Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Digital Dopamine

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Digital Dopamine: “Consider the one app category that continues to succeed wildly on the App Store…

…free-to-play games like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans. Critics complain that they are manipulative, extracting money from culpable players in exchange for a worthless digital good that delivers little more than a sense of accomplishment to the buyer — a shot of dopamine, basically. But, if I may put on my contrarian hat, so what? Is said shot of dopamine any different than that obtained by any number of other means, many of which cost money? If differentiation is more about how something makes you feel and less about features then why the special bias simply because one particular something happens to be created in software? And, I’d add, digital dopamine results in a far more equitable business model for the developer: the more a user plays the more money a developer earns…