Pocket Devil Lite Takes a New Approach to Ads

Posted by Brad Hilderbrand on December 17th, 2010
iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad

Today Eyedip announced that they would be releasing a lite version of their popular Pocket Devil app, but the real news is how the free version of the game would be supported. Rather than following the traditional model of throwing up an ad before every round or locking away content and asking players to buy the full version, Eyedip is opting for an entirely different approach.

According to the company users will be allowed to play Pocket Devil until they summon and torture 50 Mugat2s (the game's name for the demonic imps). At this point the game will stop, a video ad will be shown, and then 20 more Mugat2s will spawn. The development team equates the situation with the way Hulu approaches TV shows, and claims that this setup will be less annoying to players than traditional models which continually interrupt.

“We took great care when crafting our Lite implementation of Pocket Devil," said Jeremy Adelman, Co-Founder of Eyedip. "We wanted to bring a free solution to market that was substantial enough to be fun as a stand-alone app, not just a funnel that guides people to the full version.”

So will consumers embrace this approach? It's hard to say at this point. On the one hand it's nice to have access to genuine edition of the game and a good amount of content rather than simply one or two levels. At the same time, will players tolerate being interrupted in the middle of a game to watch a commercial? The concept works for television because it's a passive medium and we've been conditioned to expect a commercial break ever 6-8 minutes while we're watching. Television shows are structured so that there's a natural break for the insertion of advertising, a concept which doesn't work as well for games given their interactive nature.

While we support new approaches to the ad-supported game model we're also fearful that this approach may actually be more intrusive rather than less, but we're willing to reserve judgment for now. Perhaps Eyedip is onto something here, or then again they may have done little more than find a new way to irritate gamers. Let's see how this all shakes out.