Apple
- App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview 16 minutes ago The Apple Blog
When iTunes web preview pages first appeared for songs and albums the industry was abuzz with the possibility that iTunes could be migrating to the cloud. iTunes preview has so far had little impact on how we use purchased media content, but it has had a huge impact on how we find iTunes media content [...]
- MacHeist nano bundle adds Tweetie for final day 46 minutes ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Deals
The ever-popular MacHeist bundle, offering eight Mac apps for $20 total, closes out at midnight Pacific Time tonight. If you've been on the fence so far about whether or not to buy in this year, two bits of news may push you over the brink.
First, all the initial applications have been unlocked; both Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver are fully present and accounted for. Second, there's been a last-minute addition to the roster; Tweetie for Mac (normally $20 on its own) is now part of the bundle.
If you're Macheisting this year, let us know what you think of the app selection; if not, share your reasons why. (We will accept "I'm saving up for tickets to Tron Legacy" as a valid reason.)TUAWMacHeist nano bundle adds Tweetie for final day originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
MacHeist - RapidWeaver - Tales of Monkey Island - Macintosh - Apple
- GDC 2010: Ngmoco justifies the freemium model 1 hour ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store
As popular as Ngmoco and its games are, whenever we seem to post about them, the subject of their business model seems to rise to the top again. While they have emerged as one of the iPhone's top original developers, they've also lost a lot of fans by sticking with a model they call "freemium," even to the detriment of some of their most popular games. They release games for free, and then monetize the games by using microtransactions, selling both virtual items and virtual currency for real money.
We have a lot of questions for the company, and we'll be asking even more of them coming later this week. But first things first: we cornered Ngmoco producer Allen Ma here in their suite at GDC 2010 and asked him to try and tell us why Ngmoco is so insistent on "freemium," and how they feel about some of the adverse customer reactions to their model. Read on to hear why free-to-play, pay-to-play-more is the model that they're betting their business on.
When we post about Ngmoco, the first comment on the post is often "Here's Ngmoco trying to steal our money again." What do you think when you see a reaction like that?
It's very, very odd because it's strange to see those moments when our goal as a company is that we want to give you a full game experience for free. That's really what Eliminate is. You can log into Eliminate any time you want, and play the game against anyone else, for free. And it's Quake 3 on the iPhone! So it's very interesting when people go oh they're scamming us because they want us to pay ten to twenty dollars to play through a game experience. That really is not true. Because you can never pay for the game and get the same exact experience.
Well, it's not the same exact experience.
It is, it just takes longer to get there.
That in itself makes it not the same.
Well does it or doesn't it, right? Because I feel like there's a lot of games out there where you're paying to do something faster than someone else. There's a whole black market that exists in World of Warcraft where you can buy a level 80 character for hundreds of dollars. There's this market where people are willing to do that. We're just doing that in a way where it's legitimate and fair to everyone.
Well, but a lot of players frown on that even in World of Warcraft. A lot of players say if you buy a level 80, that's cheating, because the game is designed to be played the other way.
And in Eliminate, we would never let you buy a fully maxed out character, right? In Eliminate specifically, what we're allowing you to do, we're still allowing you to play the game, but we allow you to earn credits at a higher frequency than other people. You still have to play the same amount of games, you can't cheat your way to max level, but in actual total number of days to get there, you're lowering it.
I think another reason that people have an issue with this is that you guys, Ngmoco, have said that you're not even bothering with paid apps. There are some people who are willing to pay for a good experience, they're even willing to pay ten dollars for a solid, worthwhile, whole unlocked version of the game. And Ngmoco is saying we're not doing that, it's all freemium or nothing. What would you say to that?
We're just finding that, with paid, you can't make any money. There's only a handful of companies that are able to charge more than three dollars for a game. Gameloft, EA, Square Enix. Anyone else, they charge more than two bucks, no one's even going to look at their game. There's no way that we could have built Eliminate, for the cost per install or cost per SKU that we would have sold, to actually be able to make back that money in the timeframe that we wanted to. It's funny, because people are saying that they're willing to pay, but when push comes to shove, they're actually not willing to pay. That person that says they're willing to pay $10, they'll probably wait for it to drop to 99 cents before they actually purchase it. What they really want is a $10 game for 99 cents. What we're giving them is a $50 game for free. That's really our stance right now.
When you set out to make these games, even a game like We Rule, are you still thinking about it in the old model of, the premium experience for this is $50, or the premium experience is $10? Is there a "right amount" of money to spend to get the full game, or are you just saying the sky's the limit on the amount of money you should pay?
I think what freemium allows us to do is continually make the game better. So instead of going, OK, you as the user have to take a gamble to see if this game is worth x amount of dollars to you; instead, why don't you come in and try the game. If you like it, throw us a couple of bucks. When you do that, we know that you like that piece of the game, and we'll give you more of that, so that if you continue to like it, we'll keep designing these things, right? The ones that you don't like, we'll stop doing. For example in Eliminate, people really wanted co-op. So we're going to give them co-op, because they're going to keep playing the game. Some of them will continue to keep paying to play the game, and that's encouraging as a developer to keep making it better and better. And this is why World of Warcraft works, right, because users are willing to continue to pay to play the game. Unfortunately, not every game can be as excellent as World of Warcraft where everyone in the world is willing to pay for it. I could point you to a game like Dungeons and Dragons Online, which used to be a regular MMO and now is a free-to-play MMO, and they're saying that they're making like 60-80% more revenue as a free-to-play game than when it was paid. And they're now updating the game way more frequently than they did when it was paid.
So it sounds like you're not even thinking in the old model of, "here's this experience for this amount of money." You're thinking of it as a dialogue, where you pay us for what you like, and we'll return more content. You're not just investing two bucks to speed up your game, you're investing two bucks in the game and in future content.
Yeah. You're paying to support the game, and you're paying to support all of the free players that weren't willing to pay for the game. So when you think about it that way, you're paying so that we can maintain the servers that allow all of the people to play. So again, going back to Eliminate, our game that's working right now, you're paying for the game, so that you can continue to own people that don't pay for the game.
Great, thanks very much.TUAWGDC 2010: Ngmoco justifies the freemium model originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Apple?s iPhone developer agreement published (updated) 2 hours ago The Apple Core
The EFF has posted one of Apple’s most secret and most confidential documents ? its developer agreement that all devs must sign in order to access the company’s iPhone SDK. The EFF found a creative way to legally get and publish the document, an act that would surely invoke the Apple’s legal wrath. Noticing that NASA [...]
- EyeTV Hybrid shrinks down, gains Win7 compatibility 2 hours ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Hardware
Same price, same features (mostly) but a sleek and slender new look: yesterday Elgato introduced the latest revamp of its EyeTV Hybrid USB tuner for high-definition digital television. The US$150 widget gives you the option of watching over-the-air digital television in full HD glory, and can also tune in unencrypted (Clear QAM) and analog cable TV signals. If you've got an analog source like a VCR or videogame console, you can also route those signals through the EyeTV Hybrid to watch or play on your Mac (for those who don't need the analog option, Elgato also sells the HD tuner-only EyeTV One for $120).
The tuner ships with the EyeTV 3 software, enabling live TV, DVR functionality and shared recordings for your iPhone and iPod touch. With every new EyeTV Hybrid you get a one-year subscription to the TV Guide data feed, which provides full listings and enables the Smart Series recording feature; the software also can detect and display the embedded ATSC schedule information for broadcast shows. After the first year, re-upping with TV Guide will cost you $20.
Other than the slimmer profile, the major new feature on this model is the addition of driver support for Windows 7's Windows Media Center. Mac users may not care much, but this does let you use the same tuner if you're using Boot Camp, or you can loan it out to Windows-centric friends -- if you trust them to give it back.
You can check out our previous coverage and reviews of the EyeTV Hybrid for more.
TUAWEyeTV Hybrid shrinks down, gains Win7 compatibility originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- GDC 2010: Ngmoco previews We Rule and GodFinger 3 hours ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Gaming, Freeware, Developer, iPhone
We stopped by Ngmoco's suite at GDC 2010 on the afternoon of the first day of the show, and got a chance to preview two upcoming titles they're working on testing and releasing soon. Both of the games follow Ngmoco's popular (and yet much-maligned) "freemium" model, in which you download the game for free with the option to buy in-game items or currency that can change up or speed your gameplay. Still, while the model might turn some players off, the games we saw were the kinds of games Ngmoco is slowly becoming known for: polished casual experiences that bring an established genre squarely into their business model.
The first game we saw was called We Rule -- it's currently "beta testing" in the Canadian App Store and will be available to users in other App Stores soon. It was described to us as "Farmville meets Age of Empires," but what we saw was much more like Farmville rather than the more combat-based RTS title. The game opens on a screen full of "realms," each one developed and grown by one of your Ngmoco Plus+ friends, and you can zoom into your own to start building it up.
It plays a lot like Farmville, which is a gigantic Facebook game in which you grow crops and cultivate plants of all kinds. Ngmoco's version is slightly different, but only slightly: you're still laying down crops, waiting for them to grow (30 seconds for the cheapest and easiest crops, and up to days for the rarer and higher-level items), and then harvesting them for in-game currency that lets you grow more and build more, and so on. It's not strictly a competition (you don't track totals with friends or score points for what you grow), but the game is very social, with push messages notifying you when crops are done or when your friends have done something spectacular or worthwhile. There's a big focus on customization as well -- you can build things like mailboxes or signs that make your realm very different from anyone else's.
So where's the "premium"? Every time you grow or build something, there is a little button marked "mojo," and "mojo" is a type of magical in-game currency that can be used to speed up whatever you're growing. Mojo can be earned slowly in the game, but if you want to use a lot of it, you can pay real money via in-app purchase to get more. Thus, if you want to grow the game quickly and don't want to wait to earn more mojo, you can start putting real money in.
Ngmoco did say that they'd "learned" from their previous games, and that they wanted to make sure that even the free game was a full experience. But that mojo button was awfully big and purple, and combined with the fact that there were also in-game ads all over the build we saw (when we asked if there would be a way to turn them off, even with real money, we were told that they haven't decided yet), it certainly seems like Ngmoco will do their best to get you to invest in the game.
The other game they are showing off this week is called GodFinger, and if We Rule is based on Farmville, GodFinger is Farmville mixed with Pocket God. The game is centered around a planet that you can rotate around with your finger, and the planet is populated by "followers" that offer you, as a God, all sorts of prayers and wishes. Granting those wishes (like adding rain to crops or sunlight to people who need their day brightened) will grant you "awe," which is another currency that you can use to upgrade your planet however you see fit, by terraforming the ground or building various structures and upgrades.
GodFinger is also very social -- you can actually "assign" one of your friends on Plus+ to a certain follower (as in, you can name a follower after your friend Katie), and then we were told that your friend will get push notifications and even benefits in their game depending on what you do to them. For example, if your follower Katie asks for sunlight and you grant the wish, your friend Katie will get a message that you granted her virtual wish, and even get a bonus of some kind in her GodFinger games.
We didn't see ads on the game, but of course being as this is Ngmoco, there is a "freemium" plan in there. You can purchase "awe" with real money, and that will let you use your god powers even more per day than usual, kind of like Eliminate's energy currency. GodFinger definitely seemed like it was a little less "pushy" than We Rule, in terms of asking you to spend real money, but of course, if you're playing the real game, there will presumably come a time when the game will tell you to stop playing for the day or pay up. It's still in development, of course, so even Ngmoco isn't 100% sure
Both games are definitely polished and well designed -- they ran great on the iPhone 3GS, and the graphics were colorful and easy to understand. But Ngmoco's main obstacle will be to keep their business plan from getting in the way of their game experiences. They say their main goal is making fun games, and it'll be up to these two games to prove it.TUAWGDC 2010: Ngmoco previews We Rule and GodFinger originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- TextExpander 3 makes short work of keyboard shortcuts 4 hours ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Software
TextExpander, one of my very most favorite (yes, I like it that much) utilities has been updated to version 3. This is a major update and renovation of the program, which has changed from a preference pane to an application.
I honestly don't think that I could use a Mac without TextExpander anymore. I have a customized list of "frequently misspelled words" that I have it correct for me, as well as a snippet of text for creating a new shell script, a shortcut to insert the current date or time, HTML markup, and more.
TextExpander has been able to sync via MobileMe for some time, but version 3 also includes the ability to sync via Dropbox. It can also correct "double caps" at the beginning of a sentence which happen when you accidentally hold down the shift key for too long. There is a feature to capitalize new sentences as well, but that feature was a little hit-or-miss for me.
In its new application form, TextExpander has to be running for it to work. That may seem obvious, but since it used to be a preference pane, users may be used to it running "hidden" as a daemon in the background. There is an option to hide the application icon in the dock. If you hide it in the dock, you can still access TextExpander from its icon in the menu bar. They've even included several different styles of icon for the menu bar, which is good news for those of you who believe that menu bar items should only be black and white.
The menu bar offers a slew of cool new features, including a search function and a list of all of the folders and snippets for you to navigate, in case you have forgotten a shortcut. This is a good reason to start sorting snippets into "Groups" which were previously a bit of a pain because you had to tell each group to sync via MobileMe. Syncing is now an "all or nothing" option.
You can also create a new snippet, edit the last expanded snippet (handy if you realize that you need to "tweak" it), or use the clipboard to make a new snippet. New in this version is also the avility to create global "hotkeys" which will reduce the "friction" involved in making a new shortcut. I know I've previously thought "Oh, I ought to make a shortcut for this" but I usually wait too long before I finally get sick of re-typing it and actually do it.
I've only just started playing with this new version, but it looks like a great upgrade to what was already a full-featured application.
TextExpander costs $34.95, but they offer a full-featured demo and a 90-day guarantee which is far longer than I'm used to seeing for software. If you own an earlier version of TextExpander you can upgrade for $15. Those who bought TextExpander on or after November 1st, 2009 are eligible for a free upgrade.
There's even a companion application for the iPhone and iPod touch called TextExpander touch which will sync to your local Mac, so you can use your snippets in a wide range of iPhone apps.TUAWTextExpander 3 makes short work of keyboard shortcuts originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Hack: The iPod serial library enables homebrew remote controls 5 hours ago The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Filed under: Hardware, iPod Family, Hacks, iPhone
Warning: If you are baffled by people who think dismantling technology is fun, and completely fail to understand the excitement of building robots to battle other robots, this post may not be for you. Just so you know.
On the Make: magazine blog, they recently posted a piece about the evolution of a project. It was an iPod remote from last year that has gone from a "start and stop" only device to a full featured remote. It is a lovely piece of tech, powered by Arduino hardware. Arduinos are open-source circuit boards and software you can use to develop interfaces with all sorts of electronics.
I remember reading the first post about this remote last fall and being interested in where he would take this project, mostly because I love seeing what people do with Altoids tins. I have to admit hooking one up to a giant "Easy" button for my car never really occurred to me, though.
I really like the idea of building my own remote; partly so I can say I did it, but also because it would be a nicer way to get my iPod or iPhone (depending) working nicely with my car stereo.
Honestly I only understand about half of what he's talking about in this article, but I'm good at following instructions and I am reasonably handy with a soldering iron, so this doesn't look completely unreasonable. If I do end up building one I'll be sure to post all about it for you. In the meantime, have you built an unholy alliance between your Roomba and your iMac, or any other variety of Mac Tech Mashup? Tell me about it, I'd love to see what you all can do!
TUAWHack: The iPod serial library enables homebrew remote controls originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Analyst: iPhone to Overtake BlackBerry in 2011 6 hours ago The Apple Blog
A few years ago it would’ve been only the insane and the insanely prescient who were predicting that Apple would replace RIM in terms of world mobile phone market share. Now it doesn’t seem that outlandish, but the question of how soon we’ll actually see it happen remains up in the air. According to a new [...]
- You Look Ridiculous: The Other Augmented Reality Issue 6 hours ago The Apple Blog
Augmented Reality (AR) is a hot topic in the app stores these days. So, what’s AR? It’s multiple technologies being used simultaneously to provide you with data relevant to your location. This includes your phone’s compass to determine the direction you are facing, GPS to determine your exact location, Internet connection to gather information about [...]
