Actually, I quit Magic: the Gathering exactly because of its pay-to-play and pay-to-win aspects. The deck-building is absolutely fun, but I didn't want to keep sinking money into it. But I still love a friendly game with others.
I don't think Clash of Clans is pay-to-play or pay-to-win. I don't pay a dime and am perfectly able to play it quite effectively.
The real problem with many of these free "social" games, however, is that they've turned micromanagement into the actual game. Quite often, there's very little strategic choice to be made, you just need to check in regularly to give new orders because you can't queue your orders.
Back in the '90s, people used to complain about the micromanagement involved in many big games. Designing your empire in Civilization is fun, choosing spots for new cities it, selecting new research is, but managing every individual city and unit gets really tedious after a while.
And for some reason, this modern genre of games has removed all interesting decisions from their games and turned the tedium itself into what the game is about. You can't queue stuff, or at least not a lot, and you have to earn the privilege to avoid a small part of the tedium of micromanagement. Less micromanagement has become the reward for playing. And yet without it, there's practically no game.
Clash of Clans is not remotely the worst in this; designing your defense and organizing your attacks are still interesting parts of the game. But without those, you'd get a game like Hay Day which has practically no recognizable game underneath all the tedium.
But all of these games, including Clash of Clans, eventually have to make money for their developers, and they do so by making the game less fun than it needs to be, and you can pay to skip the unfun parts. And some people are suspectible to that, and end up paying. And the real evil of it is that they prey on addictive tendencies to get a few people to pay a lot.
But in the end, the games are intentionally designed to be less fun than they could have been.
I don't think Clash of Clans is pay-to-play or pay-to-win. I don't pay a dime and am perfectly able to play it quite effectively.
The real problem with many of these free "social" games, however, is that they've turned micromanagement into the actual game. Quite often, there's very little strategic choice to be made, you just need to check in regularly to give new orders because you can't queue your orders.
Back in the '90s, people used to complain about the micromanagement involved in many big games. Designing your empire in Civilization is fun, choosing spots for new cities it, selecting new research is, but managing every individual city and unit gets really tedious after a while. And for some reason, this modern genre of games has removed all interesting decisions from their games and turned the tedium itself into what the game is about. You can't queue stuff, or at least not a lot, and you have to earn the privilege to avoid a small part of the tedium of micromanagement. Less micromanagement has become the reward for playing. And yet without it, there's practically no game.
Clash of Clans is not remotely the worst in this; designing your defense and organizing your attacks are still interesting parts of the game. But without those, you'd get a game like Hay Day which has practically no recognizable game underneath all the tedium.
But all of these games, including Clash of Clans, eventually have to make money for their developers, and they do so by making the game less fun than it needs to be, and you can pay to skip the unfun parts. And some people are suspectible to that, and end up paying. And the real evil of it is that they prey on addictive tendencies to get a few people to pay a lot.
But in the end, the games are intentionally designed to be less fun than they could have been.