When Real Racing 3, Electronic Arts' super-glossy simulation mobile game, was released worldwide in February, it was not met with warm fuzzies.

This new racing game is FarmVille meets Formula 1. Players can play for free in bursts of roughly 30 minutes at a time, but then are asked to pay to "refuel" their car or repair busted parts. Those who pay can play more right away, but non-payers have to wait for a few hours before playing again.



*Life After Disc is a series exploring new development in digital gaming platforms, from app stores to browsers to downloadable console games.*Real Racing 3 is "a brilliant game crippled by EA’s greed," proclaimed the Penny Arcade Report. "Real Racing 3 is ruined by in-app purchases," said The Verge.

The response from the critics was near-unanimous: EA is the worst, and so is Real Racing 3.

So why is it the most popular game in the series yet?

Real Racing 3 has a near-perfect customer review average on the App Store, with over 30,000 five-star ratings from players. Only about 8.5 percent of players gave the game a negative review of one or two stars, and most seem to love it.

In the first week after its launch, Real Racing 3 downloads surpassed those of both of its sequels combined. To put that in context, the original Real Racing has been on sale since 2009, and Real Racing 2 was released in December 2010. Both were multi-million sellers.

Rage all you want: If over 90 percent of the people playing Real Racing 3 are happy, and the business model is successful, why would EA do anything differently?

Real Racing 2 cost $2 million to develop over a period of 18 months, and often sold for as little as 99 cents.

"You can't do that anymore," says Kynan Woodman, development director on Real Racing 3. "That's not a business model that will support the next Real Racing."

Woodman says that the team behind Real Racing 2 considered a transition to free-to-play with that game, but EA was too squeamish to try it in 2010. "It was too early and too scary," Woodman said.

Today, the free-to-play, pay-for-stuff model isn't just less risky, it's practically required for success. "Look at the top grossing [games]," Woodman says. "They're all free with the exception of Minecraft."

Woodman is right. It has been apparent for some time now that mobile game developers who don't embrace the free-to-play model are throwing away money that could've been theirs for the taking. There is a market of wealthy gamers out there willing to spend literally thousands of dollars on their favorite games. What big gaming publisher wouldn't want a piece of that?

The time limit that players of games like FarmVille are used to isn't often used in the racing game genre, and that's what seems to have critics irritated. We expect that racing games will let us play as much as we want. Real Racing 3 does fundamentally change the relationship between the player and the game by shutting that down – unless they're willing to pay, and pay, and pay forever. There is no option that allows a player to simply pay a flat fee for an all-you-can-race experience.

Of course, there is another way of looking at it: Real Racing 3 is a service that you can access totally for free, for 30 minutes per day. Once you play it enough and unlock more cars, you can play it for twice as long.

In this scenario, with Real Racing 3 as a service, deep-pocketed gamers aren't lured into a monthly contract, but instead can choose to pay any time that they've used up their daily allotment and want more game. They get a premium service with quicker career progression and faster car unlocks, and casual Real Racing 3 fans are let in the door for free without having to make any sort of financial investment. On top of this, everybody gets access to a vastly larger community.

Plus, Real Racing 3 players who drive carefully and avoid scraping up their cars will have to repair their vehicles less often, and thus can play longer. It harkens back to the days when a skilled player could last far longer in an arcade. In this way, Real Racing 3 is like an arcade where you're given three or four free tokens every day just for walking in the door.

Electronic Arts says it can't afford to charge a one time fee for Real Racing 3, given the amount of money it spent creating the game. In other words, this is the future of big-budget, premium-quality mobile games.

And remember: Most people playing it seem to be perfectly fine with that.