I feel compelled to bring this to your attention, Mark.
The Top F2P Monetization Tricks - www.gamasutra.com
I would like to bring special attention to this passage that I find very relevant to the tl;dr crowd;
“King.com’s Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.”
So the takeaway is “RUN! Save yourself while you still can!”. I have walked this path many times now and I can tell you, it rarely ends well. Find a nice skill based game where the diffculty isn’t made to pull more money out of you and avoid “Freemium” like the plague that it is.
Edit: sigh, ninj’d
