I can't remember the exact reactions but Machine Gun Kelly was a guest host and was not happy about it. I imagine the producers where pretty happy that they got something exciting happening.
The 2010 documentary catfish, and subsequent mtv series, offers an interesting look behind the curtain at the type of people who create fake facebook profiles. It covers a wide variety of reasons for creating them spanning from people who suffer from low self-esteem and confidence issues to not being able to reveal that they are homo-sexual out of fear of their friends and family finding out, just out of pure malice or even in one case creating a fake account story to get the show to pay for flights so they could finally meet face to face. Its crazy some of the lengths people go to keep up the charade and how much evidence certain people will ignore to keep the idea that the person is real alive.
I once joked with my friends about something similar to this. The best target audience to attempt something like this one would be people who are really big into conspiracy theory's and would have any attempts to bring something like this to light immediately shot down due to their other beliefs. It would be pretty simple for facebook to flag users that match a profile like this just off their likes and profile activity!
They could try introducing some filters you have to pay for. It might be tough surviving the initial backlash due to people expecting them to be free but as long as they keep releasing some free ones they should survive. The other problem is their demographic is a bit younger so might not have that much disposable income but that didn't deter them from releasing glasses that cost >$100. I think parents would be more likely to pay $1.99 for a pack of 5 special filters for their child rather than getting the glasses.
Freakonmics has an interesting episode where they cover the idea of offering a patient a bonus/rebate if they forego the standard end-of-life medical care. Quite a controversial suggestion but it does seem to have some though behind it
I feel like a lot of people miss this point. The technology has existed for years although clearly the cost to implement a touch screen console has also plummeted.Even accounting for that most self-service checkouts are just a tilled turned around.
I wonder how much of this is super markets jumping on to the fact people are conflating automation with using a machine and assuming self-service checkouts are proof of a technological revolution. At the end of the day the same amount of work is being done at the till as if a cashier was working but it is now being done for free and a company won't miss a chance to capitalise on an opportunity like that.
I think people put to much emphasis on the program to follow. The real secret to progression in the gym is dedication. The guy who shows up 4 times a week for a year doing his own made up program is going to look better than the guy doing the latest program they are recommending online for 2 months then giving up.There isn't any perfect system or quick answers so I find its best to just do exercises you enjoy and set yourself little mini goals and work towards them.
China is set to introduce a law that will force these sort of games to reveal their drop rates. It will be interesting to see if it will have any effect but my gut is telling their wont be any significant changes.
Thinking about it I wonder how they expect games to report this information when it is most likely have 2 or 3 different data sets in the wild with different drop rates. A company could mis-lead customers by displaying the percentages for one data set with favourable odds when in reality they are in a bucket with much worse odds.
I have worked on a few mobile games where there was a big developer push for reducing the app size but it was shot down by management to add more new features instead. A lot of features had expected performance targets to hit before they got the go ahead and it was hard for reducing the app size to have a sizeable difference on KPIs until it got to critical levels.
I think there is also a certain amount of developer apathy towards application size.I was recently talking to a colleague who had worked on a new banking app and they saw no problem with developing, what was essentially a web front end, with the Unity game engine. When I asked if he was concerned the effect on the app size including a game engine would have he said it was what they where used to using and that was more important.
I can't remember for certain if it got a banner feature but I think it did.I agree though that it had very little effect on the success of Pokemon GO as a large amount of people downloaded when it was still in soft launch phase and before it was properly featured by Apple.
Just checked and here in the UK Super Mario Run already has a banner feature and is top of the new games we love section despite not being available yet to play yet
I think the Mario IP combined with an App Store feature, which it is almost certain to get, should give it respectable enough download numbers for Nintendo to consider it a success. Endless runner games historically don't monetise as well as other genres so allowing the user to trial the game then pay a fee for full access might work out better for them than if they had went the micro-transaction route.
The decision to include the one off payment would suggest to me that they don't see it as an ever-green game with monthly updates like Pokemon Go and expect it to have a much shorter life.