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2009 was a weird time for the App Store. Free to play games were building steam on other platforms, but the way Apple originally structured the in app purchase mechanic prevented it from being used on anything but paid games and apps. This policy was reversed in mid-October, and only a few hours later ngmoco announced that their (then) upcoming online first person shooter Eliminate would be free.

The game was released a few weeks later, and we posted an extensive guide on it. In a nutshell, Eliminate was a four person first person shooter with a free to play twist. In order to earn credits to buy armor and weapon upgrades, players needed to use their energy supplies. Energy depleted as you played, and, obviously, an in-game store sold all the energy that players could ever need if they didn’t wait to wait to recharge.

Being among the first free to play games available, and actually being the first gamer-centric freemium game on the App Store, Eliminate seemed to spawn a massive community of players overnight. In fact, the Eliminate thread on our forums is still amongst the most popular TouchArcade threads of all time, running closely behind the Street Fighter IV Volt thread and the Pocket Frogs trading thread.

A TouchArcade reader sent a tip in over the weekend that not only had Eliminate been pulled from the App Store, but launching the game now results in the above popup. On May 25th, 2012, Eliminate is going offline. It’s sad to see not only this game, but also ngmoco as a company coming full circle. We’ve been covering ngmoco since their inception, as it seemed to many (myself included) that they were the most promising contender to be the premiere iOS-exclusive game developer.

In early 2010 the company then picked up some additional financial steam and bought Freeverse, which was yet another incredibly promising iOS developer that has since vanished. Later that year, Japanese social gaming giant rolled ngmoco up into their proverbial katamari at the potential price of $400m… Then things started to take a slide.

The Epic Wars series of games were the first projects to be shut down by ngmoco, leaving faithful players (who potentially invested heavily into the game) in the cold. News of games releases, or really, any activity from the company dried up until earlier this year we heard the company was hit with layoffs. Inside Mobile Games even suggested that they missed the financial targets of the $400m buyout, putting the bulk of that purchase price in jeopardy.

If nothing else, the shut down of Eliminate is yet another reminder that the money you spend on these server-centric free to play title is buying you things that only persist as long as the developers keep the game online. If you’ve dumped cash into Eliminate, be sure to get your money’s worth playing the game before it goes offline next month.

Thanks Payam!

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This week on The TouchArcade Show, the crew powers through mini-discussions about KoRn and mysterious sodas with pumas emblazoned on the can to bring you the latest, hottest, and best in iOS news and commentary. At the top, we dig into Pizza vs. Skeletons for the final time, discuss Hero Academy’s sign-up system, and crack into games like Ragdoll Blaster 3 and Dodonpachi Blissful Death.

Later, in our news section, we sound off on several juicy topics including the release and subsequent broken-ness of Battlefield 3: Aftershock and Double Fine’s Kickstarter.

If you’d like to listen in, go ahead and do so via the links below. Additionally, you could subscribe to us on iTunes and Zune and get our episodes the second they hit the Internet for your consumption. All the cool kids do it.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-038.mp3, 39MB

Here’s your show notes:

GAMES

• Pizza vs. Skeletons
• Ragdoll Blaster 3 [$.99 / HD]
• Hero Academy [Free]
• Dondonpachi Blissful Death [$4.99]
• Dariusburst SP [$10.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Pussy Malone And the Cow Snatchers From Space [Free]

NEWS

• Ngmoco Hit With Layoffs
• Epic Issues Indie Game Dev Challenge to Remake ‘Fighting Fantasy’ Books in the Unreal Engine
• Double Fine Asks For Kickstarter Support On New Game, Totally Gets It
• ‘Battlefield 3: Aftershock’ Hits the US App Store for Free
• ‘Mass Effect Infiltrator’ and iPad Companion App Announced

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We’ve been covering the existence of ngmoco since the very beginning in mid-2008, back before they dropped the extra colon from their logo even. A month later, we were on top of their initial round of funding, and with the launch of nglabs and other amazing future promises, quite a few people (myself included) thought ngmoco was going to become the unquestionable king of iOS game development.

It’s been a long four years since then, and while we once knew ngmoco for releasing absolutely classic must-have games like Rolando [99¢], Rolando 2 [99¢], and Star Defense [99¢], they switched gears to championing the free to play game market in a major way in late 2009. We were blown away when it was announced that Eliminate [Free] was going to be free, and We Rule [Free] was equally popular around here as ngmoco made a splash on the App Store with one of the first available free to play Farmville-like building games.

Since that original free to play explosion in 2009, Ngmoco hasn’t done very much to interest our community. They’ve seemingly stopped both publishing and releasing games, with the last major release that made much of a splash around here being Godfinger [Free], another free to play building game which hit the App Store in late 2010. Even more confusing is what in the world ngmoco has been doing with Freverse, the beloved former Mac developer, since they were acquired.

With Freeverse onboard, ngmoco’s proverbial financial katamari was large enough to lure Asian gaming giant DeNA was acquiring ngmoco for $400m, and since then it seems they’ve fallen even further off the map. Not even people familiar with the situation have been able to explain what ngmoco has been up to in the last two years aside from pushing hard into the Android world with questionable success utilizing their cross-platform game engine Mobage (which is pronounced MOH-bah-GAY, if you were curious).

Throughout all of this, it seems that ngmoco has been hiring all sorts of people, and still are, if their positions page is any indication. Sadly, TechCrunch is reporting layoffs at the former iOS gaming giant:

Ngmoco recently had a round of layoffs — maybe somewhere above 30 people, according to one source. The number isn’t huge, but among the departed are senior leaders including a director of platform tech and the chief marketing officer, this person tells me. One game has apparently been shut down, while another has been pared down, with some engineers remaining to see it to launch.

Ngmoco CEO Neil Young was quick to respond, making it sound as if they layoffs are a result of Ngmoco and DeNA merging, eliminating any duplicate positions leftover from the restructuring process:

“Armed with the insights we’ve gained from both the Western and Japanese markets and after completing the integration of a series of key acquisitions, we’ve organized our global operations to best support and deliver on our mission to build the leading Global Social Mobile Game Platform company.”

To add another interesting wrinkle to the potential fate of Ngmoco, Inside Mobile Apps is reporting that Ngmoco has missed their first earnout date, putting a large portion of that $400m acquisition amount in jeopardy if ngmoco (assuming this report is true) has been unable to meet the agreed upon performance milestones.

It’s hard to say what this all means for the future of ngmoco, but as a fan of all of ngmoco’s pre-freemium titles, it really saddens me to look on what the company used to be (and the promise they represented to iOS games) and what they are today. The weird thing about all this to me is that ngmoco championed the free to play model, then sort of just disappeared to build mobage while other developers went on to become overnight millionaires utilizing it.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what, if anything, they do next.

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If you've got a first, second, or even 8GB third generation iPod touch, an O.G. iPhone or an iPhone 3G, it might be time to think about upgrading. Aside from missing out on a heck of a lot of cool games that require more recent hardware, quite a few developers seem to be dropping support of their older devices as Apple no longer provides iOS updates.

Freemium powerhouse ngmoco announced this afternoon that as of We Rule [Free] version 1.6, older devices will no longer be supported. Ngmoco, like many other developers who have made this decision to abandon older devices explains that in order to move the game forward they need to free themselves of the constraints of these older devices.

An interesting statistic comes out of this though, in that according to a blog post of theirs, only 5% of their player base actually uses these ancient devices. What do you do if you're in this 5% and you want to keep ruling over your game of We Rule? Well, even older iOS devices still fetch a decent amount of money on Craigslist and Ebay, and Apple offers refurbs on the cheap.

Alternatively, it might not be that bad of an idea to just wait until what the rumored September iPod/iPhone event has in store for us before upgrading. Like most yearly iterations, the 5th generation iPod touch likely will cost just as much as the current 4th generation iPod touch does now. Otherwise, if you're still one of the people who is playing We Rule, hold off on updating if you're still on older hardware.

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After being an Android exclusive for half a year, Pachinko Frenzy [Free], the latest from ngmoco, has arrived on iOS hoping to whet the appetite of Pachinko addicts everywhere. While that itch is certainly scratched with this game, Pachinko Frenzy’s freemium underpinnings unfortunately detract from the overall gameplay to the point where only the most hardcore of Pachinko fans will continue to play the game for longer than a few sessions.

For those unfamiliar with the early 20th century Japanese gaming device, we gave a good explanation of it in our review of the 2009 Pachinko [$0.99] iOS game. Essentially, small metal spheres are launched into the Pachinko machine with the goal of hitting as many stationary pins as possible, racking up points and generating more balls. Pachinko Frenzy takes this further by incorporating mini-games that can be earned when every pin on the board is lit up.

Mini-games range from trying to keep a single ball live for as long as possible, to trying to hit as many consecutive pins on one ball, and more. Do well in these mini-games and prizes can be earned, including collective trophies that can unlock new boards when enough of them are collected. Overall, Pachinko Frenzy does a good job emulating a standard Pachinko board, assuming you aren’t put off by the excessive anime motif. Just make sure that you have the latest generation of iOS devices, as Pachinko Frenzy isn’t compatible with anything earlier (and does occasionally slow down on the iPhone 4, no less).

Where the game starts to falter, unfortunately, is in its freemium implementation. The game starts out with only one board unlocked, and you can only unlock additional boards by “selling” 1000 balls or by collecting all the trophies associated with a locked board. Acquiring 1000 balls appears to be an exercise in futility, as you start out with 50, and it’s extremely slow going trying to earn more than that (unless you’re some kind of Pachinko Savant). The developers predicted this, and included the option to purchase additional balls as IAP, but as of this writing, IAP hasn’t been implemented yet. This leads to trophy collection as the only other alternative to unlocking the additional boards, which is definitely possible but would take an extremely long time. Odds are most players would probably lose interest in the one board before any additional ones could be unlocked.

One of the goals of Pachinko is to feed the addiction of possible reward by playing a game based mostly on random chance. If you’re looking for a time-waster that accomplishes that, or you’re a fan of Pachinko, you can’t go wrong with Pachinko Frenzy. However, don’t think you’re going to be unlocking new boards any time soon, unless you put in a good deal of time or money (once IAP goes live).

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One of my favorite things about the App Store is because of how fast it moves, you never have to wait too long to see trends forming. Thinking back on it, the entire existence of the iPhone is little more than a flash in the world of technology, even though its release back in 2007 (and the launch of the App Store in 2008) feels like ancient history now. A number of things have changed over the short life of iOS devices, but I think the change that had the largest effect on App Store was Apple shifting gears to allow the free to play market to take hold.

When Steve Jobs initially announced the in-app purchase system, he made sure to emphasize that only paid apps would be allowed to use it. Or, as he put it, "free apps remain free." Apple doesn't often change their tune, but they did in a big way on October 15th of 2009 when they opened the free to play flood gates. Moments later, ngmoco announced that Eliminate would be free, officially kicking off the free to play revolution on the App Store and energizing an incredibly vocal minority who were sure that this would be the death knell of iOS gaming in one fell swoop.

Since Apple rarely reveals statistics on both the sales of iOS devices and the number of apps downloaded (200 million device sales and 15 billion downloads, per last count.) if you want to delve any deeper than that you need to get third party analytics firms involved. Flurry is one (of many) of these companies, and they've currently got their analytics package installed in over 90,000 different apps spread across over 40,000 different companies. This gives them a massive bucket of data to run all kinds of different reports which they throw up on their blog from time to time.

The latest out of Flurry is that free to play games are responsible for 65% of the revenue in the top 100 grossing list, compared to only 39% earlier this year. If you're the kind of person who would rather see this data in chart form, well, you're in luck:

Now, I'm sure there are skeptics out there that right now are thinking to themselves, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. The top grossing lists go to 200. These numbers are skewed in favor of free to play by chopping off the bottom half of the list!" I followed that path of logic too, since it can often be easy to manipulate statistics to promote an agenda of sorts. However, after speaking to several developers with games all over the top 200, it seems that in calculations like this positions 100 to 200 (and beyond) aren't worth that much consideration because of the extreme bell curve of the top grossing lists making #200 essentially insignificant compared to #1.

What does this mean for iOS gamers? Well, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while now that free to play is taking over the App Store. It's not a hard decision for developers to make either when laying out plans for future games either. With a 99¢ paid game, your profits are completely tied to your chart positioning and your options are incredibly limited for promotion, often relying entirely on making your game free and crossing your fingers for a surge of sales when the sale is over. Comparatively, there's all sorts of neat tricks to make money from a free game, even with horrid chart position.

Thankfully, even though Zynga put the original bad free to play taste in everyone's mouth with Farmville on Facebook and many developers followed suit with similar iOS games that centralized around time sinks and pay walls, there is light at the end of the tunnel. On the Mac/PC side of things, games like League of Legends and recently Team Fortress 2 have been providing some fantastic "core-gamer" experiences while being totally free. I'm sure eventually games like these will filter down to mobile devices, as it's basically impossible to argue against the financial incentive being there through a massive customer base eager to download (and optionally pay for) free to play games.

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On this week’s TAS, the Brad, Eli, and Jared discuss conspiracies, the sudden explosion of promising titles on the App Store, popes, and for the first time ever, answer Nintendo Hot Line e-mails that somehow, someway ended up in our own Tips Line inbox.

Ready for over an hour of hot and steamy entertainment? Great! You can catch us on the iTunes Music Store for Music or the Zune Marketplace or if you’re a streamer, you can grab the latest episode just below. Don’t forget to rate us on the iTunes (and tell us your favorite monster movie in the review; I think we all agree that "Swamp Thing" was the best, EVER.)

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-005.mp3, 47.6MB

And now for the show notes:

GAMES:

FRONT PAGE:

SPECIAL NOTE:

Thanks for continuing to listen and supporting us, guys. We all really appreciate it. Without you, we would be NOTHING.

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Ben Cousins, the former general manager at EA Easy Studios who oversaw the creation of Battlefield Play 4 Free, has landed a new job in a similar field. It’s been revealed that Cousins is now working with ngmoco and forming a new studio in Sweden focused on delivering F2P games on mobile platforms.

Chock it up to “studio infancy” syndrome, but ngmoco isn’t divulging any specifics on what Cousins will be cooking up. We’re simply being told that he’ll lead the studio and drop games on Mobage courtesy of DeNA, the Japanese studio who bought ngmoco for an obscene amount of money earlier last year.

“The games industry is at an inflection point,” Cousins said in a statement. “These platforms are bringing hundreds of millions of new gamers into the fold, and at the same time existing core gamers are discovering the innovation, immersion and connectivity they bring. I’m excited to participate in helping shape what we believe is the future of games.”

It’s easy enough to speculate that Cousins will be making more core gamer-focused F2P games, which seems like a smart move considering the growth in this sector. We’ve got all sorts of “core” F2P games — League of Legends is a leading example — and it seems as though they’re continuing to fair well post-release.

It bears noting that Cousins was also a creative lead at EA DICE, so he’s got some decent ‘core’ game experience under his belt, namely with (proper) Battlefield games.

If anything, dude is going to be making F2P games. That much is plain. I just wonder if we’ll see more bullets instead of farms from ngmoco Sweden.

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Remember back when Freeverse used to make traditional games instead of freemium titles? The ngmoco acquisition and the shift to free to play almost seems like ancient history with how fast the App Store moves, but Warpgate [Free / HD] was one of the final gamer games released by the studio. How long ago did Warpgate come out? Well, our review is centralized around it being an original iPad launch title. See, I told you, ancient.

Warpgate is a space trading game, and a damn fine one at that. There's tons of content to delve through, and the dynamic in-game economy is something that can basically keep you busy for eternity if you get immersed in it. In addition, there are 35 star systems to explore, 172 different ships, and over 100 main quests. It's also had graphical updates since the initial release to add antialiasing, making Warpgate look even better than before.

Be sure to snag Warpgate and/or Warpgate HD while it's free. It's not for everyone, but if it gets your hooks in you, you can dump hours into the game without even realizing it.

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At some point early this morning, Gameloft released their MMORPG Order & Chaos Online on to the Canadian App Store, which seems to be standard operating procedure for a wide-scale "beta" of sorts. Ngmoco and other similar developers all have used the Canadian market to test out how their servers are running and how the game is performing, so it isn't out of the ordinary by any stretch of the imagination to see Gameloft doing something similar.

I've downloaded the game and put around an hour of playtime into it so far, and in the process discovered quite a few of the things we were wondering from the trailers Gameloft previously released. First off, the game isn't freemium which may be a relief for some. It's launching at $6.99, which includes three months worth of subscription to the game. Following that, you can subscribe for a single month for 99¢, three months for $1.99, or six months for $2.99.

There are four playable races. Humans and elves are on the "order" side, and orcs and undead are on the "chaos" side. These races look remarkably similar to World of Warcraft, and as of right now four basic classes are included: Warriors, mages, monks, and rangers. Each class also seems to have two talent trees to invest points in. For instance, my ranger can specialize in being an "archer" or an "assassin".

In the hour I've played I've barely scratched the surface of the game, and most of my time has been spent completing basic kill quests and running around trying to get my bearings. One thing that's very nice about Order & Chaos is that there's an arrow you can enable or disable to always point you in the direction you need to go for the next quest, and a great map system hasn't allowed me to get lost anywhere.

Order & Chaos also features two different types of IAP. Runes can be purchased in differently sized packs and then spent on things like vanity pets and what appear to be high-end crafting items or enchantments. Gold can also be bought, but according to the Order & Chaos thread in our forums it can also be earned in game. So far the only thing I've come across that specifically requires a gold piece is increasing the size of my inventory.

As mentioned, I'm only around an hour into the game so far and it isn't immediately apparent how much any of these IAP items are needed. Every quest rewards money, although I'm far too low level right now to see if that money does in fact add up to the same gold pieces you can buy. I'm going to keep at it though, and will update this story as I hit any walls that require IAP.

All in all, Order & Chaos seems like the real deal, it's a great effort by Gameloft and a surprisingly accurate, although substantially toned down, clone of World of Warcraft. I'm curious to see how the whole order and chaos factions eventually play in, as I was able to create two characters on different factions on the same server. The terms of use does have all kinds of provisions for player vs player combat, I just haven't found it yet.

Anyway, if you're a Canadian or a "Canadian," give Order & Chaos a shot. I'm fairly impressed so far, although I wish it worked over 3G. Requiring WiFi is a drag, especially since my iPad tethered via 3G seems to work flawlessly while playing the game. If you're creating characters, do so on the Arcadian Forest server, that way we can all play together.

And of course, we have no word when this game will actually see an international release. Historically though, when developers release things in Canada they're just doing final testing to make sure their infrastructure is working. We could see Order & Chaos Online is the rest of the world as early as this Thursday.

Canadian App Store Link: Order & Chaos Online, $6.99]

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