Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 509 posts

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#191

Post by eridius »

rodgerd wrote: post #186
eridius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can follow companies, but "relationship" generally implies that it's reciprocal. A one-way "relationship" is called "stalking" ;) I don't really see why the App Store affects the ability for customers to choose to follow their favorite developers.

> Yeah, you can follow companies, but "relationship" generally implies that it's reciprocal. iD and Bungie both have a long history of heavy interaction with their customers. That's rolled off for iD, but Bungie's back-and-forward seems as lively as ever.

I'm still unclear on what part of the App Store makes it impossible for companies to engage with their customers. I've played many Bungie games, but nowhere in the purchase process for any of their games was I encouraged to form a relationship with the company. Any back-and-forth with companies happens in channels other than the retail channel; twitter, forums, websites, etc. I don't understand why selling on the App Store vs, say, PSN Store, or Xbox Live Arcade, or any of the numerous Windows PC retail channels, affects the ability to engage with customers in this fashion.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#192

Post by Steko »

seanalltogether wrote: post #177
Steko wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

> Apple hasn't pushed this. Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP.

It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#193

Post by Mithaldu »

_lce0 wrote: post #187
Mithaldu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as i know free-to-pay stuff never worked even remotely as well as on cellphones, because on average pc gamers are more experienced and recognize more easily when a skill-based difficulty curve morphs into a payment-based difficulty curve. So i didn't think it worth mentioning.

did you noted that you said, free-to-pay , on both comments? nice typo, got me a smile.

That's intentional. :)

There are 2 classes of f2p games:

free2play, which sell game content in small units. Characters to use, classes and equipment to unlock, etc. and they also make it possible to gain all of those things in a reasonable manner by simply playing.

free2pay games intentionally abuse the human psyche and subtly push people towards buying things that are at the core consumable cheat codes, and which are not available reasonably through normal gameplay. (They also tune the difficulty curve so this becomes only visible after the player has invested a lot of time into the game.)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#194

Post by ThomPete »

Steko wrote: post #192
seanalltogether wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't pushed this. Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP. It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

And the reason we got Transformers 3 is because the 50 million people will buy whats being made available for them and pushed.

Keep in mind that via Spotify's subscription model it's only something like 20% of the what users listen to thats chart music. The rest is outside the normal popular genres.

So it's a chicken and an egg discussion.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#195

Post by seanalltogether »

Steko wrote: post #192
seanalltogether wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't pushed this. Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP. It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

And now to complete the conversational loop and point out the problems of categorizing demos via IAP, I point you right back to my original comment.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#196

Post by _lce0 »

Mithaldu wrote: post #193
_lce0 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you noted that you said, free-to-pay , on both comments? nice typo, got me a smile.

That's intentional. :) There are 2 classes of f2p games: free2play, which sell game content in small units. Characters to use, classes and equipment to unlock, etc. and they also make it possible to gain all of those things in a reasonable manner by simply playing. free2pay games intentionally abuse the human psyche and subtly push people towards buying things that are at the core consumable cheat codes, and which ar…

wow, I never heard of such thing --really interesting.

Also searching the web, I got no relevant result; is this some term you came up with, or are there more info somewhere?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#197

Post by Steko »

Mithaldu wrote: post #189
Steko wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, Dota 2, Hearthstone, World of Tanks (etc) are all wildly successful F2P PC titles.

How is minecraft free2play or free2pay? Also, afaik LOL, TF2 and Dota2 sell content as micro transactions, not consumable cheats. I don't know if the same is true for Hearthstone, and i know this is true for WoT, but its lunch is being eaten by War Thunder, which also only sells content.

I'd love to hear the substantial difference between Clash of Clans selling you gems that make your building finish faster and LOL selling you XP boosts?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#198

Post by zmmmmm »

lukeschlather wrote: post #183
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

There are lots of alternative solutions to share file systems between a VM and host ... is that all you're trying to solve? VirtualBox has it built in.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#199

Post by jdmichal »

mooreds wrote: post #169
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

Absolutely! I usually buy windows machines because of price/performance, and, to be honest, because I know how to make windows work for me and don't want to learn mac idioms. However, the first thing I do is install git for windows, which gives me bash to navigate the filesystem, and then vagrant/virtualbox/ubuntu for development.

Have you given PowerShell a try? If so, how did you feel about it compared to using bash on Windows?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#200

Post by jerf »

lukeschlather wrote: post #183
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

I don't have a click&go solution because I don't have this problem, but you could certainly serve a Samba share out of the guest OS or something.
Post reply on HN