WRKSHP’s Battle Camp (Free) has been on the App Store for quite a while now, often hovering around somewhere near the middle of the top grossing and top free download lists. If you’ve never played it, gameplay is close to games like Summoners War (Free) with a bit more of a Pokemon-ish slant to it where you’re leveling up and evolving Pokemon-like Monsters. Anyway, if you’re reading TouchArcade, you probably know the drill on these kind of games.

A big way that games like Battle Camp maintain their player base (this is called minimizing churn, in the industry) is by constantly reminding you to play the game through push notifications. If you’ve played any kind of free to play game, you know how this goes. If you allow a game to send you notifications, you’re going to get a bunch of them. They’re typically innocuous, reminding you that your troops are standing by, there’s a new update, or something similar. Get a load of this notification that Battlecamp sent out:

It really reminds me of the Hawaii false missile alert that happened a few months ago. Most people just glance at alerts on their phone, and don’t pay a whole lot of attention otherwise- Particularly when it comes to game alerts. If something pops up on your phone saying, “EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!" you pay attention so I suppose I can see the strategy, those sort of words popping up on your phone makes your heart drop, and in a way sort of feels like yelling “FIRE!!!" in a theater.

I doubt anything will come of this, but it just feels super crappy for developers to do. Hopefully backlash surrounding this (it’s blowing up on Reddit) will convince devs that this is a bad idea. But, who knows.