Capitals (Free) from NimbleBit has rustled a few jimmies with its lives system and its particular implementation. At the moment, you spend a life whenever a game starts up, with lives recharging over time. It’s a system that makes sense to me, but it’s not the most intuitive one, and has cuased a lot of consternation. The costs of in-app purchases have been prohibitive, and have changed. Now, Ian Marsh of NimbleBit says that they’re going to be revamping the system entirely. Here are the coming changes in his words:

Today we submitted an update with an overhauled lives system. New players start with 15 lives, and lives no longer regenerate. No more lives once you hit 0, but you can watch a short video at any time for a free life. If you don’t feel like spending and watch a video every time you’re waiting for a turn you’ll easily have more lives than you know what to do with. Customization is also free to everyone in the next update.

Along with the life system tweak there are a ton of cool little changes like more social features, ranking, expiration timers and directions on how to leave or forfeit a game.

We’re not sure if this will make any more money (Capitals is now our second worst performing game, after Nimble Quest) but it should actually provide less waiting and preventing people from actually playing.

No clue if this will actually work to make the game make more money, or at least to be friendlier to players while holding serve in terms of revenue. I really enjoyed my time with the game, though crushing fools became way too time-consuming. But it’s nice to see that despite a rocky launch, NimbleBit isn’t just giving up on this one.