Earlier today, Lee Hajin announced her collaboration on a new Tsumego app on Reddit. The main distinguishing feature over the stable of other such apps appears to be its "gamification" mechanics, which are of the kind usually associated with freemium games like Candy Crush. Namely, you get a certain number of "tickets" every hour which are required to play a set, and you can purchase more tickets (or various powerups to get things like time extensions or move hints) as in-app purchases. You also get tickets as a reward for completing a problem set correctly.
This type of monetization scheme is a hot-button topic for a lot of people, and the Reddit thread seems almost unanimously against it. I'm curious if the community here will have the same reaction.
Having done a few rounds myself (basically enough to exhaust the initial daily supply of free stuff), my first impressions are:
- Surprisingly, I really like the aesthetics of the board. I normally find 3D boards to be a gimmick, but this one has just the right amount of perspective and cel-shaded graphics on the stones to make it really endearing. I also feel that it matches real-world pattern-matching a bit better than flat diagrams.Attachment:File comment: BadukPop screenshot
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- I personally don't really mind the monetization scheme. The free tier matches my usual rate of consumption for problems anyway (a couple of sets a day while on the train), and if the psychological tricks supposedly at play really are effective (which I doubt), they're tricking me into developing a good habit anyway, so I don't really care.
- It's hard to judge after only a handful of sets, but to me the problems seem of above-average quality in terms of aesthetics, difficulty, and realistic-ness. I also don't recall having seen any duplicates from the usual collections. Hajin never explicitly says so in her post, but presumably she had some role in generating and/or curating these problems, and hopefully that continues. That would go a long way towards justifying the monetization scheme, to me.