4 ms·

Father of two boys, and kinda lapsed gamer. Wanted to introduce boys to some fun games we can play together. I cannot express how maddening the entire casino/m

Father of two boys, and kinda lapsed gamer. Wanted to introduce boys to some fun games we can play together. I cannot express how maddening the entire casino/micro-transaction transformation of all games has ruined everything for kids. I would happily buy a game out-right if it disabled all up-sells, and transactional BS. Even frikkin Minecraft launches with a bazillion pay upgrades now, and that's after you already bought it. I play a few carefully selected Steam titles with the boys in a limited fashion, because they are actually games, and not clever schemes to monetize everything. Even so, my oldest (who's 6) hasn't even ever seen Fortnight - and yet he still asks me about it. (I guess he hears about it from friends.) That's how good their marketing and monetization strategy works... It's sickening.

tomjen3 8y ago
As someone who used to develop games I would love to work on non-ad games, but the way the appstore works, you have to get on the top ten to make money (first page of google effect), which you can only do if you charge .99 (in the paid category) or free and then fill it with ads and shit. It takes a lot of advertisments elsewhere to get on the top ten apps in the appstore, which means if you don't fill your app with crap you can't afford to get the app up high enough that you break even. The best thing apple could do would be to randomize the list of which apps are shown when the user just searches, perhaps even weighted by reviews.
- andrew-dc 8y ago
  Oh yeah, I get that the stores and industry are a major problem here. Devs who don't play the store ranking game, end up losing. I resent that very much. I'm not certain what would be a decent solution for this problem, cause even if games were rated by users on "quality" - then the shift would be to game that quality system, by rewarding players to rank things higher quality, etc. Just a bummer.

tomjen3 8y ago

As someone who used to develop games I would love to work on non-ad games, but the way the appstore works, you have to get on the top ten to make money (first page of google effect), which you can only do if you charge .99 (in the paid category) or free and then fill it with ads and shit. It takes a lot of advertisments elsewhere to get on the top ten apps in the appstore, which means if you don't fill your app with crap you can't afford to get the app up high enough that you break even. The best thing apple could do would be to randomize the list of which apps are shown when the user just searches, perhaps even weighted by reviews.

andrew-dc 8y ago
Oh yeah, I get that the stores and industry are a major problem here. Devs who don't play the store ranking game, end up losing. I resent that very much. I'm not certain what would be a decent solution for this problem, cause even if games were rated by users on "quality" - then the shift would be to game that quality system, by rewarding players to rank things higher quality, etc. Just a bummer.