Buying upgrades in real life

You can often find in freemium apps/games these days, that there'll be some kind of a store or shop section, and people would buy upgrades using actual money via in-app purchase. It is a somehow more proven and effective business model as compared to selling the apps/games for 99 cents and they get everything.

The tips in making people go for in-app purchase is to frustrate them bit by bit in the gameplay experience. You progress through the game smoothly at the start, and as it goes towards the end, difficulty starts going to the peak, and people would eventually buy upgrades to progress through the game.

I was seeing the same thing happens in real life. As people grow, they will definitely face more challenges in their life. And people are actually attempting to buy upgrades to progress through their life.

Self help books

I'm talking about self help books. How to be successful, how to be rich, how to make money with facebook, et cetera. You name it. 

I always get this feeling whenever I went to MPH, Kinokuniya etc. You go pass the bookshelves, and there's like tonnes of upgrades that you can choose from. It's kind of deceiving. You saw a book called "How to become the next facebook", you pick it up, and it was as if you've automatically achieved it. Like an in-app purchase upgrade. And I saw people bought a lots of these upgrades. 

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with buying these upgrades. It's just people sometimes can fall into the trap of buying a whole lot of books, but end up not reading it. Or if they manage to finish it, or at least read a part of it, they didn't actually practice it. 

Recently I saw someone put an ad selling a lot of ebooks with titles like 'How to Be Rich' et cetera. They are giving hopes to the people who decided to buy it, with quite a price (about RM100 for dozens of ebooks). Yeah people can argue that as long as there is demand, then nothing wrong with selling those. But I'm thinking are those ebook authors really achieve something when they publish that ebook called 'how to get rich', apart from getting rich from selling ebook about how to get rich? Yes you can indeed call it richception if you want.

I'm not discouraging you guys from reading books. I'm just discouraging you guys from buying instant upgrades. Find a quality book. Don't judge the book just by its cover (or title).