So in this case the comparison is not between selling in-app coins vs games. It's between licensing IP to the company that sells coins, vs selling games.
It's not successful because it's particularly innovative or a fancy piece of tech, it's a success because it's pokemon.
You wouldn't go around comparing the popularity of Doom to Facebook right? This comparison needs to disappear.
Just because something doesn't get widespread news doesn't mean it's unpopular. Sure, Go is massively popular in its own right and to scale beats out Ingress but it's not like Ingress was some 2-bit game that nobody played. Half the mechanics of Go came from there, if Ingress sucked and was a failure they a) wouldn't have put the same features in Go, and b) probably wouldn't have even made Go.
tl;dr Please stop shitting on something you have zero experience with.
I don't use it at all anymore.
The difference?
Pokemon, which Nintendo owns.
If I was an investor, I'd view the potential for licensing the Nintendo IP (something Nintendo has been extremely reluctant to do in the past) as a huge potential growth vector for a struggling market segment (consoles, specifically Nintendo-made ones.)
Either way, I expect Nintendo will finall be releasing more mobile games. I suspect investors think the same thing, leading to the $7b increase.
Sony will live or die based on their ability to make great tech. Nintendo is different.
Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.
I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.
This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats.
Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun.
In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.
The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.
another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.
It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game.
The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly.
I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above.
For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.
it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective
But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!
Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.
As implied by the earlier commenters, that's obviously not the case.
> It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.
It's only an "option" because they crippled the game in the first place.
> Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.
And thus, freemium is inherently abusive. But even then, there are more acceptable ways to do it.
For example, look at how Smite does this: free to download, you can pick between grinding/microtransactions to unlock each character individually, or pay $30 to unlock everything in one go and effectively go back to what the game should have been from the start. Cosmetics are still paywalled, but at least there are no more microtransactions that have any effect on gameplay.
I'm not against paying for games. I'm against constantly being hounded to pay for the same thing over and over again.
So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.
Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.
Based on what I've read and my own experience (including a month as a beta tester), this isn't quite accurate. There are a few items that can't be harvested, including incubators, lures, lucky eggs, and backpack upgrades. Those can only be purchased.
One of the smarter ideas I've seen today - a local pub noticed they were getting increased traffic from players due to being close to both a gym and Pokestop. They mentioned in media interviews that they might permanently fund a lure in the Pokestop as a way to attract more players to the pub & offer them discounts on purchases if they mention the game. That sounds like a potential business model...
This is not to say that there can't be good free-to-play games with IAP, but the vast majority of the payment models is terrible in game quality (not talking about success). I honestly have a hard time coming up with a good example of an app, but in the PC space, excellent examples of quality free-to-play meets success is TF2 and Dota 2 where you can't buy an advantage yet they are hugely profitable.
I've spent at least 200 bucks on dota 2, and regret nothing. I have yet to spend any money on IAP in apps simply because I haven't seen any implementation I find acceptable.
agreed theres plenty of bad implementations of iap, but i think with time people are figuring out how to do it well.
i must confess im not much of a gamer in adulthood, but eg i think space team and clash royale are both excellent apps w/ iap.
(as a side-note, most online advertising is much more aggravating to me than purchases!)
Pacing it to gouge money to unlock chests, no max levels on cards (especially in tournaments), selling epics and chests etc.
I wish there was or I could come up with better ways to monetize it other than hats, but the game could be SO much better, and I would feel good about sinking money into it. The only thing that would happen, were I to put money into it, is that I would maybe bump up an arena or two earlier than otherwise, but then I would be in the exact same spot there instead. There's no end to the gouging, where gouging != possibility to put in more money.
My hope is after this initial success they start adding in paid apps that tie into improve their existing games. Something like exploring the real world for Pokemon allows them or the items they carry to be transferred to the 3DS version.
If something like that is successful full development of uniquely mobile games that are actually worth paying for and don't require the app to be full of ads, cheat to win paid upgrades, or completely unnecessary waiting periods between levels. The best outcome for the mobile gaming industry would be the fall of in-app purchasing in favor of outright buying fun well made games.
Nintendo's IP is strong enough to lead this charge with the right business strategy.
Can you imagine driving down the road, your family is starving, you just want something quick to eat. You ask your kids what they want to eat, and they say Burger King, because that's where mew is that week? Kids have a lot of control on this stuff, and the retail space knows it.
In addition, they can also tap into mellineals who grew up on Pokémon.