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Mobile gaming's monetization landscape may still change as China relents on gacha games
China's latest controversial gaming law may not go through after all
China is no stranger to implementing laws to protect children from gaming addiction. In 2021, China introduced a law that restricts gaming time to be limited to three hours per week for people under the age of 18. In December 2023, another law was proposed to remove gaming practices incentivizing daily login rewards. However, this newly proposed law has caused stocks to drop for major companies like Tencent (16%) and NetEase (25%) — which may be the primary reason the government has eased up on the recently proposed direction.
YouTube's got another new way to support your favorite creator (and also YouTube, the soulless machine)
Super Thanks, our lord and savior Tube of You!
Independent content creators have plenty of avenues to monetize their work. YouTube, home to many of those creators' videos, has been pushing their fans to contribute gifts during livestreams with Super Chats and Super Stickers. Now, it's opening up a way for them to do the same for video-on-demand with Super Thanks.
Google preparing to end support for paid Chrome extensions
Developers can only use third-party payment providers going forward if they wish to offer paid functionality
While many extensions are great for enhancing your browsing experience, they can be a tacky business for people who aren't at least somewhat familiar with the inner workings of browsers. Google noticed an influx of fraudulent paid extensions in January this year, and the situation only got worse when lockdowns first started and some people tried spreading misinformation or profiting off the pandemic through any channel they could find. With that in mind, Google has now decided to scrap paid extensions altogether.
Early last year, Google rolled out a new monetization method for developers to take advantage of in their apps. The woefully non-descriptive "rewarded products" allowed for things like watching videos to get in-game currency or extra lives — you get the idea. For simplicity, it was built right into the Google Play Billing Library, but Google has just announced that it will be deprecating the feature on April 21st, 2020, about two months from now.
Even though YouTube has long become a multi-million-dollar business, individual creators can sometimes still end up struggling when they rely only on the built-in ad revenue (SnazzyLab's Quinn Nelson has a great explanation on this, if you have an hour to spare). Google sees these problems and is looking for ways to help YouTubers diversify their income. At VidCon, the company announced that it adds multiple tiers of Channel Memberships, extends Super Chat with purchasable stickers, and adds new native merchandise options.
Instagram has announced new features that are intended to enhance the experiences for the 500 million daily active users of its Stories feature — one of these features is available right now while the other may take some time and adjustment to get used to. The social media platform is also building a new way for users to browse and buy the clothes their favorite influencers are wearing.
In this day and age, it's easy to be cynical about the games industry, advertising, and the general state of a lot of consumer technology. Google has magnanimously decided to help Android game developers increase monetization opportunities by offering means to re-capture wayward players and keep paying ones happy in ad-free bliss. How, you might ask? Two ways: using ads to draw people back into a game and by using machine learning to only serve advertisements to those deemed less likely to buy in-app purchases.
How to go about bringing in revenue is a problem Facebook has failed to solve in the four years since it acquired WhatsApp. The world's most popular messaging app cost roughly $22 billion, but other than a brief experiment with charging an annual 99-cent subscription fee, there has been no clear plan on how to monetize the service.
I've noticed that there are two kinds of people, generally speaking, when it comes to app purchases. Those that consider a couple bucks towards a new app no big deal, and those that wait until the last minute, if ever, to drop a few dollars on a "Pro" version or IAP for a full app. Personally, I jump at the chance to disable ads, add additional features, and support independent developers. But, even I can acknowledge that it depends on how much an app costs.
Snapchat, not long ago an ad-free platform, is preparing to ramp up the promotional content. In a series of industry-targeted announcements, the company has detailed several initiatives that will inevitably result in users seeing ads more frequently than they do now.
We here at Android Police have a thing for Pushbullet. You could even call it a crush. Not everyone on the team uses it, but we and many of our readers agree that it's a solid service. You get to send text, links, images, and notifications from one device to another with minimal effort.
The Czar has spoken. After his anointment as Google's Senior Vice President of Products last October, which put him in charge of Chrome, Android, search, ad technology, Google+, Maps, social, commerce and infrastructure, Sundar had been operating in incognito mode, occasionally letting loose a few tidbits of information, like Inbox' deployment to Apps users. In a recent interview with Forbes, the man behind most of the things we talk about here on Android Police has answered some interesting questions regarding his vast portfolio of products, tried to put an end to a few concerns, and remained mum about other issues.
CloudMagic Reveals Monetization Strategy With New Pro Account Costing $4.99 A Month Or $44.99 A Year
The CloudMagic Android app is capable of managing multiple email accounts from a single location, and by indexing your messages on its servers, it can provide significantly faster search results than much of the competition. The experience is free, but now the company has unveiled how it plans to make money going forward—by encouraging power users to sign up for a pro account.
YouTube thrives off the videos produced by independent content creators all over the world, and while it compensates many of them through ads, that money is hardly enough to make a living off of in most cases. Earlier this summer Google said that producers would soon have the option to request donations right on their YouTube pages. The feature's live now, so here's a look at how it works.
Free-to-play is a divisive topic in the games industry right now. Some developers and publishers, especially in the mobile gaming world, love it - free games get downloaded more, and they have the potential to bring in more revenue. Gamers used to the "pay once, pay forever" model of games and software in general over the last 30 years think it's changing the industry and damaging both the economics and the mechanics of gaming itself.