This is not pointed directly at you, Irock, but at a concept I've seen in general in the gaming industry as of late; game design snobbery. Unless my game is designed to make you think about your place in the world, how your neighbors interact with each other on a human level, how you've believed wrongly all this time and you're really just an insignificant speck in the grand time stream of existance, or how the giant Galapagos turtle manages to live, lay eggs, and start the beautiful cycle all over again, oh, and if I hope to make any sort of decent return on all my effort, I'm leading people down the rosy path to merry game maker's hell.
Flappy Anything aside, let's look at the historical level of games closer to the type we can create today with programs like Stencyl. I mean not pinball or games designed on an early oscilloscope to simulate tennis, but games with colours and graphics and real game play. For me, that era was the 80s.
Look at the arcades that once existed in great numbers, now not so much. I remember my home town arcade and saving up my allowance so I could go and play for an hour. Not one single game asked me to consider my place in the universe. Not one single game made me wonder about how I'm living my life. And not one single game was utterly free to play. Sure, power ups didn't cost money, but playing again and again after failed tries sure did. It encouraged you to try harder, play smarter, be quicker, so you could last longer in the game before having to pop in another quarter. There were ending scenes and credits that the few who had seen them would tell as if they'd witness a moment in history, inspiring you to play well enough to get to see the ending credits, too, and be equally amazed.
I remember getting together with a boyfriend to play Golden Axe. We were pretty good but we didn't get as far as we wanted on that first quarter. He looked to me and said, "Do you wanna see the ending of the game? I hear it's really good." I said yes, so he went to the counter, changed out a $20 for game tokens, and by gods, we saw the game ending. I don't remember how much of that $20 we used but I do know we needed it. And when we were done, we didn't have a product, we weren't full from a dinner, we didn't have anything except bragging rights to saying we saw the ending of Golden Axe. And you know what? We loved it. We weren't sorry at all.
These days, mobile games and other types allow you infinite play without paying a cent. I don't have to pop a quarter in every time I want to play Bejeweled. I bought the game once, I can play it forever. I also try to pick mobile games that don't make it near impossible to enjoy them without IAPs so that I decide if I want to pay, not the game. I can play Jetpack Joyride all I want without one single IAP. Hell, the friend who showed me the game in the first place, later saw me playing and saw my character had a different jetpack on and was like, "Whoa! How'd you do that?!" He'd been playing the game for weeks without even realizing there were IAPs. He seemed to be having just as much fun as I was.
There are people out there who want a nanny state where nothing they don't agree with happens or is available because "people can't be trusted to do the right thing when the wrong thing looks like so much fun". I say that as long as what I'm doing, in this case, the game I'm working on, doesn't cause blindness, seizures, or other instantaneous mishaps, then really, it's very nanny-like to child-proof my game even from adults because someone out there may be dumb and spend too much on my IAPs.
Apple allows you to turn off IAPs so you can't accidentally trigger them. A wife who worries her husband will spend too much while mobile gaming can lock that off from him. I tried Candy Crush Saga to hear what all the fuss was about, found after awhile that the game really tries to force you to buy IAPs before being able to complete a level and you know what?
Like the adult I am, I removed the game from my phone and never downloaded it again. To quote one of those office supply store commercials, "There. That was easy."
I refuse to go down the slippery slope of "Mobile IAPs are like gambling which is like smoking which is like alcoholism! They're all addictive and destroy lives!" Whether I'm a chicken or not in the great time stream of the universe, my sky isn't falling.
Stop shaming game creators for allowing them ways to make money and instead shame game players for playing irresponsibly. That's it. The end.