I started playing The Simpsons Tapped Out (tsto), also an EA 'freemium' game, this week due to boredom with RR3. If you've not looked at it, it's a sort of city-building game in which you create your own version of Springfield with characters and structures from the TV show that you purchase with currency you receive when you complete tasks.  

Interestingly, the economic model is almost identical to that of RR3. In tsto, when you complete tasks, you get "dollars" and XP, the tsto equivalent of Fame. Just like Service and Upgrades in RR3, every task has a time associated with it in tsto, ranging from a minute to 24 hours. You can wait, or you can spend precious donuts to finish them instantly. But for most people, that's not going to be an option, because as far as I can see, you only earn donuts when you level up. There is no equivalent, for example, of completion bonuses. Worse, when you level up, you only get 1 or 2 donuts. 

That's why I'm at level 10 of 41 (maybe 10% through the game?) and I have 28 donuts. What can I buy with my donuts? Some examples: 

• Planter Box of Flowers: 10
• Dumpster: 10
• Apple Tree: 15
• Duff Brewery: 190
• Frinks Lab: 150
• Lard Lad Donuts: 110
• Barney's Bowlarama: 250

Obviously, I am never going to be able to purchase more than a few pathetic items like dumpsters with the donuts I'll earn in the game.  Hard as it might be to believe, it is far harder to acquire donuts in tsto than it is to acquire Gold in RR3. Of course, just like in RR3, you can buy the scarce currency from the store, where pricing is as shocking and puzzling as in RR3, with the  biggest purchase (2400 donuts) available for only (you guessed it) $99.99.

It certainly looks like EA invented one economic model and is trying to impose it on all its products, at least judging by these two games--tsto even has a bonus for playing every day, but bizarrely, it seems to cycle, as though the RR3 daily bonus went back down to 10% (or whatever) the day after it reached 100%. That pretty much sums up the feel of the two games: tsto actually feels far more like a mercenary exercise in planned frustration to encourage purchases than RR3 does.

Part of this is because gameplay would be transformed far more radically in tsto if you had unlimited donuts than in RR3 if you had unlimited Gold. Every task worth doing in tsto takes many hours of waiting, which is what makes the game so painful to play without paying: imagine what RR3 would be like if there was, for example, a two hour wait (or 10 Gold) before each race in order to "form the grid", and a 24 hour wait (or 15 Gold) before you could enter the events you just unlocked on a new tab. It's just brutal and ugly, which many people seem to think about RR3. But if you think RR3 is "unplayable" without vast amounts of gold, you might have a (nucular) meltdown if you try The Simpsons Tapped Out.