One way to show disrespect for customers who paid for your iOS game
The latest update to developer HotGen’s Pocket Gamer Bronze Award-winning iPhone and iPad title To-Fu: The Trials of Chi has caused a bit of a stir.
[Despite] the update making the rock-solid platformer—and all of its in-app purchases—available for free, it introduces pesky ads that flash up at the bottom of your device’s screen as you play. This has upset some of the players that bought the title for 69p / 99c.
The iPad version is also affected, and that initially cost £1.99/$2.99. One recent review on the App Store states:
Now I always have an advert which I don’t usually mind but this time they actually affect the gameplay, it makes the game screen smaller, you can accidentally touch the advert and it is a bit distracting.
And that’s one of the more constructive of the recent slew of one-star reviews.
I find HotGen’s stance very odd, since it appears to show disrespect for those who already paid for To-Fu. If I’ve spent money on a game, the last thing I want is for the developer to suddenly make it free and shove adverts in my face. It also makes me concerned about other HotGen products. Will To-Fu 2 be next? What about Spacelings? (Note that I this morning asked for a comment from the company’s PR as to why this decision was made, and will update this article should I receive a reply.)
HotGen’s hardly alone. I’ve seen plenty of iOS games integrating house ads (sometimes in the form of ‘news announcements’), and I find such things irksome at best. But it’s pretty rare to see a paid-for title switch to free and have banners welded to it, compromising the experience for all and angering people who originally paid for it.
I imagine this must be incredibly irritating. Ah, but devs are bound to discover the proper way to treat their customers.
I heard of this happening with Fling a Thing, but then apparently it o ly affected those who didn’t pay for it originally. Maybe HotGen just needs to find a better way to do this?
I am one of the legions of people who left a 1-star review on this game, and I appreciate articles like this and your efforts to get an official response from HotGen. I, too, have written emails and tried contacting them on Twitter, all to no avail.
I wanted to add to your analysis that this issue is not simply about HotGen putting ads in a previously paid game. Sure, that would be bad enough, but in my opinion what HotGen did here is much worse. HotGen had a free, ad-supported version of this game that was available separately from the paid version. So, my criticism to HotGen is that at the time I purchased the HD version for $1.99 I had a choice to make: do I want to pay $1.99 to avoid ads, or am I willing to accept ads to get the game for free. I chose to pay the $1.99 to avoid ads. However, now that HotGen has removed the free, ad-supported version and put ads in the previously paid version, I am now right back in the position I would have been in had I just taken the free version to begin with. In other words, what did I (and every other paying customer) receive for their money?
Plus, HotGen did not even have the decency to allow customers to decide for themselves if they wanted to update by providing them with warning. The update that introduced ads simply stated in the “what’s new” section that it has iOS5 compatibility fixes. No mention of ads.
Update: HotGen just put ads in To-Fu 2, even though the “what’s new” section only indicated “5 new trials.”
Thank you for this, now I know not to trust this developer. But can a developer just come up again under a different name?
To be fair, the dev’s released some good games. It’s just this particular decision was a very bad one.