![]() You could easily spend hundreds of dollars trying to get the ability to insert a cute WALL-E emoji into your text messages. You then have a 1 in 20 chance of getting that Tinker Bell emoji you really want (And it’s always 1 in 20, since, SURPRISE, you might get a awarded an emoji you already have.) It’s crazy. Of course, you need 15,000 coins to buy a new emoji, so maybe you should buy 486 gems for $9.99 and then trade 300 of those gems into 40000 coins to pick a “gold box” emoji. You could then use 30 of those gems to get 5 extra hearts, and 50 of those gems to 6000 coins. For example, you can purchase 81 gems for $1.99. So, why have this kind of confusing system of currency? Because, it provides a way to obfuscate what you are purchasing and how much you’re actually spending. Gems are what you can purchase more of with actual money via the game’s in-app purchase system. Gems – You trade in gems to get more hearts or coins (yep, it’s that convoluted) or to change the “challenges” the game is presenting you.Coins – These allow you to buy things like “boosts” to use in your game, or, most importantly, new emojis.These re-generate every 10 minutes, but you can only keep five of those auto-generated hearts at once (you can, of course, buy more.) You can only play the game if you have a heart. In the game, you have 3 different types of currency: Currency at Top The easiest place to start talking about the gamification of Emoji Blitz is in the “currency” system that’s in place. Sadly, however, it gets much, much worse. If that’s all the game was, I might have such a problem with it. It’s a nice little distraction when you have a minute or two. On its face, the game play isn’t terrible. You see, instead of purchasing the Disney Emoji keyboard and getting access to the various emojis that Disney has created, the Emoji blitz requires you to “unlock” the various emojis through repeated play of a simple matching game (think of a combination of Tetris and Connect-Four, where when you end up with 3 of the same emoji next to each other, they disappear from the board and new emoji fall into place.) Emoji Blitz Game What I never expected was that Disney Emoji Blitz would set a new low in gamification of a simple concept. When it was announced that Disney was going to make its own emoji keyboard–featuring its famed icons like Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy–I figured I would give a try. Clearly, I was in the minority, as KIMOJI shot to the top of the iOS App Store sales chart. When I first heard of KIMOJI, I couldn’t understand what would make the application so popular. Sadly, Disney’s iOS offering has all the worst elements of that trend. ![]() Insidiously, the games are then designed in a way that you are almost constantly tempted to purchase these “enhancements”, thereby allowing the developers to rake in money from users. These games use a model that involve a “free” download of the game, and then the ability to use the in-app purchase functionality of your to allow you to “enhance” your experience. In a recent article at MacStories Graham Spencer dug into the top grossing apps in the iOS App Store, and found that over 65% of them were what are known as “free-to-play” games. Tl dr – Though mildly enjoyable to play, it’s your typical, scammy “free-to-play” mobile game that is best avoided.
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