It's really disappointing to see this trend, both as a consumer and as a developer.<p>On the consumer side, freemium games are designed to be inferior to their pre-paid cousins, or else there wouldn't be an incentive to spend on in-app purchases. And the lucrativeness of the market has turned the heads of most of the game development companies in the world, so it's getting harder and harder to find games that don't use this model.<p>And as a developer, I want to make things that people enjoy. I want to recreate the same feelings I had as a kid, the delight of mastering a game. Or the bliss of a program that enhances the user's capabilities, without adding new impediments of any kind. But <i>consumers</i> have so gone towards this freemium model that they just don't seem to pay attention to pre-paid programs. How do you compete against a company that can take a game that is as big of a piece of crap as Game of War and turn it into a printing press for money--can afford to spend $40 million to have Kate freaking Upton show up?<p>I'm sure it's stupid of me, from a business sense, to declare I'll never make a freemium game. But dammit, I went independent specifically <i>because</i> the general lack of ethics I had encountered in industry bothered me so much. If I can't make it on my own terms, I guess that's the fate I'm going to have to take.