Harry Marks (who writes over and Curious Rat) and I have differing views about the state of media and how companies should respond to modern technology. When we’ve discussed things on Twitter, he’s very much in the ‘black and white’ camp regarding piracy, and will even go so far as to rebuy media digitally rather than ripping CDs to iTunes. I’m generally more of the opinion that media companies should be doing a lot more to make content available, accessible, affordable and not hugely annoying to use. Although I almost never torrent anything (one of the side effects of having a reliable but capped broadband connection), I find it hard to sympathise with companies whose work is widely distributed in that manner when they’ve been region locking it in some way or charging obscene money.

Today though, I’m mostly of the same opinion as Marks regarding his takedown of John Siracusa, who decided to whine about credits being attached to every episode of Netflix’s House of Cards. Marks says:

First, the problem was not being able to get the content we wanted when we wanted it. Then, came the laments about pricing. How dare seasons of television cost anything more than [INSERT ARBITRARY NUMBER… I REMOVED FROM MY RECTUM]!

Now, people are getting their panties in a twist over having to sit through opening credits? Where does it end? At what point does this blatant selfishness turn into, “I hate this actor/these mushy love scenes/this director. If you remove all of that, I’ll be beating down your door to give you money, then complaining some more.”

Netflix has its problems—the lack of a ‘wish list’/’save for later’ option is especially annoying—but credit sequences aren’t one of them. They’re a staple of TV, and although you might choose to watch several episodes in a row, until the systems are intelligent to recognise this and chop out the credits, you’ll just have to sit through them. Except you won’t, because Netflix—unlike many shiny discs—doesn’t lock the content it’s streaming and you can fast-forward through it. (Additionally, such sequences often have ‘previously’ sections, which might include a useful reminder that you’d otherwise miss, thereby making your experience worse. This won’t be rectified until we’re all wearing Google Chip In Brain™, some time in 2017.)

Mind you, here’s where I depart again from Marks, who says:

So, I’m going to finish this season of House of Cards and sit through every opening credits sequence because people worked hard to build it.

But if and when I also watch that show, I’ll sit through one credits sequence and fast forward through the rest. What I won’t do is complain about them.

I’m getting increasingly tired of the tech pissing contest, with everyone suing everyone else for every possible potential infringement, and I was idly wondering recently if there’s ever a line companies would not cross. It appears not. AllThingsD reports on Samsung’s latest shot across the bows at Apple:

A Mannheim Regional Court on Friday ordered a stay of a Samsung suit against Apple that alleges the iPhone maker’s VoiceOver screen-access technology violated its patent on display into speech data.

VoiceOver is accessibility technology, designed for people with impaired vision. In short, it enables blind people to use iOS devices, which gives them relatively easy access to information in a manner previously unheard of. AllThingsD notes:

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived.

I’d say it’s reprehensible. There are some things lawyers should just leave alone, and I genuinely hope Samsung gets a seriously bloody nose from this

Further reading: David Chartier’s story about watching a blind Apple Store employee use VoiceOver. Via 512 Pixels.

At the time of writing, most of the top grossing games in the App Store are freemium titles: games that are free to play, but that hinge on a business model that more often than not requires money to be semi-regularly fed in, either to speed up the game or to get through regular doorslams. I’ve written about freemium games before, highlighting my distaste for the model on the basis that it’s too often abused.

Occasionally, this isn’t the case, although that’s mostly when a game is more akin to an old-school demo (and therefore more accurately labelled as ‘free to play’ than ‘freemium’, if there’s a distinction to be made). For example, Gridrunner Free gives you a unique game mode and a single IAP upgrades the game to unlock everything else. Letterpress restricts you to a couple of simultaneous games, but, again, a single upgrade unlocks everything.

However, even when you enter into the realm of upgrades and ongoing cash injections, there’s no reason why gouging and grinding has to be front and centre. Hero Academy has a smart system where you buy new teams of characters and aesthetic customisations, but you can play without them, albeit without the same level of variety as those who choose to pay. And despite its hateful £59.99 ‘gold package’ (to my mind, any game with a disposable 60-quid IAP needs to take a good, long look at itself), Royal Revolt is a hugely enjoyable romp that you can play through without spending a great deal of cash to speed along upgrades. In fact, it’s perhaps the first game of this sort I’ve played where I thought it could do with more roadblocks, because it was being a little too generous. (I also felt the same about Frisbee Forever and its sequel, both of which I threw a few quid at, purely on the basis of the enjoyment I’d gotten out of the free games.)

On Eurogamer recently, Dan Whitehead reviewed Ghostbusters. Whitehead seems to be of a similar age to me, given that he references David Crane’s 1984 tie-in (which, let’s face it, was amazing if you had a C64 and were about ten: *stabs space bar* GHOSTBUSTERS!), but this also means he’s old enough to remember not only when gaming lacked modern-style freemium business models but also when it was heavily based around ‘pay to play’ a.k.a. arcade gaming.

Whitehead tears apart Ghostbusters, his review being summed up by the concluding paragraphs:

You quickly realise that there’s absolutely no point to anything you’re doing. You grind through identical battles dozens of times to scrape together enough credits to earn the right to grind through more identical battles. It’s a prime example of that upside-down design mentality that requires the ‘game’ element to be so slow and frustrating that the player feels compelled to pay in order to skip it.

In the comments, he’s then accused of being anti-freemium. Perhaps, argue those in favour of the model, Eurogamer should be asking people who love buying a 70-quid barrel of Smurfberries to review the likes of Ghostbusters. But making that accusation on Whitehead is missing the point he so clearly makes in his review:

There’s a world of difference between a game that uses micro-payments and a micro-payment model that is simply delivered in the guise of a game. If Ghostbusters has any value at all, it’s as an illustration of this important point.

In the comments, he further elaborates:

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a freemium model, and many games use it wisely to great effect. There is something very wrong with ‘games’ that are simply mechanisms for payment, dressed up as ‘gameplay’ in the limpest possible sense. That’s what Ghostbusters is. Take away the payment model and there’s simply no game there—just an endless series of mindless tasks with no positive feedback loop.

This is something people misunderstand when comparing freemium titles to arcade games. The latter were sometimes vicious in their difficulty levels, gulping coins, but the games were always about skill. Get good enough and you could survive on a single coin. That, to some extent, was the magic: a well-tuned game would reward your investment; and although from a manufacturer standpoint you could argue it’s not savvy that a game would potentially earn less per play as it aged, older games would regularly make way for new ones anyway, enabling the cycle to repeat.

However, I do nonetheless divert slightly from Whitehead’s views; he states:

This is why the example of arcade machines is flawed—those games were fun, whether you put 10p into the slot or £10. The input-feedback loop was completely different because progress per coin was skill based. You don’t need skill to beat Ghostbusters—just reams of patience and money to burn.

Although this is an opinion that aligns perfectly with my own preferences, it’s not an opinion I consider relevant to all modern gamers. In many cases, people seem content—even happy—with an experience rather than an old-school arcade-oriented title, demanding puzzler or slice of challenging strategy that demands skill for success. They’re happy to tend—the gaming equivalent of mindless gardening, where you go through the motions. However, I believe that even in this space, there still needs to be reward, and companies must take care to not enforce grind.

Even looking at Ghostbusters from the point of view of someone who enjoys freemium games, Whitehead’s review calls out the truly negative, hateful aspects of the production: grinding through nondescript scenes dozens of times to merely see more of the same; making progression so slow, frustrating and annoying that a player pays to skip through. Even without skill, a game can offer progression, fun, delight, beauty, and, as I’ve said, rewards—a return for the investment of both your time and your money. Without at least those things, freemium titles still represent a massive threat to not only iOS gaming, but also to the entire gaming ecosystem. Within a few years, the most exciting medium in history could be little more than potentially infinite Little Infernos* installed on people’s devices, sucking bank accounts dry in return for what ultimately amounts to nothing at all.

* Little Inferno is an experience-led game that riffs off of freemium games, almost being one, but with in-game currency generated solely by the items burned on the Little Inferno fireplace. It’s proved divisive, but it’s one of the finest productions I’ve seen in recent months on the iPad, and I very much recommend it and staying the course. If you get frustrated by the combos, I’d even argue you won’t lose much by finding some hints online, because the game’s pay-off is wonderful. Also, judging by reviews I’ve read, some people (who presumably like their freemium games) are ecstatic purely with the burning and not just the underlying story, which is amusing.

Responding to the same ‘Samsung out-innovating Apple’ piece I wrote about earlier, John Gruber at Daring Fireball talks about the iOS app launch grid:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

This is a viewpoint I’ve long shared and continue to argue in favour of. The problem is that the tech press lives in its own little bubble, and often those commenting on articles (and therefore shoring up viewpoints) are also those heavily into tech, tweaking and customisation. The reality is most people either cannot do such things or really don’t care about doing so. Most people just want to get on with performing tasks.

The question with iOS and its perceived limitations is whether it stops people from doing this. Some pundits have said the iOS lock screen should be massively overhauled, to add a slew of widgets, providing immediate access to information from diverse sources. Clearly, that’s something that works for some people, but it’s also a confusing, unfocussed mess for others. I look at my parents, new to touchscreen devices, battling iOS. If they were bombarded with crap the second they turned on their devices, said devices would soon end up in a drawer, never to be used again. But because they get a clean grid of icons and can focus on a single task, they’re getting into using these devices, and exploring the app ecosystem.

Even from my own perspective, I’m becoming an advocate of simplicity over complexity. I used to weld countless add-ons to my Mac, but I’ve in recent years stripped them back to only include add-ons that I cannot do without, because removing them would make me significantly less productive. I’m not sure how a more complex launch environment on iOS would make me any more productive. At-a-glance tiles can barely show any information anyway, and if they were showing something that’s ‘cropped’, I’d be more likely to open an app and become distracted. By contrast, when I open Tweetbot on iOS, it’s because I want to spend some time on Twitter, and the configurable Notification Center can take care of flinging an alert in my face for anything that’s especially important and/or time-sensitive.

Note that I’m not arguing that Apple’s got it ‘right’ and Android and others have got it ‘wrong’. But, like Gruber, I am arguing that taking a default stance that increased complexity is always a boon for computing is a bafflingly wrong standpoint that should cause any writer to take pause and reconsider.

I yesterday wrote about TechCrunch’s article that referred to Samsung out-innovating Apple. To be fair to author Peter Relan, his piece was largely balanced and generally non-mad. CNN, on the other hand, has gone all out into Crazy Zone territory, with Steve Kovach’s How Samsung is out-innovating Apple. He first sets the scene:

Competitors have built upon the foundation Apple laid in mobile and are now leapfrogging it with [a] bunch of useful features you can’t find on iPhones and iPads. The evidence is everywhere, but it’s most apparent in products made by Apple’s biggest mobile rival, Samsung.

He then equates innovation with what I yesterday referred to as Samsung’s “out-flinging-stuff-at-walls-and-seeing-what-sticks-ing Apple”:

[You] can’t ignore the fact that the company has innovated a lot by creating popular new product categories that Apple is wary to try.

Well, you certainly can’t when people writing for CNN keep banging on about it. Kovach mentions the Galaxy Note, which people criticised, and then which subsequently sold quite well. Then there’s the Galaxy Note II, with an even bigger screen and that sold five million units. This, according to Kovach showed how Samsung

created a new category of smartphone that people didn’t even know they wanted, much like Apple did when it released the first iPhone.

Yes, exactly like the iPhone. Because without the iPhone, Samsung would quite obviously have created a slightly larger iPhone-like device. That much is certain.

Samsung isn’t afraid to tout its cool factor either. Since the first commercial debuted in late 2011, you’ve probably seen those “Next Big Thing” ads that make fun of starry-eyed Apple fans waiting in line for the next iPhone.

While hoping one day people will also queue up like that to buy one of its devices.

On the software side of things, Samsung is taking advantage of its mobile devices’ processing power to layer premium features on top of Android, such as the ability to run two apps at once in a split screen or separate window.

Sounds great. Let’s hope there’s not a downside to that!

There is a downside to the split-screen thing, however.

Oh.

Developers have to tweak their apps to work in split-screen mode on the Note 10.1. There are only about 20 apps right now that can do it.

Oh.

Samsung isn’t alone, of course. Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system is built for touchscreen devices like tablets, too, and it offers a lot of advantages over iOS.

Fewer touchscreen-optimised apps, for a start, meaning you don’t waste any time actually using the device like a tablet and immediately wish you’d bought a proper laptop instead.

Microsoft even has its own line of Surface tablets that blur the line between PC and laptop thanks to a clever snap-on keyboard cover.

Of the type that’s completely absent from the iPad ecosystem.

Based on all this evidence…

Evidence?

… Apple feels behind. Take a look at its newest fourth-generation iPad. It has a killer processor and other great hardware features, but the operating system doesn’t take advantage of any of that. The home screen is still just a grid of static icons that launch apps.

Because, as everyone knows, an operating system and the hardware it runs on is only judged by its app launcher, not everything else it can do.

Apple also isn’t nearly as versatile at adding new software features to its devices. Apple usually makes users wait a year or more for a new version of iOS, and even then some older devices can’t access all the latest and greatest features.

Because Android has such a good reputation compared to Apple in updating device operating systems. Still, the original Galaxy Note is now getting an OTA update to run Jelly Bean, which came out in, uh, July 2012. That clearly keeps products alive in the same way Apple’s same-day across-the-board iOS updates don’t. IN YOUR FACE, CUPERTINO!

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Steve Kovach.

“We paid for this? Shit. Yeah, I know you warned me. Anything we can do to disassociate us from this garbage in as obvious a way as possible? An ‘opinions expressed’ line? Sounds great.”