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Amazon's Android appstore loses one of its best features
Free. It's a price we love. Ironically, free usually comes at a price. Today, that price, is the loss of Amazon's try-before-you-buy TestDrive service for Android apps. It turns out, with more and more apps being free (at least to download), there was less demand for a service that let you test 'em out in the browser/virtual machine. Makes sense. Accordingly, Amazon has pulled the TestDrive feature from the appstore -- this has no effect on any apps that used it, just the feature is gone. The downside being there's no longer a way to (easily) check out apps that don't use the free-to-play/freemium model on Amazon's store any more. But, coming full circle... that's the price you pay for having more free apps, right?
GDC 2010: Ngmoco's Neil Young on how freemium will change the App Store world
On the third day of GDC 2010, Ngmoco's Neil Young took the stage in one of the largest rooms at the conference to talk about what his company had "unlearned" in its time in the App Store. Ngmoco has become a large and polarizing figure in the world of App Store development -- after starting out with a big investment from the iFund, it's moved quickly to become one of the biggest iPhone-only developers, and after starting out with a few premium titles like the very successful Rolando, have recently made waves with its "freemium" business model. Young talked about the company's history so far, and went in-depth on Ngmoco's plan for ruling the App Store and why he believes it's the "most significant shift and opportunity for [game developers] since the birth of this business." We've summarized Young's long address in this post. It was pretty incredible -- not only did Young lay out his idea of a clear plan for building and developing a large portfolio of very profitable App Store titles "at scale" (the company plans to release twenty new freemium products on the iPhone in the near future, as well as six titles on the iPad), but he made it very clear that he fervently believes that freemium and the model he's structured is the future of the video game business.
