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To paraphrase Jonathan Blow, game developers have a large impact. This comes with great responsibility. This permeates every aspect of the design: a game that

To paraphrase Jonathan Blow, game developers have a large impact. This comes with great responsibility. This permeates every aspect of the design: a game that consume significantly more resources than it should encourage players to renew their hardware sooner than they should have needed to —money that could be better spent elsewhere. Loading screen that take too long loses people's time. Only a bit of time, but with a lot of people. There are Skinner boxes like candy crush that prey on people's need for escapism, and create a compulsion that loses much of their time and sometimes money —we should consider prosecuting that last one criminally. Eating too much of one's data plan is one responsibility among many. The sad fact, is most people are uninformed, ignorant, and don't want to learn. But the temptation to say they had it coming doesn't help. And even if people were careful, the mere need to be careful is a burden that would have been avoided if the game didn't consume so much freaking bandwidth. --- YouTube can't reduce the bandwidth, short of re-encoding everything, which it probably does already. Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth. Same for Apple (they already compress music without the user's consent or knowledge, which is bad, but at least it saves bandwidth). Instagram pre-loading should probably be tunable, maybe even off by default, though. --- If the app's bandwidth consumption exceeds all expectation, making the consumer whole should be considered. There is a point where this stuff is the app's fault.

TrevorJ 10y ago
It isn't clear from the document that the App uses more data than most of it's type. 20 meg/per hour seems likely to be on par or even a bit less than browsing facebook mobile for the same amount of time. The trouble seems to stem from the amount of time people are using the app, which is above the average for other apps.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > uses more data than most of it's type First, there are not that many games of this type, but the user will see this as a "game". Most games don't use any bandwidth, and network games are often fairly lightweight in bandwidth, while some use a lot more. I doubt most games use anywhere close to the bandwidth used by modern bloated websites. If this game is different from the usual expectations of a game, it should include a warning and estimation of it's bandwidth usage. > browsing facebook mobile Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    The game is a descendant of Ingress, so anyone familiar with the latter should at least have a feel on how much data it uses. Also, it's obviously a multiplayer game (even if the multiplayer aspect is limited), and it shows you the map of the real world, which kind of sets an expectation of it downloading data... ...that said, Pokémon Go could sure use a lot more caching. It seems that (didn't confirm with a packet sniffer, but latency says it all), for example, it redownloads all Pokéstop data whenever you visit it. That's IMO utterly ridiculous - a Pokéstop is pretty much a permanent fixture (an ex-Ingress portal), it doesn't change, and the user itself is expected to mostly stay in the same geographical area. I don't see any good reason not to cache at least the visual stuff. Which brings me to the general problem of the hipstery approach to development - download and redownload everything from Internet ad infinitum, as if everyone had broadband and electricity was free.
    - egypturnash 10y ago
      > anyone familiar with [Ingress] should at least have a feel on how much data [Pokemon Go] uses Most of the people playing Pokemon have probably never heard of Ingress. I agree that it could use a lot more caching, though!
    - pjc50 10y ago
      The thing is, it's a descendant of Ingress, but it feels like a cheap clone. It seems to be worse in some regards. I think Ingress does cache the photos it uses for portals. Pokemon Go is tremendously resource-hungry; I can play Ingress fine on my Moto G, but PGo's stated memory requirements are far larger, it crashes regularly (about every 5-10 minutes), and it gets very warm in the process. And the Pokedex is completely broken.
  - TrevorJ 10y ago
    >Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations. I am comparing it to Facebook because that is what the linked document in question does. I suspect you are being overly pedantic as a way to avoid my core point, which is that this application doesn't consume much/any more data per hour than most other activities people use a smart phone for. Even the linked document shows that.
DominikR 10y ago
Fundamentally there cannot be any kind of expectation regarding bandwidth usage that a customer can reasonably have as even experts would need to analyse the source code first before they could reach a conclusion if excessive data is loaded needlessly to provide the user experience. You cannot say this for sure about Pokemon Go, neither can I. The only way a customer can have an informed expectation about that is if the developer tells the user upfront how much data the application will use. Regarding expectations you give this example: > Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth How did people learn to expect this when the first movies were available online? They didn't have any comparison back then. And what exactly is this expectation? Does any non-tech customer know today what the bandwidth usage of 4K video streaming should be and how much less it should be for a 720p video? And which company does a better job at this? Netflix, YouTube or Amazon Prime? Customers probably just know about bandwidth usage for video: it uses "a lot" The thing is that movie apps can at least be somewhat categorised in terms of what they will do, but for games this is hardly possible. There the bandwidth usage can be all over the place, starting from online chess to VR games with high res video experiences. > If the app's bandwidth consumption exceeds all expectation, making the consumer whole should be considered. There is a point where this stuff is the app's fault. Primarily it is the customers obligation to manage and monitor his private bandwidth usage. After that it is the carriers obligation to make sure they track the usage correctly. Turning this upside down and placing the burden on the developer will not help as the users cannot have a reasonable expectation and trying to regulate the world to fulfill whatever phantasies people might have has never worked.

TrevorJ 10y ago

It isn't clear from the document that the App uses more data than most of it's type. 20 meg/per hour seems likely to be on par or even a bit less than browsing facebook mobile for the same amount of time. The trouble seems to stem from the amount of time people are using the app, which is above the average for other apps.

pdkl95 10y ago
> uses more data than most of it's type First, there are not that many games of this type, but the user will see this as a "game". Most games don't use any bandwidth, and network games are often fairly lightweight in bandwidth, while some use a lot more. I doubt most games use anywhere close to the bandwidth used by modern bloated websites. If this game is different from the usual expectations of a game, it should include a warning and estimation of it's bandwidth usage. > browsing facebook mobile Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The game is a descendant of Ingress, so anyone familiar with the latter should at least have a feel on how much data it uses. Also, it's obviously a multiplayer game (even if the multiplayer aspect is limited), and it shows you the map of the real world, which kind of sets an expectation of it downloading data... ...that said, Pokémon Go could sure use a lot more caching. It seems that (didn't confirm with a packet sniffer, but latency says it all), for example, it redownloads all Pokéstop data whenever you visit it. That's IMO utterly ridiculous - a Pokéstop is pretty much a permanent fixture (an ex-Ingress portal), it doesn't change, and the user itself is expected to mostly stay in the same geographical area. I don't see any good reason not to cache at least the visual stuff. Which brings me to the general problem of the hipstery approach to development - download and redownload everything from Internet ad infinitum, as if everyone had broadband and electricity was free.
  - egypturnash 10y ago
    > anyone familiar with [Ingress] should at least have a feel on how much data [Pokemon Go] uses Most of the people playing Pokemon have probably never heard of Ingress. I agree that it could use a lot more caching, though!
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The thing is, it's a descendant of Ingress, but it feels like a cheap clone. It seems to be worse in some regards. I think Ingress does cache the photos it uses for portals. Pokemon Go is tremendously resource-hungry; I can play Ingress fine on my Moto G, but PGo's stated memory requirements are far larger, it crashes regularly (about every 5-10 minutes), and it gets very warm in the process. And the Pokedex is completely broken.
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  >Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations. I am comparing it to Facebook because that is what the linked document in question does. I suspect you are being overly pedantic as a way to avoid my core point, which is that this application doesn't consume much/any more data per hour than most other activities people use a smart phone for. Even the linked document shows that.

DominikR 10y ago

Fundamentally there cannot be any kind of expectation regarding bandwidth usage that a customer can reasonably have as even experts would need to analyse the source code first before they could reach a conclusion if excessive data is loaded needlessly to provide the user experience. You cannot say this for sure about Pokemon Go, neither can I. The only way a customer can have an informed expectation about that is if the developer tells the user upfront how much data the application will use. Regarding expectations you give this example: > Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth How did people learn to expect this when the first movies were available online? They didn't have any comparison back then. And what exactly is this expectation? Does any non-tech customer know today what the bandwidth usage of 4K video streaming should be and how much less it should be for a 720p video? And which company does a better job at this? Netflix, YouTube or Amazon Prime? Customers probably just know about bandwidth usage for video: it uses "a lot" The thing is that movie apps can at least be somewhat categorised in terms of what they will do, but for games this is hardly possible. There the bandwidth usage can be all over the place, starting from online chess to VR games with high res video experiences. > If the app's bandwidth consumption exceeds all expectation, making the consumer whole should be considered. There is a point where this stuff is the app's fault. Primarily it is the customers obligation to manage and monitor his private bandwidth usage. After that it is the carriers obligation to make sure they track the usage correctly. Turning this upside down and placing the burden on the developer will not help as the users cannot have a reasonable expectation and trying to regulate the world to fulfill whatever phantasies people might have has never worked.