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.
> I doubt anything will come of this
Any game or app that treats me like this gets deleted. We all have plenty of other toys to play with.
Remember kids, iOS notifications are optional, you don't have to opt in.
Well I meant more along the lines of nothing happening from any of the platforms like Apple or Google.
I predict a few additional lines, to the effect of "don't be a jerk" in this section of the app guidelines:
4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
I almost always deny the opt in, because of nonsense like this. Apple shouldn’t allow this and punish the crooks the hardest.
I saw this on Twitter as "yet another example of how bad mobile games are" yesterday. Shit like this gives the whole platform a bad name.
Yuppppppppppppppppppp.
if you watch ads on facebook or any of the mainstream ad networks in-game - these are the guys that run full blown Pokemon ads except the download link at the end is for Battle Camp. they believe in the school of thought that it's all about getting clicks/downloads/actions/etc no matter how devious/misleading