Balancing between google and Apple

[muted hound]

I have an account for google play and iOS. While google play annual fee is $30 for in-app purchases; I believe iOS users should have the ability to buy an annual or monthly in-app purchases that roughly produce the same amount of rewards that google play has to offer. This is more of an iOS store problem than cookie inc. but a good way for cookie inc to make more income

[fallen valve]

To my knowledge there is a thing similar to play pass on iOS called Apple Arcade or something like that. However, the app is not currently featured there. I don't know enough about the systems to say why, it's not really something that's been discussed very much. I will take your feedback to our drawing board of course 🙂

[wintry basin]

I would second that. Honestly, while being happy for all Android users with PlayPass I‘m on iOS only. I payed a lot in app purchases over the years but since that PlayPass thing it’s getting more and more frustrating to have to pay so much when Android users get so much more. This just feels imbalanced.

I’m not aware of how Apple chooses apps for their Arcade but seriously, there’s lot of crap games there and many even abandoned by their developers like no updates etc.

While I appreciate that Naveen hopefully makes some effort to get CI into Apple Arcade, I admit I don’t feel attracted to buy IAP anymore if what I get for my money is so incredibly much less that what PlayPass users get.

I‘m disabled and poor but I always bought IAP or 1time purchase apps as it’s crucial for especially indie developers to get money for their hard work.

But in my opinion it has to have a balance. I think, if there’s so little chance to get it on Arcade, it would be more fair to offer a monthly subscription for Apple users that reflects the price and bonuses of the PlayPass. This would absolutely be possible without the need for having the game on Arcade.
If not it feels like milking the Apple users whilst pampering the Android users.

Honestly I can’t understand why Naveen doesn’t seem to care about this issue. Not enough people complaining?

I truly love his games but imho it would have been better to actually recode CI and use all of its great potential instead of coming up with just another td and merge games as the app stores are full of them and besides ‚Scrap 2‘ none of these games is in any way very unique. They give money for a short time but not enough content to create income for years.

I hope not to sound too harsh. I‘m an autist and know that sometimes my words can come across as too direct for neurotypical individuals. I don’t want to hurt with my comment but to ignite a spark for maybe reconsidering some approaches and for different perspectives.

[inner dawn]

Well Cookies Inc which was originally named Cookie Collector 2 before it's rename and that released in from what I gather in 2014 - 2015. It is a sequel and the prequel game released in from what I gather 2013 - 2014. The codebase is probably already really old and probably was never meant to be as complex as it is now.

I also in fact do not like it that the devs enforce a 3GB ram limit for the game on the playstore. You can install Cookies inc manually with an APK and it runs just fine on a supposedly "unsupported" device? it's pointless. if the reason is that the game lags, well they have nothing to blame but themselves for not optimizing their game enough. I have scrap 2 on my ancient android 2.3 gingerbread phone and it runs perfectly with no lags at all. And that phone has a whopping 256MB of RAM!!!! the CPU and GPU is really weak as well, barely capable of running subway surfers and it likes to crash as it runs out of memory. The devs of Scrap 2 heavily optimized their game for that to work so well

[wet zephyr]

So what you're saying is that Naveen should rewrite the entire game from scratch? I know spaghetti code is heavily unoptimized, but also really hard to properly optimize. Personally, I think Naveen could add two years worth of features in the time that it would take to properly optimize the game.

[wintry basin]

I played the first game back in the days and then CI from the start.

I‘m assuming Naveen pondered the options of which road to take very well and seemingly considers not recoding from scratch as the best option.

I just can’t help imho it’s not the best direction towards the future of CI which according to Naveen is his main income source to be a full time indie dev.

True fond fans of CI would probably happily patiently wait for a fully recoded game and in the meantime pay for PlayPass or IAP as they already do.
New players have much content to unlock and won’t hit the end too fast (although I can’t know if that’s still true with PlayPass).

So, yes, I think nothing would be really lost if instead of creating just the next average merge or td game that will get abandoned after a year or so, it might be the more sustainable option to recode CI as it has an unmatched depth already and reading the current suggestions here some very cool ideas by players to enhance that even more.

You may call me naïve but I can imagine same as some passionate players that happen to share feature ideas for free here there might also exist the passionate fans that would help with coding for free to honour that original project of Naveen and support the idea that he still can make a living of it.

Imho just optimising the existing code wouldn’t do and I understand that Naveen prefers to just add some new features sporadically.

I think that only adding the occasional new feature would not keep CI a sustainable income source in the long run and now even less with that tremendous discrepancy between Android and Apple users to come back to the original point of the post.

While I‘m not aware of how the user base is divided between both platforms and even if there were more Android users, I hardly can imagine loosing many players from the Apple community buying IAPs would help Naveen make a living of his games.
Who likes to be milked in plain sight? I’ll gladly pay if things are balanced.

[teal sleet]

How do people write this long messages 😭

[wintry basin]

If they are autistic and a writer and most importantly because they’re staying away from most social media so their brain isn’t damaged and manipulated like many nowadays who can only handle short sentences anymore and suffer from having very short attention span. 😉

[teal sleet]

And that, was a crazy run-on sentence. 💪

And quite the jab, ouch.

[wintry basin]

Haha, yes, indeed. They are also quite often to find in true literature or essays as well. No big deal if one concentrates on it a bit. ☺️ But they’re certainly not for everyone.

[teal sleet]

Yeah, although, i just did a literature class and found no run-on sentences. Maybe not all of them have the glory of not using punctuation. 😂

[lapis notch]

Agree

[wintry basin]

Well, I‘m German. I don’t know much about American or English literature besides a bit of John Irving who very well uses long sentences. Also sorry if my punctuation in English isn’t that well, my training is 30 years ago. Sorry for having been OT.

Still hoping for at least better and cheaper IAP for Apple users.

[teal sleet]

I think your punctuation is really good, you really learned a lot when you were learning English.

It is hard to learn other languages, i've tried Duolingo and though it was fun, i still got bored and quit.

[wintry basin]

Thank you. I was blessed with a true Englishman as a teacher.

[wet zephyr]

Can we please get back to the original subject of the post ("fixing" IAPs for the Apple version)? Feel free to have further discussion on this in #chat. Thank you 👍
(Sorry if this comes over as rude, not my intention.)

[teal sleet]

Crap, you're right, sorry.

[wintry basin]

Sure

[vocal galleon]

Yes! I agree! I switched to Android for this game and the progress you can make on play pass versus iOS is like playing two different games. I made the same complaints months ago to mostly silence, leading me to believe that nothing will change. That is my assumption anyway.