51–60 of 139 posts
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Repeating my call for each HN post to have a new, separate comments section specifically for shitty comments about the page itself as opposed to the ideas contained therein
Why isn't the page itself relevant?
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This model comes with a few problems: 1) High quality games that are meant to be completed quickly will make less money relative to poor quality games that stretch out gameplay. 2) Developers become incentivized to stretch out gameplay to increase revenue. 3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play g…
That sounds like baseless FUD. Underground is essentially the TV model. While some TV shows do stretch out longer than they need to in order to milk the audience, there are plenty of high quality ones that don't, and many people who have less time watch those instead, or pay for premium, short-time experiences like movies. Which we all know are just as likely to be of low quality despite their reduced length. Meanwhi…
- Traditional TV has fixed length programming windows. No station is going to pay you more if you turn your 30 minute show into a 35 minute show. - However, you might get more money by turning your (25 minutes of content + 5 minutes of ads) show into a (22 minutes of content + 8 minutes of ads) show.
- And, setting up your show to end on a cliff-hanger and encourage viewers to come back next week is great for audience and therefore revenue. That's not "milking the audience" but it is structuring the system/content to maximise revenue.
- TV Content Producers are not generally paid "per minute" but according to its popularity with target demographics. That leads to trying to get more overall audience, rather than just more time. That will be true for underground as well, and it will certainly be the case that content producers will want as many users as possible to use their app as often as possible. But, the economics are such that for a lot of apps, getting existing users to consume for longer is a cheaper avenue than getting new users.
- That said, TV producers often try to spin-off new shows form old ones in order to get more airtime (& more dollars) for a brand. The TV industry graveyard is full of lessons like "Joanie loves Chachi". We similar stories in the app world, expect more of them.
The parent comment isn't FUD in any sense of the word.
Everything gdeglin said is true - just like in-app purchases have encouraged a whole genre of games where you pay to escape the grind, earn-per-minute games are likely to produce an equivalent genre of "just make that cut-scene run for 15 seconds longer" games.
Follow the money. If content producers are paid per minute consumed, then the owners of many of the game publishers will start making decisions that stretch the same amount of actual game play into a longer interaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This model comes with a few problems: 1) High quality games that are meant to be completed quickly will make less money relative to poor quality games that stretch out gameplay. 2) Developers become incentivized to stretch out gameplay to increase revenue. 3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play g…
That sounds like baseless FUD. Underground is essentially the TV model. While some TV shows do stretch out longer than they need to in order to milk the audience, there are plenty of high quality ones that don't, and many people who have less time watch those instead, or pay for premium, short-time experiences like movies. Which we all know are just as likely to be of low quality despite their reduced length. Meanwhi…
It changes things slightly, but I think the issue remains. As you say, the problem certainly exists on television. Most shows do have lots of filler content in addition to frequent advertisements, and the ones that don't often require a more expensive subscription.
Took me a minute to find out what "actually free" means: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do... "Interstitial Advertisements When a user launches an Amazon Underground app for the first time, a welcome message in the form of an interstitial ad plays. In subsequent times that a user either launches or resumes the app, paid interstitial ads will also sometimes play." Interesting. So amazon deal…
To be fair, Amazon didn't claim there wouldn't be any ads: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1003016... The promise is that there will be no payments for the app or for in-app purchases. Also, I've spent some time playing Angry Birds through Underground, and the ads seem much more unobtrusive compared to getting the "freemium" app through Google Play. I guess the philosophy is similar to the "Speci…
Took me a minute to find out what "actually free" means: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do... "Interstitial Advertisements When a user launches an Amazon Underground app for the first time, a welcome message in the form of an interstitial ad plays. In subsequent times that a user either launches or resumes the app, paid interstitial ads will also sometimes play." Interesting. So amazon deal…
Finally, someone figures out the real reason Amazon is doing this. Thank you for doing the job all the journalists reporting on the press release failed to do.
When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't have to pay any money for it. It's still, technically, free.
I bought this and played it for about an hour to completion. For my hour, I'd have made them $0.12. Instead, I paid $4.64.
So for them to get to the same profit using this model, they'd have to attract $4.62/$0.12 = 38 times more users. i.e instead of having 1000+ downloads, they'd need to be in the 38k+ downloads range and for everyone to have played it to completion.
I see two problems for this particular game. 1. Fighting fantasy based games are a niche market so is there going to be a large enough user base to support this? 2. I'd say that the length of a typical gamebook shouldn't be more than 1-2 hours as it will get very complex. So they're kind of capped re per player usage.
Since it's a niche market, I don't imagine there would be hundreds of thousands of people trying this out for 5 minutes each.
Took me a minute to find out what "actually free" means: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do... "Interstitial Advertisements When a user launches an Amazon Underground app for the first time, a welcome message in the form of an interstitial ad plays. In subsequent times that a user either launches or resumes the app, paid interstitial ads will also sometimes play." Interesting. So amazon deal…
To be fair, Amazon didn't claim there wouldn't be any ads: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1003016... The promise is that there will be no payments for the app or for in-app purchases. Also, I've spent some time playing Angry Birds through Underground, and the ads seem much more unobtrusive compared to getting the "freemium" app through Google Play. I guess the philosophy is similar to the "Speci…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finally, someone figures out the real reason Amazon is doing this. Thank you for doing the job all the journalists reporting on the press release failed to do.
Of course there are ads. Amazon never implied that there wouldn't be. This isn't Amazon trying to be sneaky. The opening lines say that everything is free and developers get paid according to use. How did you expect that would happen? It has to be subsidized in some way, and in the context of an app store that means ads. When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't ha…
From the author's pov, it's an interesting proposition. Take sorcery for example: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dba... I bought this and played it for about an hour to completion. For my hour, I'd have made them $0.12. Instead, I paid $4.64. So for them to get to the same profit using this model, they'd have to attract $4.62/$0.12 = 38 times more users. i.e instead of having 1000+ downloads…
Also, there's the niche issue: it's very possible that fighting fantasy fans are more likely to pay for their apps, which means none of these numbers applies to them.