Adam Saltsman for Gamasutra:

Freemium game technology can be one of the tools we use to increase convenience, but if it is at the price of contrivance, we are doing a profound disservice to the players that support us.

Fantastic article for anyone interested in the ethics of games where the entrance price is free.

We’ve opened this Pandora’s Box of market and psychological technology with free-to-play games. They’re a sort of freakonomics atom bomb where the possibilities of application seem simultaneously dangerous and benign, and the question is no longer what can we do but what should we do.

As a direct beneficiary of a game where you can start playing for free, I’m happy to work with a publisher who thinks about these problems every day. The best way we’ve found to answer that “should” question is pretty simple: what is the best experience for the player? It distills all the psychological, emotional, and market forces down into only the bits that matter — to the player and the business.