Any game with any in-app purchase at all already feels unhealthy, even if its just a trial unlock.
The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.
Nah that’s going too far. 90s shareware was sold exactly that way — free trial and pay if you want more — and there were plenty of great creative games in that category.
How would you feel about a free game spending one frame per second mining a cryptocurrency? This would be as an alternative to a one-time purchase (and as an alternative to ads). So, you could play a full game for free, indefinitely, and have a small portion of compute do mining, and at any time you could pay a one time fee (purchase) to turn off mining forever.
I feel the same way about crypto as I do about those herbal supplements at gas stations. It's not that they're inherently problematic, but everyone involved turns out to be scammers consistently enough that automatic distrust is a fantastic rule of thumb.
This comment makes me feel so sad. I lack the words to describe what critical essence this question is missing, but technology used to mean a hacker ethos of just doing things because they seemed cool and worth doing and even just the ask of this feels parasitic by comparison. Sign of the times.
Eh, I think this falls right into the traditional hacker ethos of doing what seems cool, it's just that what you think is cool may be different than what I think is cool.
I want to make games, but I know how much time that takes, so I understand that to make something cool I need funding to be able to focus on that cool thing. Crypto can be a tool in this case, and I personally would prefer mining to watching ads.
Hackers are great and analyzing systems and figuring out what they might support, despite the original designer's intentions.
The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.