Pro's and Con's of forcing a game update.

I would like to know your thoughts about whether you should "force" a game to be updated?

I am thinking of releasing my next game as a workable basic version of a game ( I know some already do). I would publish the game without any revenue streams, without leader boards, without any thing else you and or I can think of that clutters up development.

If the game gathers traction/interest, downloads, reviews, then release updated version with everything I have left out (or revenue stream at minimum). I would "force" the update by firstly informing at startup that there is a new version on the store. After ~10 days, if the user has not updated, prevent the game from playing.

Pro's

1. Keeps your game updated.
2. Informs players that a bug fix or features are available.
3. Prevent bad reviews due to bug fixes, that you have already fixed.
4. Added features, especially something like leaderboards, will become more relevant (I hated opening one of my games, look at the leader board, only to see 20 entries.

Con's

1. Your game might be deleted.
2. You could get bad reviews from the "nag".
3. The user might just close the app and never play again.

I think its that relevant to the conversation as there are probably many ways to do this, and what I am going to do is use the Unity Analytics Service Remote Settings to hold a date of the version update and app version, then on app startup check if app update date is at least current date + 1 and app version is not the same (I would do this as iOS in particular takes a while for an app update to propagate across servers, so I dont want to indicate to users that there is an update, only for them to check and there is nothing).

Is this something you already do / don't do? What is your reasoning?

 

I think forcing updates is basically required for a multiplayer game. I'm not sold on it for single player though.

Not a Pro from the user perspective. They care that the game works, not that it is a newer version than yesterday.

You could use Remote Settings or contact your own server to tell the player that bug fixes or new features are available without forcing the update anyways though.

You'll still have older reviews with them mentioned if they are that bad

Definitely more people will use new features if players are forced into using them via an update. Is the player launching your game for its leaderboard though? Most likely they want to kill 10 minutes while at the DMV and blow up some tanks, zombies, or whatever your game features.

These are all pretty much just symptoms of the same problem. Mobile players generally want to hop on and off your game whenever they have a few minutes to kill. Often they are out of wifi range, and many people still don't have unlimited data plans. If you're #10 in line at McDonalds and you open the game and it says you need an update, yes you're closing the game and irritated. If you're away from wifi and you don't want to use data or pay to download the update, again you're closing the game. If this happens all the time you're probably never going to bother again.

I actually stopped playing several mobile games for this reason. Every time I opened them there was some new required update. I will tolerate that every once in a while, but mobile games are rarely worth putting up with more than a very small amount of hassle.

 

If you are on any public transport outside the very center of the city, you basically end up rolling into and out of phone service constantly (at least in Australia), so any attempt for force an update will probably just repeatedly fail.

 

"I want to play, I don't want that freaking update now. Get off ...
Rage quit.
I hate this app. Always does updates in worse time ever.
Oh I tell you what, I am going to write mad review ..."

 

Only force update on stuff like MMO, if you have single and multi player make running the latest version a requirement to play online/let player match make only with other people on the same version.

 

Thanks, good explanations from everyone. So multiplayer yes, single player no. If you have update maybe just have Information message at main menu?

 

Exactly, or at the lancher if you have one.

 

I let steam worry about updating our game, all we have done is to only let players play on the same build to avoid versioning conflicts

 

I had assumed this was a mobile platform specific topic, but for Steam I'd agree with you.

 

It was mobile specific. Thanks for the info anyway, something else to put in the vault.

 

Google play probably has similar functions though.