iAds

General
1

I followed @Reefwing tutorial on implementing iAds but am getting 2 errors having to do with ContentSize identifier being deprecated. Is there code to replace these 2 lines of code? When I took the code out, the banner was showing up below the game screen in portrait view. Also, my app ran fine in the simulator, except for the banner being to low, a few times and then all of the sudden I started getting a blank simulator screen. Is there a way to fix this?

2

Hi @GregH - yes this was deprecated in iOS 6.0. Banner views no longer use content size identifiers.

Your application should never directly change the size of the banner view. Instead, set the currentContentSizeIdentifier property to a known advertising size. The view is automatically resized to match the new content size. The default value is ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait.

You can move an add banner view by adjusting its frame.origin x and y properties. As per above don’t changed the width and height.

3

Thanks! That helped.

4

Hi, I’m not very good with the xCode side of things.

My app was working on both iPad and iPhone with the older code as it supported iOS 5.

So I can block out the code and put in

[_bannerView setAutoresizingMask:UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth];

but that works just works on the iPhone and doesn’t show the ads properly on iPad - it shows the smaller size banners and doesn’t scale them up for iPad.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Major

5

@GregH adds suck mate and greedy devs use 'em. don’t be a greedy dev, sure you wanna get some money for your game np but just don’t make it free, free games blow. make it 99c and no adds. much better than the freemium trash out there.

6

@Paul123 A lot of people don’t have any money to buy an app, not even 99¢. IMO ads are fine as long as they don’t pop up constantly and prevent you from playing the game.

I actually choose to watch an ad in some games to get a free prize, like in-game money.

7

I just wrote a similar post on my Buggyz game-dev blog regarding iAds and what some of the issues are (see: http://tmblr.co/ZcWG9p1DFCT-h ).

I guess the upshot is that a large proportion of games are now free on the App-Store (with iAds) or have some sort of in-app purchase strategy in order to ‘monetise’ them.

This is the dilemma I think a lot of Indie game developers face these days. Also, remember iAds aren’t the only Ad framework you can chose - there are are quite a few others which ‘promise’ much greater returns.

Would be interested to hear what others on here think from a developer and end-user perspective…

8

@SkyTheCoder I’m sorry but thats codswallop… people can buy an iphone for £500 or ipad for £400-500 and yet can’t afford a 69p app?

No, that just doesn’t wash. if a game is GOOD enough, people will buy it. look at the recent release of FTL its like £5-$10 and its selling like hotcakes.

9

@Paul123 - I disagree. If the marketing is really good and so is the game - people will buy it. :wink:

The App-Store has lots of really good games from Indie developers that never made mega-bucks or even covered their development costs. This is the harsh reality of 1000+ apps released every week - most have very little marketing and subsequently zero exposure and then get lost in the darkest pits of the App-Store after the first few days after they are released. This is an unfortunate fact and has nothing to do with whether a game/app is good or not.

@SkyTheCoder does have a point - although, a lot of gamers are kids who don’t own credit cards to pay for their games. Free/Freemium apps are then the only option, unless their parents pay or they have a App Store voucher. :wink:

Its not as straightforward as simply ‘having money to pay’ - its also ‘the ability to pay’ as well - something that a lot of young gamers dont. :wink:

10

If they want a game, their parents will happily buy it for them, look at utter mind rotting trash like Candy Crush and all the morons that play that. They can spend a fortune on despicable greedy devs things like consumable iap which imo is the worst thing in ios gaming currently. so these ppl can pay a fortune for in-game virtual currency but can’t pay 99c/69p for a game? riiiight… sorry but no.

11

@Paul123 - a simplistic view IMHO. Conventional wisdom and a wealth of App-Store marketing research in the public domain says otherwise. The facts speak for themselves - a good 90% of App-Store games are now free. Why? Because this business model appears to work. :wink:

12

@Paul123 Buying a new iPad has put me out of allowance for nearly a year, and I haven’t been able to buy anything since then. I highly doubt my parents would let me buy an app, let alone pay for it.

But back to greedy devs-you have to remember, we are them! Always value your money more than your customer! (Just kidding, but still, you do have to think of profit a little bit. You can’t put an app on the App Store and expect to go bankrupt. It costs $99 a year!)

13

@SkyTheCoder I’m not wanting devs to go hungry, I’m all for devs getting a good reward for their work but I’m just sick of seeing lots of lazy devs swamping the app store with the ‘flavour of the month’ trash. You have to admit the app store is really full of crap right now and its hard to wade through the shit to find a gem or two.

Personally I’d happily pay £1-5-10 for a game I really like as long as theres no consumable iap in it and have done. I bought Baldurs gate 1-2 and even paid £11 for Phantom Leader. GOOD devs should be rewarded for their work, sadly it seems these days that most devs are simply looking to bleed their customers dry. ie King

14

Hi it’s an interesting debate and one I carefully weighed up.

What I did was include ads in a non obtrusive way. The ads are all the way up at the top and never anywhere else. The game is designed so you only look in the bottom 35-50% of the screen so you never really see the ads. Try it and see!

Thanks
major

15

If you only have ads in the menus, not while the game is in play that’s not too intrusive