience. So good even, that I think these ‘freemium’ games have been dealt a great blow with this newest episode. Their newest episode of the show features an excellent analysis of the business models these games incorporate, on par with analyses by industry ‘professionals’ like John ‘Totalbiscuit’ Bain. Have you ever downloaded a free game to your cellphone, only to discover that in order to enjoy the game to its fullest, you have to dish out loads of cash? I myself might have fallen into that trap a few times, and apparently so did South Park’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Ever downloaded a free game, only to discover you have to pay loads of money to actually play it? Ever get annoyed by an invite to play Candy Crush or Farmville? Ever wanted all of this to stop? Well, there is hope, since South Park magnificently addressed the issues.

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