- Mar 14, 2012
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First off, you no not have to grind through ads. The Advanced challenge no longer requires you to watch an ad before every play. Once you’ve won a challenge and are presented with the 5 cards to flip, you can get by just fine without flipping the one you’d have to watch an ad for, as parts are rarely hidden beneath it, usually it’s tickets or a skin.
As to why they don’t do this system for the mobile Zen app? Because that came out before they decided to move in this direction. After that the Aliens vs Pinball app and the Bethesda Pinball app came out, both experimenting with tickets, coins, and ads for those that didn’t want to pay outright.
I’m not privy to how the financials work, but I can guess that Zen got more downloads and play throughs with those two than the Zen app. Why? Because I’m one of those that doesn’t wanna pay on mobile (go ahead, call into question my hardcore pinball bonafides) and therefore never opened the Zen app. Aliens and Bethesda on the other hand had me playing daily for a while. Advertisers want to know how many eyeballs might see their ads, and showing active account logins generates better ad rates for Zen. Advertising is a perpetual income, a one time purchase is not. Then Zen app might have more app downloads in total, I don’t know, but what’s it matter if active usage is low?
Look, I agree that Zen should be more transparent with their intentions and have some consistency between releases. That being said, they’ve actually made improvements on the grinding side of things. For starters, the score targets for challenges have been reduced and made easier. Parts are now hard capped, meaning you will cease to earn parts beyond the 170 needed in total, regardless of if you’ve upgraded or not. Upon release of Vol 4, there was a limited event that allowed you to easily get all three tables up to 2 stars in the span of a week. You can now play 2 star tables offline. They just did another limited event that dumped around 60 coins and lots of tix in the span of 4 days.
My point is, Zen is making it very doable to get your tables for free. Why would they want this instead of the easy money? Because they want activity, and there’s way more mobile gamers out there willing to get something for free* than 1 time purchasers. I’m sure the app also acts as a gateway to people downloading and checking out FX3 on console or PC, where they will more readily pay the purchase price.
I’ll say this too; Zen had planned on updating the Zen app to more closely reflect the FX3 platform. I don’t know if that is still in the works or if the Williams app is what became of that, but if we see a new version I suspect it’ll be modeled on the Williams app. I’d certainly welcome it as then I’d finally start playing originals on my phone.
*even amongst the free players, there are going to be those that like throwing money at an app. I just saw it in a different app where mist in my clan didn’t like spending anything. Suddenly a new season pass gets introduced and most jumped on it because of the value they saw in it. We’ll see how many renew next month.
**a newby starting from scratch with the Williams app can conceivably fully own every table within 4 months of daily grinding, playing the Basic, Advanced, and Pro challenges to completion once per 24 hour cycle. By cycling and playing the Basic and Advanced twice more each day, that time gets cut to 40-60 days. Is it instant gratification? No, but the same people that have been complaining and refusing to play the app because Zen won’t take their money could have been close to owning them all after all this time.
