Tap! magazine deputy editor Matthew Bolton has written about IAP in iOS gaming, complaining about its increased dominance and the way that many developers don’t know where to draw the line. He talks about two different approaches: ‘complete’ and ‘endless’. The former is where you have a finite amount of game, chop it into bits, with some of said bits being premium upgrades. Hero Academy is a good example on iOS—a game where you can happily play for free, but where you must pay to unlock alternative teams and cosmetic upgrades. The endless approach is the one I’ve complained about before, where you require an in-game resource that either demands constant payment or that possibly recharges in a glacial manner, sapping enjoyment and increasing frustration. Bolton cites the bafflingly highly regarded CSR Racing as an example of this kind of freemium title; depressingly, it also manages to kill the satire in my piece that I linked to, in actually demanding payment for petrol. In a racing game. I think the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.

Bolton says greed is the problem (and that’s certainly the case in games that would otherwise be pretty good, such as EA’s latest Tetris for iOS, ruined by the freemium system), and he wonders if freemium will cause iOS gaming to be held back in terms of creativity:

If it looks like invasive IAPs are the only way to be successful, will brilliant games that don’t fit that model end up going elsewhere? When games are being created with the Endless model in mind, do traditional game mechanics, such as progression, fall by the wayside? I played No Zombies Allowed for a while, but gave up after a few days, because all I was earning was more of what I already had. I was accumulating, but for what? The game didn’t escalate. I was just building and building. What if all devs interested in offering a game with an actual pay-off abandon iOS for Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft platforms? That would be a huge regression for iOS gamers.

Those of you with long memories will argue we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, arcade games were designed with a fixed chunk of time in mind for your 10p or your quarter, but if you got good—really good—you could sit on an arcade cab for hours. Those were the finite games of their day, and they were about challenging gamers to beat them. After the gaming crash in 1984, and with the realisation that almost every arcade game was selling fewer cabs than its predecessor, cynical business models took over. Games no longer gave you three lives and a stern challenge: instead, they eventually got to the point where they were totally impossible to beat, but they’d give you that wonderful option of the continue. “Feed me more money,” they’d say, a glint in their eye, “and you can carry on from where you just left off. Your time won’t have been wasted! Go on! You know you want to.”

To my mind, far too many iOS freemium games are now the ‘continue’ of modern gaming. They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction? My hope is that something—anything—will make them change course, or at least leave enough of the really great developers playing a fairer game, because otherwise the greatest platform since the dawn of home gaming will end up bloated and dying on the floor, surrounded by mouldy piles of pointless Smurf berries and tarnished ‘coins’, which are only accepted currency for a stupid pixelated hat or a hateful paid-for fuel top-up for a virtual car.

Although it at the time of writing only has 260 backers, the GameDock for iPhone, iPad and iPod is over 80 per cent of the way to funding its Kickstarter project. As hard as I try, I just don’t get the point of the device. I last year wrote about iOS controllers, which at the time were fragmenting wildly. Today, the majority of controllers are iCade compatible, and yet the devices I’ve tested still exhibit massive fragmentation, largely due to the manner in which buttons are mapped.

Much of the reason for this is down to the original iCade’s set-up: a joystick and eight action buttons. Developers made their own decisions regarding which buttons mapped to which controls. You therefore find some games work with the left-most buttons and some with the right-most ones. For the original iCade and iCade Core, this doesn’t matter a great deal. The worst-case scenario is one rapidly aborted game with your on-screen guy getting killed as you figure out which buttons equate to jump and fire. iCade-compatible mobile devices, such as the iCade Mobile and Gametel aren’t nearly so lucky. With only four action buttons, many games become unplayable, substantially reducing the already smallish compatible selection. (Games aren’t automatically compatible with iCade—developers must specifically add support.)

The GameDock further reduces the number of action buttons to two, and so it’ll be a small miracle if many games work well with it. Additionally, the controllers are clearly modelled on NES controllers, which is a pretty good way to get sued by Nintendo, and the entire system is based around wires. You plug a wire from the GameDock into the TV, for video output, and the controllers plug into the dock itself. This might be kitsch and retro, but it also feels like a step back. To my mind, the future for iOS and gaming remains AirPlay and the Apple TV. It’s still not there yet—it’s too common to get just enough lag for games to feel wrong—but it makes more sense to me to use this system than one so solidly rooted in the 1980s.

I was surprised yesterday to see 148Apps run a post on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. I’ve written about this before on Revert to Saved, and the Atari competition is essentially spec work. Presumably gullible and desperate (or perhaps just naïvely optimistic) indies get to submit their ideas, which become the property of Atari, and one lucky winner ends up with a huge wodge of cash, although as Brian Robbins pointed out in February, said huge wodge might not be quite as huge as the dev was expecting. In his words:

If this were a typical publishing contract, there’s no way I would recommend any developer to sign these terms, no matter how desperate or cash strapped they are.

This is something of a far cry from 148Apps’s take:

Now is the chance to cash in that indie cred for a beefy paycheck.

More like cashing in your soul for a chance to win the King of the Spec World crown.

Like others who have run this story, 148Apps claims Atari is somehow extending an olive branch to the indie dev community, but there are other ways to do this. Atari could so easily have created its own shortlist of indie devs that create great games—perhaps great retro games, in some cases—and chucked a dev fee at them, thereby commissioning exciting and innovative indie games based around the Pong theme. This could then have been released as a series on the App Store, and if Atari was really wanting to doff its We Love Indies hat, it could have revenue-shared. But the Pong Indie Developer Challenge? That still, like a synonym of the original game’s name, stinks.

Kotaku reports on a tragic incident involving two children, from a story that originated at WJBF. They’d reportedly been playing Call of Duty, when one picked up a semi-automatic belonging to his parents and fired off some rounds, one of which fatally wounded the other. This is, of course, a horrible and tragic event, but the inference from the reporting is crazy.

The case—which has led to a charge of involuntary manslaughter—is being called an accident. Still, the television station reporting the incident spoke to child psychiatrist Dr. Dale Peeples…

Here we go.

who said that playing games like Black Ops could have contributed to this terrible event

Because kids never played ‘war’ before modern videogames arrived.

“A game that is rated M for Mature, probably doesn’t belong in the hands of a 12 year old”

Neither does a SEMI-AUTOMATIC GUN.

While it’s common to dismiss media outlets’ convenient linkages between violent video games and crime as sensationalist, this time—because of the closeness of the crime and the gameplay—it might not be as easy.

How about this for a link: had the child not had clearly far too easy access to a dangerous weapon, the other child would not have been shot. This has nothing to do with a videogame and everything to do with the gun.

Hat-tip: Xander Davis

Michael French for Develop writes about his GDC experience in GDC and the death of the gods. He notes that the gaming gods of the industry—Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo—once offered keynotes that defined the future of the industry, but now the gods are dying, largely due to competition from newcomers. He makes one point that I find particularly interesting:

As journalists like me say, ‘the [blank] happened’. The Internet happened. Facebook happened. iPhone happened. The power shifted. And Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony—they all lost some relevance. They had to share power with platforms that were built, at a macro level at least, to not be so draconian. For better or worse, platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens.

In case you didn’t catch that:

platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. At an EA event last year, I spoke to a few developers who’d created games for a number of platforms. They glumly told horror stories of their experiences on the ‘god’ platforms, before brightly saying what a breath of fresh air the relatively open iOS ecosystem is for gaming. Yet we most often only hear about the times when someone at Apple comes down with a bad case of the stupids, rejecting a game or app for spurious reasons, and not the many thousands of games that have ended up on the App Store that simply wouldn’t exist for any other mobile platform.

I’m not suggesting iOS is the most open of platforms, because it clearly isn’t, and it would be great to see the likes of OS X’s Gatekeeper arrive on iOS, providing a little extra freedom regarding apps that can be installed. But open and not-open isn’t black and white—instead there’s a diverse range as you move from one extreme to the other, and this is especially true when it comes to mobile gaming.