The manifesto
Open any app store and scroll the top-grossing charts. Most of what you'll find isn't games — it's slot machines wearing game costumes, tuned by behavioural psychologists to separate you from your money one notification at a time.
Somewhere along the way, "free" learned to charge you forever — in money, in attention, in data. YKYMF exists to make the other kind of game: one you buy, own, and actually enjoy.
// no IAP · no pay-to-win · no subscriptions · no ads · no tracking · no timers
What went wrong
The trick was never the price. It was teaching a billion people that a game is something you rent from a psychologist, not something you own.
The download is free, so you install it. Then the game starts working on you. An energy meter empties, so you wait — or pay to skip the wait. A limited-time offer blinks red for the next four hours. A wall appears that you could grind past in a fortnight, or clear tonight for $19.99. None of it is an accident. Every timer, every bundle, every "you're so close!" popup was A/B tested against your patience until it won.
The people who spend the most aren't called customers. They're called whales, and entire games are balanced around finding them and bleeding them. Everyone else is the free scenery that makes the whale feel like they're in a real world. Meanwhile the game watches everything you do — every tap, every session, every hesitation — and quietly sells that trail to data brokers you've never heard of.
We've all been trained to accept this. To shrug at loot boxes aimed at kids, at ads that interrupt the thing you opened the ad-riddled app to escape, at "seasons" that reset your progress so you'll re-buy it. It's normal now. That's exactly the problem. A game should be a thing you get to enjoy — not a subscription to your own boredom.
The full no-crap pledge
The same tricks show up in almost every mobile game. This is the line we hold in every game we ship — no exceptions, no asterisks.
Line by line
A pledge is easy to print and easy to fudge. Here's the reasoning behind every one — what the trick does to you, and what we do instead.
IAP turns a game into a shop where the product is your impatience. Once a designer can sell you a shortcut, they're paid to build the obstacle it skips — so the game gets worse on purpose. We sell you the whole game once and then compete only on how good it is.
Pay-to-win quietly rewrites the rules so the richest player wins, not the best one. It poisons every leaderboard and turns a fair contest into a wallet-measuring contest. In our games everyone plays the exact same game — your money bought you in, and after that you're on your own merits.
A subscription means the game you love stops working the day you stop paying — you were only ever renting it. Miss a payment and your save, your progress, your whole world locks behind a paywall. Buy once from us and it's yours to keep, on your device, for good.
An ad-funded game is one where you are the product being sold, and the "content" is just bait between commercials. Worse, most mobile ads phone home about you to sell better ads. We took the money up front, so the screen belongs entirely to the game and to you.
Most "free" games are surveillance with a play button — every tap logged, profiled, and sold to ad networks and data brokers. We don't build that machine because we don't need it: there's nothing to optimise when the whole game is already paid for. What you do in our games stays between you and the game.
Energy meters and endless grind exist to manufacture a wait, then sell you the exit. They dress up "please stop playing" and "please pay to keep playing" as game design. Ours are built to be enthralling on their own terms — you play because you want to, and you stop when you want to.
"Free" is the most expensive word in the store — it's the hook that justifies every trick above. We'd rather charge a small, fair, one-time price and owe you nothing but a great game. A few dollars, paid once, with no strings: that's a better deal than free-forever that quietly costs you a subscription's worth of dignity. Honest pricing is the only pricing we know how to defend.
The alternative
Small, sharp, affordable games that are enthralling because of the design, not because of a dopamine schedule. You buy one once. You own it. It's the whole game on day one, it works on the plane, and it never asks you for another cent.
That's a harder way to make a game and a slower way to make money. We think it's the only way worth doing — and we'd rather make forty people genuinely love a thing than trick four hundred into tolerating it.
That's the whole idea
No timers, no whales, no tricks. Pick a game, or ask us anything — a real person from the studio answers.