Late last year, I wrote about the increasingly absurd nature of IAP (in-app purchase) on iOS. The subject was Hipstamatic Disposable, which offered a bizarre pricing model that made you buy new and shiny virtual digital film for your new and shiny virtual digital film camera. I joked that we’d soon see driving games were you had to fill up your car with fuel, matching prices to the real world, just to enhance the realism. Several devs responded on Twitter, with at least some degree of seriousness, that I shouldn’t be giving certain publishers ideas.

The thing is, I’m not against IAP entirely, since it can be used for good. For example, it’s a great way to offer new content, or a ‘demo’ of a game that can be unlocked once you complete a few levels; it’s also a means to enable gamers to skip ahead through buying extras (i.e. cheats), which is fair enough if your difficulty curve is well-defined. The problem is that too many companies are now using IAP to gouge customers; they look at the top-grossing charts and see grind games performing well and therefore implement grind-or-pay mechanisms of their own. The vicious cycle continues, even infecting classic games like Tetris.

If you’ve not yet played it, the new Tetris for iPhone and iPod has the most astonishingly bat-shit crazy IAP possible. The sad thing is the game itself is, in my opinion, really good. You get a standard sub-optimal swipe mode, but also a new one-touch version that retains the game’s strategy but works well with the touchscreen. Additionally, there’s a compelling level-based puzzle mode that has you blast your way to the bottom of piles of junk. I’ve not had so much fun with a Tetris game since the version released for the original Game Boy.

But EA had to weld IAP to the game and ruin things. The puzzle mode has power-ups and these are paid for using T-Coins. You can either get T-Coins by grinding away scoring in the main mode, or by paying cold, hard cash. 200,000 T-Coins? A snip at $99.99! That’s a $99.99 IAP. For Tetris. Or you could ‘just’ pay $29.99 for a 12-month T-Club subscription, which earns you 15 per cent more T-Coins with every game! That’s right: for just 43 times more than the game itself costs, you can get a slight speed bump to how fast you acquire coins to spend elsewhere in the game. Of course, you don’t have to pay, but without doing so, you’re effectively screwed in the puzzle mode when it comes to decent scores and ratings (which is essentially what any iOS puzzler is about).

This is hateful, but it’s becoming all too common in the iOS gaming world. We now see freemium sports games that demand you pay for more ‘energy’ that is otherwise replenished at a painfully slow rate. And similar mechanics are evident in other genres, too. To my mind, this is the greatest threat to iOS gaming, which could become known not for great games, but for the fact it costs tens of dollars to buy yourself a right to play a bit of a game, but only for a set (and short) period of time, regardless of your level of skill and investment to that point.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. I’d started off thinking about 1980s arcades, which rewarded skill, in the sense that you still paid per play, but the better you got, the longer you stayed on the machine. The thing is, such ‘hardcore’ mechanics would alienate many contemporary gamers, who don’t expect to be booted off a game for not having perfect reflexes. But ‘pay for a slice of time’ in a more general sense feels even more like a corruption of gaming’s purity. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and of my age. Music continues a move towards a subscription model, with you paying monthly for as much music as you can take in, rather than owning a more limited number of albums forever; television and movies, too, increasingly drift towards such models. But I still fear for gaming when instead of you paying a sum of money upfront for a finite slice of entertainment, you’re instead presented with absurd difficulty curves or arbitrary limitations that can only be overcome by delving into your wallet. And even then, you’ll be expected to delve at regular intervals.

I hope this is just a blip. I hope that the efforts of indies such as Zach Gage and Jeff Minter, both of which offer fantastic iOS games for set prices, encourage other developers to take this path, rather than gouging. But every month I see more developers dipping a toe into the freemium waters, under the guise of ‘social gaming’ or ‘value’, when what they’re really doing is hoping our wallets will chunder coin vomits into their banking toilets.

I wrote about the recent Path cock-up for .net earlier this week. The short version is that a dev was making a Path client for OS X and realised the iOS app was uploading his entire address book to Path’s servers. Path has since nuked all data it took and made the process opt-in, although the CEO had previously argued:

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information.

Since then, it’s been discovered that uploading your contacts isn’t an uncommon practice, and this led UI designer Dustin Curtis to say:

I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers. The expectation of Address Book privacy is obvious; in fact, one person on Hacker News, in response to learning about Path’s use of the data, said, “Apple would never do this to their users.” Because Apple has your trust and yet gives this private information freely to developers, Apple does do this to their users. All of them.

I find this argument outrageous. Apple’s terms state:

17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

17.2: Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected

But more to the point, why should Apple become a watchdog for the less-than-moral behaviour of some developers? Just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean you should. And if your app is grabbing and uploading personal data, you should figure out whether this is absolutely necessary, and also decide on how you’re going to inform the user that this is happening. It isn’t Apple’s job to stop you or make the decision about how you handle such data—that’s your job as a trustworthy developer.

Update: Ben Brooks disagrees:

If you live and play in the Apple world, you need only trust Apple. This is what Apple tells us — it’s a ‘feature’ of the Apple ecosystem.

The fact is, that in this instance, Apple broke that trust.

I’m not sure what the alternative is. No access to the data? Access only on opt-in (which people tap anyway, regardless and without thinking, and that drives admins bonkers)? But my point stands that Curtis’s argument that this is all down to Apple and not down to devs, despite the existing Apple terms, is hogwash.

I last week wrote about Atari and Zynga showcasing imbalance in the iOS games industry. The main thrust of the argument was that in cases of a developer being inspired by an existing product, they were leaving themselves open to attack if small, but would be unaffected by the opposition (bar, possibly, some negative PR) if big. The two examples were:

• Atari forcing Vector Tanks games off of the App Store, due to the indie games borrowing fairly heavily from Atari’s Battlezone.
• Zynga’s Dream Heights looking perilously close to indie dev NimbleBit’s Tiny Towers.

GamesBeat now has a response from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus about the second of those spats:

We think there is a massive body of work in the video game industry that is going to be reimagined for decades to come in a way that is free, accessible and social. That’s what we’re doing. I don’t think anyone should be surprised when they see us come out with games that they’ve seen before, a decade or more ago. I don’t think there are a lot of totally new games that are invented. We always try. But to us, they are like the crew mechanic in our games. They give you a new way to interact with your friends.

To be fair to Pincus, I don’t have a problem with this argument. Even many of the games you think were amazingly original when they appeared at the dawn of the industry were effectively clones, or at least based heavily on existing games. Defender? Space Invaders, flipped on its side, with scrolling and a dash of Asteroids—and that’s a compressed version of the description I got directly from the game’s creator during a phone interview for Retro Gamer, not my own take on things.

However, what Pincus doesn’t address (and nor would I expect him to) is that this approach is only fine today if you are a company like Zynga, backed by an army of lawyers and a pile of cash. He’s essentially using the same excuse as the Vector Tanks devs—that it’s fine to take an existing gaming idea and put your own spin on it to add further value. But it isn’t nearly a level playing field, and indies are the ones hit by the fallout, whether they’re the ones providing inspiration (and cannot afford to battle huge companies inspired by their games) or drawing from existing gaming properties (and cannot afford to defend when a large company has their game removed from sale).

Hat-tip: The Appside.

Further reading: NimbleBit responds on TouchArcade regarding just how close Tiny Towers and Dream Heights are—clearly in the same ballpark as Battlezone and the original Vector Tanks.

The Guardian:

The chief executive of Dixons has been poached by Apple to head up its worldwide retail operations.

John Browett, who has been chief executive of the struggling high street electronics firm since 2007, has been appointed Apple’s senior vice president of retail, reporting directly to chief executive Tim Cook. Browett will be in charge of Apple’s already phenomenally successful retail strategy and the continued expansion of Apple’s 361 stores around the world. Of the company’s 40 new locations this year, 30 will be abroad with China playing an increasing significant role.

“Our retail stores are all about customer service, and John shares that commitment like no one else we’ve met,” Cook said. “We are thrilled to have him join our team and bring his incredible retail experience to Apple.”

Enthusiasm’s lovely, but this makes me ask one question: has Tim Cook ever been in a Dixons? If anything, Dixons Retail (which also includes Currys and PC World) is almost the opposite of what Apple’s retail operation should be: regularly poor shopping experiences, a lack of focus, and poorly trained, upsell-fanatical staff.

What a curious appointment by Cook.

On Twitter today, a couple of arguments continue to rage. One concerns Twitter, which, according to some people, has just turned into the BIG BAD of social networking, in having to deal with censorship. Elsewhere, Apple is being beaten into the ground by a number of tech pundits over supply chain issues, not least relating to human rights and labour.

I’m anti-censorship and also not thrilled by the situation endured by people building iPads and other Apple kit. But I also happen to be a realist: censorship will happen; goods will continue to be manufactured in places like China, by people working under conditions and for pay that would not be acceptable in many countries. To my mind, how we react to these things is therefore very important.

It’s increasingly apparent that many critics have joined yet another knee-jerk online mob. Twitter are evil! They censor things! Grrr! But what about Twitter’s rivals—how open are they? (Answer: mostly not very.) Do they provide pages with explanations regarding what is censored and how? (Answer: rarely.) And Apple is evil! But what about Apple’s rivals in computing, smartphones and tablets? How many of them use Foxconn and similar manufacturing companies? (Answer: the vast majority of them.) How many of them not only audit these places and stop working with those that don’t pass standards, but also make said auditing openly available? (Answer: I’ve no idea, but I’ve found no other examples like Apple’s. If you have, please let me know in the comments.) And now widen the target to other electronics, and even things like clothes. Are the things you’re buying all ethically produced? If so, congratulations (and I mean that sincerely), but I bet that’s a vanishingly small percentage of people reading this post; and if not, stop slamming one company out of a countless number manufacturing in China, not least because it’s seemingly at least doing something about the problems that are occurring there.

In the case of Apple, I’ve also had comments that Apple’s massive profits means it should lead by example and bring its manufacturing back into the USA and EU. But at that point, one of two things happens: Apple either ramps up its prices and becomes uncompetitive in terms of commerce, or its profits vanish, and it becomes a company that becomes uncompetitive in terms of investment. This could in a short period of time derail the company and ensure its rivals leapfrog it, bringing us back to square one, apart from the diminishing number of people working for a US/EU-only (or whatever) version of Apple. And that’s even suggesting it would be possible for Apple to do this—after all, ensuring some kind of US/EU-only manufacturing for every component would be a massive, possibly entirely unrealistic undertaking. Recently, it was reported that Chinese companies ended up manufacturing iOS devices not only because they were better from a costs standpoint, but also because nowhere in the USA had the capabilities.

As far as I can see, we now have two tech companies criticised for being, if not ‘good’, then at least the ‘least bad’. The ‘least bad’ isn’t something I typically champion, but I would argue that any element of openness from giant social networks and corporations is a good thing. Twitter’s openness about its censorship is something that should be praised, but that doesn’t mean you’re praising the censorship itself; likewise, Apple’s openness about its supply chain should be praised, but that doesn’t mean you back anything to do with the impact of Apple’s manufacturing, including from environmental, safety and human rights standpoints.

But to instead chastise these companies will merely encourage its rivals to clam up instead of following the examples of Twitter and Apple, to a point where change becomes more widespread and possible. I’m not saying things can’t and shouldn’t be better. I’m not saying we shouldn’t encourage them to do more—we very much should. But I am saying we shouldn’t be quick to simply slam those who are trying to improve things, even if the steps are much smaller than we’d like.