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Rise and Shiny recap: Urban Rivals
I would like to start off by saying that Urban Rivals, a multiplayer collectible card game, is not an MMO. While I always try to play MMOs for this column, occasionally my "grab a random MMO, one that was recommended by a reader a while ago, and write about it" method needs some tweaking. I don't always get a chance to vet a game mainly because I want to go through the very first stages of play while streaming live on Mondays, so sometimes less-than-Massive games squeeze through. File this under Not So Massively. Other than that, I found some neat design in the game. I didn't find anything that would just blow us away as gamers, but it has some cool ideas and artwork all the same. There's also the mobile version of the game to consider -- a universal app for the iPhone or iPad that allows for gaming anywhere.
MV Guide: January 23-29, 2012
MV Guide is a weekly rundown of the MMO gaming events planned on Massively TV. Every week, the Massively staff logs in to play various MMOs live and in person, and we'd love for you to drop by the channel and visit. We have a combination of regular weekly games and new surprises, so you'll find a variety of titles to take a look at. During our streamed events, you can participate in the live chat, ask questions to learn about the game, and simply spend some time with Massively staff and readers. (Of course, streaming is subject to the whims of outside forces like server-side gremlins once in a while.) Follow along after the jump to see what's on this week's schedule!
Rise and Shiny recap: Thirst of Night
I love my MMORTS games, for sure. I've had to work on my ability to look at them with the freshest eyes that I can possibly muster, mainly because I see so many of them. It really is a genre of details. The gameplay in different titles is often almost exactly the same, but little details will set them apart. Thirst of Night, a new MMORTS by Kabam, tries hard to set itself apart from the pack, but does it do enough? I also have to consider that, for many players, these experiences I go through every week are brand-new experiences. For a good number of people, the games I cover are their first or second ones. While it is hard for me to fathom, I have to keep that in mind. So while I saw a game this week that was lacking and tired in some areas, I know that those same areas would be pretty exciting to a new gamer. Like I said, I'm working on it.
Devs quickly move to new models after in-app purchase change
It was just yesterday that Apple announced they would allow free apps to enable in-app purchases, and developers are already jumping on the "get the app for free, buy the content later" business model as quickly as they can. ngmoco came out swinging, as Touch Arcade reports, with both a free intro version of Rolando 2 out for purchase, with later chapters of the game as add-ons. They've also been working on a shooter called Eliminate, and we're now told that title will be free as well, with extra content to buy later. The creators of Urban Rivals, an app that is based on a virtual trading card game, have let us know that they too plan to go the free-with-microtransactions model as soon as their app is released, and though we haven't actually heard from Tapulous, Andrew Lacy told us outright that the only reason Tap Tap Revenge 3 had a 99 cent price tag on it was because of Apple's limitation, so we'll expect that app to go free as soon as it can. Clearly, there's a drive for this model on the developer side, but the question will be just how much this echoes with consumers -- certainly the "download a trial, buy more later" model has worked well on other platforms, so we can expect it to work here on the App Store as well. But on the other hand, just as when the App Store first opened for business, it's a very "wild west" moment -- everybody and their brother is offering up in-app transactions, and they're all of varying prices and quality. My guess is that we'll see a few "hits" -- a few free apps that everybody buys content for (Tap Tap Revenge 3 is a good guess; considering that because you know most of those songs, there's much less guessing on what the quality of the transactions will give you). At the same time, there will likely be apps that everyone agrees aren't worth the in-app purchase (it's the old story of "horse armor" when Xbox Live started doing microtransactions). Until we find a good balance, where quality meets price, odds are that it'll be tough for consumers to know just what's worth it, and thus tough for developers to convince them that their content is.
iPhone TCG to charge $9.99 for in-app purchases
Just the other day I was talking about how prices were all over the place for in-app purchases, and now here's a company that's just going all out with the microtransaction model (or macrotransaction, maybe, in this case). Urban Rivals is an online MMO trading card game, and they're going to start selling packs of the cards directly within the game. And the pricing is interesting -- you can buy one pack of three cards for 99 cents (same as the price of the game itself, though there will be a free version to play as well), or you can pick up 11 packs of those cards, 33 cards in total, for $9.99, almost ten times the price of the actual game. This is an interesting case: the game itself already has a working model outside of the App Store, so they've already proven elsewhere that people will pay for this extra gameplay, not to mention that players of the iPhone game can play right alongside players on other platforms. And there's an interesting twist with the game's currency -- outside of the iPhone, the game lets you either win currency which you can then use to buy cards, or buy the currency with real money and then buy cards with that. But Apple has apparently said no to ingame currency being sold for real money, so instead, Urban Rivals is selling cards during the in-app purchases, skipping the ingame currency completely. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not this will actually work -- just because the game is successful outside the iPhone doesn't mean it'll work on Apple's platform. But if in-app purchases of this kind do become a big deal, we might see other developers trying to come up with ways to sell content like this -- for developers who feel that the App Store's prices are too low, they may instead be able to come up with the funds they need through sizable in-app purchases.
