What can we learn from Monument Valley's IAP?

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.busy's weekly news digest for the week ending 20th of november 2014. hi i'm john jordan um so this week we've been a pocket gamer as ever has been zooming around the globe so we've had people in korea there's been the g-star conference conference consumer show game show in korea in busan where we had a party and people have been there and also the other big show this year has been a bit close to home in helsinki so there's slush 2014 so slash isn't the game show it's like an i.t kind of technology vc kind of isn't finland great kind of show and it's a lovely show so we've had people out there we've had a mobile mixer and we also had a big indie pitch which i was out for at the start of the week and congratulations to critical force entertainment who won our big indie pitch and it's interesting i mean obviously we all know that finland

is a is a kind of a high level place for games these days following on the back of kind of romeo and supercell lots of other companies have raised a lot of money um it's interesting that even below that kind of level this is like just a lot of startups there a lot of kind of single man bands a little kind of small companies just kind of doing interesting stuff but it's also interesting to see that our third place game actually was uh calvino noir who was actually from the uk so they'd gone all the way to finland for slush and came along to our indie pitch and got third place so kind of interesting that kind of finland is kind of sucking in um kind of talent from all over europe but it has conferences like slash um the other kind of interesting news of the week there's been kind of some interesting kind of bits and bobs i guess kind of one could make significance of it as you will um apple has dropped the term free um from its what previously were free to download games and now instead of previously when he looks on a free play game it would say free and now it says get so it's going to subtle change but everyone's obviously looking to how the eu commissioners have been kind of moaning about free to play games free and kind of the the kind of the

long the long follow of government um legislation about a free to play games really free and that kind of it's not even really a first of all question but uh because obviously in most cases it's very hard to prove that free to play game isn't isn't free to play um you can grind it if you want to i guess there's an argument about whether waiting two days for your uh for your base to upgrade is a is is a is a human right of game players not to wait for more than two hours or something i don't know um but that was kind of an interesting one i guess we'll kind of hear more about that over time legislation always tends to follow technology by about two years um and kind of the other um kind of news it wasn't really news so much but it's kind of something that we kind of wrote a lot about on by gamer.biz this week and it's something that's kind of has caught a kind of resonance i guess for lots of different reasons other than the fact of its kind of news was a game called monument valley so it's kind of pretty well known it came out earlier in the year it's from a company called us two here based in london

and they're not really their main focus is their main business isn't making games they're kind of a user interface kind of kind of company um um but they've been making games so they've had a few kind of games they they used to kind of write about how unsuccessful their games were and how useless they were in a sort of a very british depreciation depreciated and humor type like and then a game called whale trail and that was kind of an interesting thing it was a paid game to begin with then it kind of really worked as paid so they weren't free to play and they got some audience backlash on that and you know but basically they always make very nice looking games um if you can argue about the business model so they've made a monument valley which is a kind of s kind of puzzle game um beautiful graphics won a kind of apple design award um and is uh three jobs they'll excuse me three dollars to buy and you get ten levels for that so everyone's been people who want to buy it buy it's got very good reviews you know if you buy it i think you're disappointed that you spent three dollars and you've got this kind of beautiful game um so as developers tend to do um they decided to make some more levels so they made another eight levels

um and they put it in the game as a two dollar in-app purchase um and when that came out there was there was i mean there's different arguments about how kind of uh how big the backlash was but there were certainly some players who saw these new eight levels love the game um but kind of thought we've paid three dollars for this game already we should this this isn't a a a download this isn't downloadable content this is a this is an update update should be free this isn't delayed so there are certain people anyway who started one star in the game on the app store and there was a certain group of people who thought it's ridiculous that people are one starring this amazingly beautiful game effectively for asking you to pay for more high level content um so we've been kind of debating this in in the broad sense so we asked our mavens about it and what they thought um and and keith um andrew wrote a kind of opinion piece about suggesting this is um just kind of the mentality of some people in i think it's a general idea that us two didn't do anything wrong and that we even had a guy from down from us to on

our mavens group and he was saying actually the whole thing was a bit overplayed by us journalists so um i guess that's awesome we're playing everything but i think it's i think reason it caught kind of a um a kind of an audience is is there is this kind of interesting thing that when when um smartphone games originally came out that was they were all paid pretty much and they became this idea that should you actually charge for updates because updates is additional content the developers spent time doing it um and obviously everything's gone to free nothing's you don't charge for anything anymore and updates it uses a retention tool so you kind of regain players who didn't have who had kind of dropped off and now you have an update and you've got to get them back in again but there's still i mean an argument and maybe it'll happen in you know at certain point in the future that um as games come back to them or a certain number of games come back to a more paid model the um it becomes a bit more like a console console kind of model where you paid for the original content if you wanted extra content extra levels extra kind of things you kind of bought them as as downloadable content and i guess we'll see how that debate kind of kind of goes and goes but it's been it's pretty interesting and lots of people have seemed to have a have an opinion on

whether us two did the right thing in the first place with us to could have communicated better with their audience which i think um a lot of people seem to suggest that education of an audience in general about whether your game is free to play and what that means and whether your game is paid and what that means for updates um is a good thing and there's equally i guess as we seem to talk about every week in the in these kind of video and digesters this whole kind of idea that's still gone from gamergate i suppose kind of like game of power and a certain maybe small group of gamers are very um opinionated in in certain aspects of the industry and how they feel that they're um kind of almost like their consumer rights um should be heard more and developers should should be focused on on them as gamers rather than um maybe business models or what the developer thinks they should be doing and there is a wider debate about when a game comes out who owns it the players own it the developers own it how is that how is that kind of um shared between the two how is kind of um kind of money and prestige and fandom and voting and time spent how are these

things kind of split up and i guess as we go on something that'll become more and more precedent as we get into kind of i guess early free play games and now games as a service so um it becomes a bit like facebook who owns facebook is it facebook or is it the audience people who use facebook and how is power distinguished or has power kind of shared between those two groups um obviously the whole thing is if something's for free you don't get anything in the world for free so if something says it's for free then if it's using you as as it's kind of your kind of time as its business model then some is getting money out of that so so should you how should you kind of um be uh kind of dealt with in that in that situation um but another kind of interesting point um it's another interesting column from our statesider um carter who kind of tried to take the or use the debate going on with them with the monument valley and also kind of linked it in or try to link it in or try to look at the um if there were any kind of cross uh kind of arguments about taylor swift and spotify's obviously famously as well spotify is a free music service you can

get a subscription on it but most people just use it for free and listen to some adverts um and the obviously for them that's great they're getting all the music for free pretty much all bands are on there now but taylor swift obviously the uh probably the number one earning american singer um this year or probably over the last couple years as well um decided she wasn't making enough money there's a big argument about whether exactly how much spotify were paying her they say quite a lot taylor swift's management say not as much as they think and obviously they pulled all the music so um in the long term is that bad for spotify is it was that bad for taylor swift her album's now number one so maybe it was a cynical thing that she kind of wanted to sell more albums and her album has sold more than i think most of the american number one albums last couple years so um maybe she's the winner in this particular kind of case but anyway carter was looking at the fact that games are worthless now um but you need to give them value by by doing something more than just going i've got a game and kind of taylor swift i guess has suggested that her music isn't worthless by taking off spotify where it kind of was worthless or her imagination was worth it to her and it's

given it value by forcing you to buy a a physical copy of it um and maybe in obviously games you can't do that but carter's kind of suggesting um this is kind of whole thing ongoing thing between kind of value and worth and those things that have different meanings different people and developers have to focus less about the fact they spent a million dollars making a game and much more about what that the value of that game can mean to an individual person for everyone who isn't going to pay in an in-app purchase but how you can maybe give them advertising or how you can get them to buy t-shirt or obviously something's happened in music quite a lot music's kind of gone free but people are paying to go see bands and buy merchandising and and kind of i guess we would call it ancillary rights um which is something that's kind of coming up in lots of business models as everything goes to free so there we go kind of quite a philosophical kind of news roundup this week um but that's where we are sometimes we're philosophical um maybe it's a bit more hard news next week let's wait and see see you next week