In Defense of Free to Wait Games

Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition, formerly of The Escapist) put out a review and also a video last year about a game called Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  Here's the review, and here's the video:

The Jimquisition - Free to Wait

Dungeon Keeper Mobile kicked up a bit of fuss when it was announced.  It was a mobile revival of a long dormant franchise that had its heyday in the 90s.  (Fun fact for those that don't know, Peter Molyneux worked on it).  And Electronic Arts decided to shamelessly cash in on that IP and they turned what was a strategic, well remembered PC game into a "free to play," "pay to win," "casual" game for mobile devices.  Or so the story goes.

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will.  I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games.  If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead.  But then these games aren't for me.

Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else.  That was the "gameplay."  Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process.  It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long.  It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.

And I'm going to try to defend them.