Criticism of free-to-play, Apple Watch failures, mobile advertising market forecasts - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Free-to-play - opium for the people!

So says the creator and lead developer of Minecraft Markus Persson (Markus Persson), better known as Notch. In his Twitter account, he compares shareware gaming applications with drugs and gambling. Earlier, he had already expressed his negative attitude towards this monetization model in more detailed comments . Persson believes that the excitement around the genre was created by developers who are chasing easy money, and suggests making f2p games illegal.

The reason for such a sharp outburst was the post in the same Twitter by the creator of the Duke Nuken series George Broussard (George Broussard), who said that arrogant developers would have to accept the growing popularity of free-to-play, understand and accept it.

Attitude to the shareware model is one of the most pressing issues for developers and players, and here you can understand both sides. It is no secret that the tops of the App Store and Google play are almost entirely composed of f2p projects, and the offer, as is known, is the result of demand. On the other hand, the same Marcus Persona has before his eyes a successful pay-to-play project distributed for a fixed fee - the mobile version of Minecraft.
')
Online surveys show that users have a very different attitude towards free-to-play monetization, and there are also quite a few loyal players among them. I would like to know that for you - both for developers and for players - free-to-play. Trick of treacherous igrodelov or an acceptable way to pay for the gaming experience?

Three key techniques for monetizing users in free-to-play games

I remember that there were 47 social games tips, 10 monetization tips, 10 tips on retaining users, and an even larger bundle of articles with similar headings. By the way, there is an obvious tendency to decrease the number of points. This time there are 3 key monetization tricks from Soomla developers in the examples. And despite the ironic name, the advice is worth it.

Forced abstinence
Play on the desire of the player to continue the game. The best example is Candy Crush Saga, when the player got excited, and his hearts suddenly ran out. From myself I can add, this is a rather subtle point - to tell the player that it’s time, it’s time to wrap up, at the moment of maximum excitement, and it should look natural.

Valuable purchase
Make an offer that is simply impossible to refuse! As an example, the builders of the Clash of Clans. The first construction projects take little time, but then the timings increase significantly and an objective need arises for builders. The need is high, and the price tag on the first builders is quite modest. The benefit is obvious!

Advertising
Whatever annoying ads are, many people, particularly in Soomla, believe that advertising is the future of monetization in games. The argument is simple, almost 98% of players do not pay and are not going to pay, but rather easily agree to view commercials for a small fee.

Apple Watch Sales Decline

Apple is not yet recognized, but, apparently, the situation around the Apple Watch is not the most optimistic . According to the electronic checks, Slice Intelligence found out that if at the time of the start the sales were near the mark of 35,000 hours a day, now it is barely 5,000.

In hindsight, this looks rather expected, although those who bought it or who want to buy it will not agree with me. But in general, I am sure that even for Apple, the situation is expected, there are still not very many applications for watches, and the market is not swinging. What to do with a smartphone, everyone already knows, what to do with the clock is not very clear.

Are there any dramatic changes in mobile advertising?

Jami Skella, director of innovation for one of the start-ups, believes that mobile advertising will undergo fundamental changes in the near future. The reasons for this, he sees in the following:

• limited visibility of traditional mobile advertising sites;
• less use of web search, websites and applications;
• development of voice user interfaces and improvement of artificial intelligence.

The volume of mobile advertising today leads to the following trends:

• Apple allows third-party developers to create extensions for mobile Safari and block ads in iOS 9;
• numerous European operators are talking about blocking all advertising in mobile networks;
• for the fourth time, the court decides that AdBlock Plus is legal;
• AdBlock Plus works with companies and universities to block advertisements and save traffic on their networks;
• Apple will no longer support the “canopenURL” API for placing targeted ads in applications;
• Adblock usage grew by about 70% from June 2013 to June 2014, and now the system works for about a quarter of all US Internet users;
• Firefox-based browser Adblock for Android has entered beta testing.

Spotlight in iOS 9 (and in OS X El Capitan) and Google Now are getting smarter and provide more and more options for selecting the necessary information. Technologies like these learn to foresee what you want now or want to do the next, in fact, only the beginning of a much more meaningful and convenient artificial intelligence. The development of voice user interfaces is expected not only at home, as with the Amazon Echo project, but familiar mobile devices will become familiar with the same level of understanding with the advent of improved versions of Siri and Cortana.

The BYYD advertising platform sees five trends in mobile advertising that can be implemented by 2020:

1. Mobile Advertising with Deep Links
To date, this tool is undervalued and is used rather poorly. By 2020, the content of mobile applications will no longer be "closed" within the application itself. Applications will be freely linked by links just like web pages now, and their developers will be able to send users inside their applications with just one click.

2. The emergence of hyper local advertising
Location data of a mobile user allows advertisers to advertise, based on maximum accuracy, up to several hundred meters. This type of targeting allows you to attract a client at the moment of close proximity to the “point of sale” and depending on the user's needs.

3. Best metrics for post-click and offline behavior
By 2020, advertisers will focus their interest on post-click and offline metrics, such as the flow of visits to the store and the rate of calls made.

4. Widespread programmatic
By 2020, advertisers will be able to use any advertising format, regardless of size, including for native, and video advertising. Although the programmatic of native and video advertising is just emerging, it is growing very fast.

5. One-click purchase / Tap-To-Buy Ads (click on ads and buy)
“Tap-to-buy mobile ad” will be very similar in functionality to 1-Click from Amazon and Apple Pay from Apple, where the user will be given the opportunity to make a purchase with one touch.

Some of these things may happen soon, even in this decade. In any case, mobile advertising such as we know it today, will not be, by 2020 it will become completely different.