Apple Arcade has been out about a month now, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it.
First, on the plus side: It is a really good offer. They have a fantastic lineup, and for five dollars a month, it’s a bargain. I especially love that they have some games in there that probably would not be viable otherwise, Over the Alps being one of my favorites right now.
However, this comes with a downside: It will become much harder to compete outside of Arcade.
I’ve developed and self-published an iOS game earlier this year. When it came to monetarization, I decided to go for a freemium/shareware approach: The first third of the game is free, and the rest can be unlocked with a one-time purchase. Unfortunately, this was not successful. I’ve since changed to a (cheaper) pay-upfront model. This has gained a little more attention, but not that much to be worthwhile either.
The popular way to monetize these days is through ads and consumable in-app purchases, combined with arbitrary limitations: Either wait ten minutes for your upgrades, or pay up. And to ensure you don’t notice how much they fleece you, they make you pay with diamonds or coins or some other pretend currency, which you buy with real currency at some indecipherable rate. This seems to be successful - after all, lots of the most successful games are doing it - but that is not a business I want to be in. I want to design games, not slot machines.
So my niche for premium games will shrink, if not disappear. If Arcade continues to grow their lineup as they have, people will pay even less for games than they are doing now. And on the other side, the ‘free’-to-play makers will have to double down with their games as well to compete with Arcade, which will make it even harder to gain any traction in the market. So even if this makes selling my games harder, it’ll at least send more great games my way.
How many switches do you have in your house? The light switches come to mind - at least one per room, a few extra for the hallway and the outside, so maybe a dozen or two. Add your other electric devices - desk lamps, microwave, hair dryer, television, you get the idea. Add all those switches up, and - unless your are an electrical engineer or live in a huge house - I’d guess you’d be around a hundred.
However, we are still missing a lot of switches. And I am talking, of course, about the Transistors that make up the processors and other integrated circuits in your phones and computers.
On a very basic level, a transistor works as an electronic switch: By applying a current, we open or close a circuit. In reality, it is a bit more than that, since a transistor can also work as an amplifier. But still, all things considered, it kinda works like a switch. And combining all these switches within an integrated circuit such as a CPU physically enables computation.
I like to say that computers really are glorified abacuses: They basically just add and subtract numbers, but they can do it really, really fast. I am simplifying this quite a lot, but at the core of each processor is a really simple Instruction set, which is mostly used to execute mathematical calculations.
Well, where do the switches come in?
Computers uses binary numbers to represent data. This is done for technical reasons: A circuit can either be closed, or open - on, or off. So it makes sense to utilize the binary system with the numbers 1 and 0 to map to the underlying mechanism. And now we can do math with these switches. Somebody made a Marble adding machine which shows how the concept works.
This marble machine has six switches and can add numbers up to 63. A modern CPU is capable of much more than that; hence, it has a staggering amount of transistors. I am writing this on a not quite current tablet. The CPU contains 3.3 billion transistors. 3,300,000,000 tiny switches. And this is in a small handheld device.
Globally, it is thought that about thirteen billion trillion have been made so far. That’s 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tiny switches. And even though Moore’s law of doubling the transistor count on a given chip area will probably reach it’s limits soon, the amount of transistors made will continue to rise - after all, we can just make the chips larger!
Modern computers are near silent, which is a blessing. But sometimes I wonder how it would sound to hear all those the tiny clickety-clack of all those happily calculating tiny switches.
A recent article compared coding bootcamps, and I was happy to see that App Academy still ranks at the very top.
I did not take a direct path to get into the IT industry. While I was interested in computers from a very early age (first computer when I was four!), my original major is in German law and business administration. Fast forward a few years and a move across the Atlantic, and I found myself with a profession that was not really in demand anymore. I found a job doing IT consulting and support. It paid the bills and my coworkers were great, but over time, I grew really, really bored and was looking for something else to do.
I considered going back to school for a proper CS degree, but then I heard about coding bootcamps and what they do. Now, at first, I was very, very sceptical. These schools are expensive, they only last for a few months - what could they possibly teach me in that time? And why would they care about my job chances afterwards since they’ll get paid either way?
App Academy caught my attention because of their business model - only pay upon graduation, and pay a percentage of your first year’s salary. This was interesting because now the school really needs students to succeed in the job market after graduation, otherwise they won’t get paid. So that took part of my second concern: With this model, the incentives of the school and the student align.
About my first concern, what they could possibly teach me in such a short time? Well, as it turns out, a lot. I had some decent prior coding experience, but nowhere near as much as they managed to cram into my skull in three months. Crucially, there is something else I learned, and that is how fast one can pick up new languages and frameworks. This is a skill that came in handy shorly after, when I started working as a developer for an Ivy League research university - but that is a story for another day.
The story of my education is not over, though. I’ve decided to go even further and enrolled at Georgia Tech for a Master’s degree in computer science. Judging from the sheer amount of material that program contains, this will be an even bigger challenge than App Academy was. Let’s see how it goes!
Welcome to my website! My name is Maurice, and I am a software developer living in New Jersey. You can find more information about me here. I also own an indie game studio, which you can find here.
This site is where I capture personal observations and thoughts regarding technology, cooking, and everything else that comes to mind.
So, thanks for stopping by - enjoy your stay!