Free-to-play Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Handcircus set to return to iOS with free game based on Okabu

by Mike Schramm (Mar 29th, 2012)

Simon Oliver's Handcircus studio was one of the biggest winners in the early days of the App Store. His game Rolando was originally published by Ngmoco back before the company went completely bonkers with social and free-to-play casual games. After Rolando 2 sort of sputtered out into the ...

Free-to-play overtakes premium games revenue in the App Store

by Mike Schramm (Jul 7th, 2011)

The latest blog post from Flurry reports that free-to-play revenue has overtaken premium revenue in Apple's App Store. I think this was pretty much a guarantee at some point in the future, though it's happening probably a little sooner than most expected. Free-to-play gaming, where a game ...

TUAW's Daily App: Astronut

by Mike Schramm (Nov 23rd, 2010)

You may have already heard about the Iconfactory's new game Astronut, but just in case you haven't, we'll happily be the ones to tell you. From the makers of Ramp Champ and Twitterrific comes a game that's sort of a mashup between Dizzypad, Captain Ludwig and Doodle Jump. You play a little astronaut ...

Ngmoco releases We Farm in the US, celebrates three million We Rulers with free mojo

by Mike Schramm (Aug 5th, 2010)

Ngmoco's free to play strategy is spooling right along -- not only is its We Farm title now available on the US App Store (it arrived late last week after a short beta in Canada), but the company is also celebrating three million We Rule players by awarding everybody 20 free mojo. New players can ...

Hands-on: League of Legends for the Mac

by Mike Schramm (Jun 4th, 2010)

Defense of the Ancients is one of the most interesting stories in all of gaming -- it was originally a player-created mod for the Warcraft III real-time strategy game, and it completely revamped the RTS game into a RPG/hack-and-slash mashup, where the player controlled a champion character that ...

We Rule content update, server fixes incoming

by Mike Schramm (May 3rd, 2010)

Ngmoco CEO Neil Young posted another update last week about We Rule. That game is probably the biggest hit Ngmoco has come across yet with its freemium model, but unfortunately, the title has been plagued with service outages since the release. Young says that they simply underestimated the amount ...

TUAW Interview: Freeverse CEO Ian Lynch Smith on the Ngmoco purchase

by Mike Schramm (Feb 23rd, 2010)

We were all pretty gobsmacked last night with the news that iPhone gaming developer Ngmoco had purchased longtime Mac game developer Freeverse, so we went hunting for answers. Fortunately, Freeverse CEO and founder Ian Lynch Smith was nice enough to sit down and take our questions this morning, and ...

Ngmoco cancels Rolando 3, says it can't fit into a free-to-play model

by Mike Schramm (Feb 18th, 2010)

Here's some unfortunate news out of Ngmoco: The company tells IGN that while there was a Rolando 3 (the second sequel to the very popular and excellent rolling iPhone platformer) in progress, the game has been essentially canceled, and will never see release in its current form. Why? The second ...