Hacking around

Firstly I was disappointed in that Rovio did not release a paid version of Angry Birds for Android, they put the full version free with advertisements. Well, it is a fun game and it is kind of great that you can play the full game for free with the cost of seeing a few ads here and there.

Still, I think this would have been the first app on Android which would be worth paying for, yet they thought of going the ad-supported way because of supposedly fears that on the more open platform Android is, the full paid app could be pirated away and distributed to people who didn't pay for it.

Well, it was okayish until the very recent update to the game. Now there are more advertisements and they are displayed more aggressively. And while the ads are loading and displaying, the game performance goes down significantly. And my phone is not even in the lowest end of the spectrum. According to the comments in Android Market, many people have simply uninstalled the game after the update because the extra lag caused by the new advertisements just render the game completely unplayable for them.

As for me, the ads are now annoying so much so that in order to be able to enjoy the game, I need to turn off WiFi connectivity while playing so that it is not able to load the advertisements. And again, according to the comments, I am not the only one turning off mobile data/WiFi connections to be able to play the game.

So what did they gain from doing this? Instead of getting more revenue from ads, they just made people stop playing the game or block the ads by disconnecting from networks while playing. So the part of people who are still left playing it after this update play it for free without the ads. If they would have given the payable version, at least some people could have bought the game and they get money for it. Even if it was pirated around a bit, that would have been more difficult than just turning off Internet connections in the current ad supported version!

I wonder when they will wake up and see that what they are doing is the same most other companies have done to combat piracy: they just make it so that people want to support their product even less and actually increases piracy related activity around their product. Damn.