iOS 10 Limit Ad Tracking could be the end of UA, lessons learned as a games journalist and a cautionary tale for global expansion

The hottest articles of last week

• 5 Are paid apps dead or is there still life in premium mobile games for indies?

  

  Yes, the "is the paid app dead" debate rages on even now, much to the chargrin of some.

  This time around, we turned to our Indie Mavens to ask their opinions on what they thought about paid apps versus free-to-play.

  Some developers have found success in paid-for titles, such as Ben Murch, who defended the premium model, claiming that "it's just a question of strategy".

  But there were also others who have experienced harsh failures, like Leanne Bayley, who are now shifting to F2P. Bayley said:"We've tried premium at a time where the market was saying that's what it wanted, and it was almost the end of us."

  
  

• 4 There are a few things you need to know before publishing your mobile game in China

  

  The China market is next to impenetrable for most Western companies, but with its huge audience available, its still a very tantalising prospect.

  So if you're eyeing up the market, then you might want to take some advice from Suvi Latva of Neogames Finland, who wants to share a few things you should know before trying to get into China.

  "The simple way is to publish only on iOS and let Apple take care of things," she writes, although that's only a small portion of the market.

  She then advises developers to look to publish on Android, but that has its own problems - there's over 400 Android stores, for example.

  
  

• 3 Will iOS 10's Limit Ad Tracking destroy the mobile game UA market?

  

  The Limit Ad Tracking function on iPhones has been around since iOS 9, but previously it only limited some features and still gave each device a unique ID for advertisers to use.

  However, in iOS 10, that feature is gone and IDs sent back will instead just be a string of 0s - which will be incredibly bad news for UA companies.

  "For example, a young guy working in New York with an iPhone 6 Plus and who's regularly playing Mobile Strike is just about the most valuable install candidate on the planet, at least in terms of game UA," writes Jon Jordan.

  "But if he switches Limit Ad Tracking on, he becomes as valuable as a Chinese toddler with his dad's old cracked iPhone 5C."

  
  

• 2 10 things I've learned about becoming a better games journalist

  

  Jon Jordan has been in the games journalism biz for over 10 years, and knows a thing or two about what it takes to be a good games journalist.

  So in his most recent article, as he outlines some of those lessons he's learned while being a journalist.

  It's not short of controversial points, but beyond that lies other interesting points, such as the fact that PR people are not the enemy and games journalists need to play games.

  
  

• 1 What happens when global expansion goes bad: A cautionary tale from Japan

  

  If there's two things Jon Jordan loves doing, it's making graphs and telling stories. So much so that he dedicated his time to an article where he uses lots of graphs and tells a few stories.

  The central theme is the difficulty faced by some of the top players in the Japanese mobile market, which saw tremendous growth in the early 2010s but struggled to maintain that momentum when they tried to expand globally.

  It was two of the biggest companies of the time, GREE and DeNA, that struggled, mainly because of their ill-fated expansions and acquisitions that didn't quite pay off.

  But there's so much more to it than that, far more than can be distilled in these paragraphs, so you should really give the whole thing a read. It's fascinating stuff, really.