This kind of reminds me of the state of the mobile gaming space with respect to these sort of “idle” games that are out there. I’m not sure if most are like this, but I’ve been experiencing one lately for shits & giggles. I started playing one a few weeks ago that’s almost like a tower defense-ish game, you’ve got waves of enemies coming at you and you need to erect various defenses to stop them, comprised of heroes from various roles.

The basic gameplay itself is ok-ish, BUT the developers have inserted so many goddamn currencies and roadblocks and things to slow the game down, I guess to make it a fucking grindfest. You’re basically required to grind and level up your heroes in order to advance past some levels, BUT they give you the option to do “Auto-battles” where you just let the game run on auto-pilot. So, in order to get arbitrary amounts of experience to level up my people and to proceed past some gameplay roadblock, you can run through X auto-battles and level up that way, so I just let my phone run this stupid thing for ~10 min just so I can advance. Or you can pay money for shortcuts, that’s their business model I guess.

Are we eventually going to get to that point with social media? We won’t really be maintaining friendships with people, we’ll just have our AIs maintain relationships with other people’s AI, and we just sort of let it run on auto-pilot while we’re off doing whatever. Then you’ll run into a Facebook friend IRL and have no idea who they are, despite your AI’s being best friends with each other. I’m just wondering how they’ll eventually transform it into the Freemium business model.