Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I recently tried for about 10 minutes to find a game that met my criteria, using the iOS version of the App Store. I wasn’t asking for much (at least, so I thought): I wanted a game that could be purchased once (no In-App Purchases), and I wanted a particular category. The search was practically futile; every single match was In-App Purchases. I even decided to stop caring about the category and it was the same.

The browsing experience was almost unbelievably inefficient; I found myself scrolling through handfuls of games when I should have been able to rule out dozens. Apple likes to show you “only the icon” most of the time, which is really quite a terrible way to browse; you keep having to go in, out, in out, to learn anything about what’s in the list.

I ended up buying nothing at all because I couldn’t even tell if there were games that supported buy-once without any of the usual bullshit gem-buying tactics. Despite having simple goals, the App Store just failed me.

There are games like those you're looking for but they use In-app purchases (IAP):

Games with ads and that are incomplete, where you purchase the "complete game with no ads" with a single purchase.

So it's like a demo that you upgrade to full version.

The problem is that because there's no "demo" functionality in the app store, they get labeled as games with IAP which turns many people, me including, away.

Before IAP, there were Free and Full versions of the same game (with and without ads and other perks), like Angry Birds and others.

If they made a "demo" category where the game has ads and fewer levels, or limited play time that you could upgrade to full game without ads, I'd be much happier as a dev and as a consumer.

> The problem is that because there's no "demo" functionality in the app store, they get labeled as games with IAP which turns many people, me including, away.

This would make no difference, people would just play the demo then move on to the next game. There are 2,000,000 apps in the store.... if your title is any good someone will clone it and put a free version up anyway.

For what it's worth, if you click on the "games" button on the featured apps page, then look around for "buy once and play", you can find a collection of games without in-app purchases. I know that doesn't fix the overall issue, but it helps a bit.

What type of game are you looking for? Do you believe there's a untapped market?

I do. All I want is something like boxcar2d.com that runs on iOS. It exists on Android, but the web version is Flash and even the HTML5 clone is far too slow in mobile Safari.

I like leaving it running while I work on other things, checking on it like a fish tank.

So your problem has nothing to do with search, but it's simply a game that isn't available on the AppStore.

What did you expect?

The search to port the game for you?

You do realize that my comment was in a reply to someone asking what games a person would like to see developed, and in particular, what games are actually missing from the app store, right? Nothing to do with being able to find them. The idea is that they don't exist at all. So yes. You're completely right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com