Well, the obvious question is: what’s an acceptable balance? I’m skeptical of F2P models because I believe they’re designed to get you to functionally spend more money than you should have to on digital, aka non-existent, products (which can be taken away at anytime by the company, leaving you with nothing, unlike physical product). This is leaving aside the ethics of physical trading cards, which I’m also skeptical about. I will also say, the way Pokemon approaches “being for-profit” is concretely demonstrated by the UI; the UI is the way it is BECAUSE of the way Pokémon approaches profit. It gets complex to say specifically how things should be (are we getting “ripped off”? What does it mean to get ripped off in this context?), but it’s simple to point out the areas that are clearly lacking and problematic.
For example, let’s say the f2p is too grindy. That is, it requires you to login everyday, spend a lot of time on it everyday, and otherwise makes having fun difficult. Ok, so you spend some money. How far does that money go? In mobile games, it doesn’t go very far. Mobile games largely want to suck you back into grinding because grinding ingrains the game into your routine. Eventually you’ll be playing because you don’t want to “miss out” of any timed events or windows, even when you aren’t having fun. A sunk-cost fallacy will begin where you pay money because you’ve already spend so much time, but that money burns out quickly so you spend more time, then more money, etc.. “Fun” eventually isn’t a factor once it’s become a way of life. It’s automatic at that point.
If you think I’m crazy, and that mobile developers aren’t trying to create this psychological dependence in their audience, I have some developer conferences on YouTube to show you…
Obviously trading offers an escape from the loop, which is why it was a kind of healthy integrity that I valued in PTCGO. Throwing that away and replacing it with this tried-and-true mobile game design is no coincidence. To be sure, being addicting because it’s fun and artistic isn’t unethical. But mobile games use an inorganic method of achieving addiction with “fun and artistic” being as cheap and minimal as possible. And that really sucks, because it means they really don’t care about the game in itself, nor the people who play it.