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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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It’s been a bustling time for acquisition news in the past half a year or so with the popularity and success of mobile gaming rocketing through the roof and mobile gaming companies making moves to put themselves in the best position to ride the wave of continued growth. The big news last fall was developer Ngmoco being purchased by Japanese-based DeNA to the tune of $400 million. Around that same time Chillingo was purchased by EA, later in the year Zynga acquired NewToy, and back in January Firemint acquired fellow Australian developer Infinite Interactive.

All of this activity left everybody wondering what the next big acquisition would be on the mobile scene, and today we learn that the extremely popular mobile social network OpenFeint has been purchased by Japanese company GREE.

OpenFeint has grown by leaps and bounds since first being founded in August of 2008. While it rapidly became the dominant social platform for iOS gaming, it expanded its reach by extending to the Android platform and currently maintains a userbase of more than 75 million players across both mobile operating systems. OpenFeint is used in more than 5000 games and has over 19,000 registered developers, and is the largest mobile social network in the US.

Japanese-based GREE is the leading social platform for mobile in Japan with a userbase of 25,000 players, and is the fastest growing technology company in that country. The two company’s combined user base of 100 million positions them as the largest mobile gaming social network in the world.

Despite the purchase, it appears that OpenFeint will continue to operate much as it always has. The entire OpenFeint team and Founder/CEO Jason Citron (pictured right) will retain their roles with the company, and their plans to open additional offices internationally and double their current staff in 2011 will continue.

This purchase gives GREE a quick entry into the US market with an already established company, and OpenFeint will benefit from GREE’s additional expertise at developing and expanding social gaming platforms. GREE has purchased OpenFeint’s outstanding stock for $104 million, but will contribute additional capital beyond this towards improving and growing the existing OpenFeint service.

There are currently no plans to merge the OpenFeint service with GREE’s to create one uniform service, rather they will tailor each of their products to specific regions. We expect to hear much more about the future plans of OpenFeint post-acquisition and we’ll bring you any new developments as they happen.

Congrats Jason!

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It's starting to look like those of you who guessed that N.O.V.A. Elite was going to be a 100% multiplayer game when it was first announced just might be right, judging by the recently released gameplay trailer. Of course Gameloft could just be focusing on the multiplayer aspect of the game and it could come with a full single player campaign as well, but we'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, give the trailer a look:

What will be very interesting to see is how Gameloft prices this game if it is 100% multiplayer based. They've shown interest in dabbling in free to play games for a while now, and a game like this needs a vibrant online player base to be fun. There's no better way to get a massive pool of player than releasing a game for free. Sure, this is 110% speculation on my part, but you've got to admit it at least makes a little sense given how well ngmoco has done with Eliminate [Free] that Gameloft might try to do the same.

Either way, N.O.V.A. Elite is apparently "coming soon" which in Gameloft-speak could mean as early as next Thursday.

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Vocal members of our community have long since written off ngmoco as a lost freemium cause, leaving us hardcore gamers in the dust as they move on to greener (and more casual) free to play pastures. The Rolando series seemed poised to become the Super Mario of the iOS platform when the original Rolando [99¢] hit in in late 2008. In July of 2009, Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid [99¢] was released, and is better than the original in every way imaginable.

Unfortunately, even though Rolando 3 was announced, poor sales of Rolando 2 combined with the wildly successful freemium-powered Eliminate [Free] seemed to be all ngmoco needed to seemingly give up on the Rolando franchise.

Check out the trailer to see what Rolando 2 is all about:

With a 99¢ price drop and a Retina Display update, I recommend everyone download Rolando 2, and you might as well snag Rolando while you're at it. Put simply, Rolando 2 is a fantastic iOS platformer that intelligently utilizes both touch and tilt to create one of the first "iOS-only experiences." It looks great with the new graphics, and the gameplay still stands on its own today. While we're incredibly excited that some of our favorite games are getting some entirely unexpected Retina Display treatment, it's still dreadfully disappointing that there hasn't yet been (and from where we're sitting likely won't be) a Rolando 3.

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