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I don’t drink coffee.
I am not sure how much they track campaign levels, especially if you aren’t syncing via Facebook. Bankler just mentioned that they do keep track of campaign levels in somewhat the same way they record Arena battles to pit against others for the pseudo-PvP expreience. Like I told bankler, I just wish they would sync to the Rovio servers the same way they do for AB, Epic, SW2, etc. Nice to know backups are in the cloud, and not via money-grubbing Facebook.
As far as Rovio’s business philosophy and what is all going on there, I think we’d have to have a philosophical conversation about pay-up-front vs. in-app-purchases. I wish to goodness that Rovio would offer games that I could just pay for and never see ads (can you imagine that?). But they are too deep in IAP to have two versions of the app. What I would LIKE to see is that at least the mentality of the developers at Rovio was more akin to, “Imagine the users have paid up front for this and there is no IAP — would we be doing the kind of crap we are doing? Would we allow spells in the Arena? Would we ask people to pay for more red gifts and then nuke red gifts from the game?” And so on. I think folks who purchases bonuses involving red gifts should file a class action lawsuit against Rovio. Would that be the first suit filed against IAP fraud?
I do think the layoffs are indicative of a couple things. One, IAP games are the norm now, and so game makers are more concerned with that than actually delivering a fun user experience. Addiction is preferred to actual game-play. Two, Rovio had gotten a bit fat off their early success and have had to pull back. They’ve also reached some saturation with other marketing avenues like selling Angry Bird t-shirts and PJs. Has the smaller staff led to shortcuts, or has the “shortcut to cash” mentality (read: IAP) led to smaller staff? Kind of a chicken and egg thing there, and the cycle is firmly rooted in the shift to IAP. Are gamers lucky for the plethora of free games, or cursed by the lower signal-to-noise ratio where “signal” is truly fun gameplay and “noise” is ads and being crushed by people who spend tons of cash on IAP?
I’m not sure of the answer to that question. But I sure keep playing a lot of free games. *smile*
Thanks,
sutekh137