Video games
fromKotaku
2 days agoPeak Devs Call Out Entitled Gamers Who Want Endless Free Updates
Endless support for games is not guaranteed; updates are considered a bonus, not a right.
Leonid Radvinsky's death leaves a void in the leadership of OnlyFans, a platform that has transformed the adult content landscape. His secretive management style and the controversies surrounding the site have raised questions about its future direction and stability.
When someone taps your link in a social app or email, it often opens in an in-app browser (embedded browser), a contained environment inside that app. Those in-app browsers don't share cookies, logins, or referral data with Safari or Chrome. They sever the continuity that website-centric analytics depend on. So these sessions look like anonymous visits.
Several Reddit users are complaining that the YouTube Android and iOS apps now show annoyingly persistent overlay ads in the bottom-left corner. These ads are usually for third-party apps or websites, and persist even after the user repeatedly taps "Dismiss" in the three-dot menu. Note that there is no "X" on the banner itself, so several users don't even know they could dismiss the ad from within the three-dot menu in the first place.
WhatsApp is now rumored to be soon introducing a premium tier. This will be called WhatsApp Plus. It's said to offer several additional customization options to change the app theme, app icon, and accent colors, including 14 new icons and multiple color choices and interface elements.
Steam's chart was designed to communicate that more games than ever are seeing revenue of over $100,000 per year. This, were it so clear cut, would be splendid news. According to the chart, in 2020 just 3,000 games "earned" $100k, but by 2025 that number had reached 5,863. Let's call it 6,000 for ease. That means twice as many games are hitting this figure compared to five years ago.
Mobile game developers have largely been locked into app store distribution as the primary way to reach players. RCS games live in the messaging inbox, the stickiest surface on mobile, where people are already spending huge amounts of time talking to friends and family. We're building on an interaction pattern people already use every day.
For example, CPA models tend to be very popular with on-demand apps or apps with subscription models based on, say, a free trial event. Examples of these include fitness apps (such as Peloton and Obe Fitness) or entertainment or VOD apps (such as Showtime, VUDU etc). In these instances, CPA is preferable as a performance model because it's easier to optimize towards a certain fixed price based upon fixed subscription fees and expected conversion rates.
The recent rise of AI may be controversial, but one thing is certain: it's here to stay. Ethical considerations aside, AI has quickly become a practical tool that everyday people are able use to earn extra income, even in retirement. From turning life experience into digital products to helping small businesses work smarter, AI could open doors to flexible, low-stress ways to make money without starting from scratch.
During my week-long binge, I played games that paused their own tutorials to run ads. I saw endless fake X icons and banners that hid the close button under the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Now, I'm not against ads, but I hate it when they feel like a penalty. I'm a gamer, and from what I've seen, PC and console games integrate ads much better. If mobile devs followed suit, mobile games might finally climb out of the mess they're in.
In-app is far from a lawless, unpopulated no man's land of advertising. In fact, the latest stats show it's actually where audiences are spending most of their time. In the UK for example, just over two and a half hours a day are spent in the in-app environment, compared with only 20 minutes on the mobile web. That's a staggering 90% of the time on mobile spent in apps - whether messaging, social media, music, or gaming. It's a huge opportunity.
In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.
More ads are coming to App Store search results starting in March, Apple shared on an advertising help page. The company first said that it would increase the number of App Store ads last month, and this new rollout of search ads will begin on Tuesday, March 3, according to a developer email viewed by MacRumors. "Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search," Apple says.
What Patreon is referring to is the mandate Apple announced in 2024 around subscription billing changes. It said that Patreon must move all its creators to subscription billing using Apple's in-app purchase system by November 2025 or else Patreon would risk removal from the App Store. Apple made this decision because Patreon was managing the billing for some percentage of creators' subscriptions, and the tech giant saw that as skirting its App Store commission structure.