If you’re a mobile gamer, you know all about the ‘freemium’ game model. You get a game for free and the in-game purchases are really cheap… but then they start to add up and before you know it you’ve sunk more money into the game than you’d have spent buying it in the first place. Freemium games have been designed to be addictive and while some companies do it well and treat the gamer as a customer, the problems of the ones that treat the game as a money mine are clear.

Today however it seems that Apple have decided to take a stand, adding a new section to the front page of the App Store called ‘Pay Once & Play’. In other words, it promotes only games that you pay for once and that do not contain any in-app purchases or extra content that needs paying for to unlock. The section is further arranged into sub-sections of Recent Releases, Blockbuster Games and App Store Originals. This includes games such as Thomas Was Alone and Minecraft alongside the likes of Threes, Leo’s Fortune and many others. It’s already in the UK App Store and should be rolled out to the US Store soon if it hasn’t been already.

Apple has taken other steps to combat misleading freemium games that advertised themselves as ‘free to play!’ despite hiding major features of gameplay behind in-app purchases. It added a label that was added to indicate a game contained the purchases, and then changed the text of the button for Freemium games from ‘Free’ to ‘Get’ to save more misleading of customers.