Microtransactions (sometimes abbreviated as MTX) are a business model where users can purchase virtual goods via micropayments. Microtransactions are often used in free-to-play games to provide a revenue source for the developers. While microtransactions are a staple of the mobile app market, they are also seen on PC software such as Valve Corporation’s Steam digital distribution platform, as well as console gaming.
Free-to-play games that include a microtransaction model are sometimes referred to as “freemium”. Another term, “pay-to-win,” is sometimes used derogatorily to refer to games where buying items in-game can give a player advantage over others, particularly if the items cannot be obtained by free means. The objective with a free-to-play microtransaction model is to involve more players in the game by providing desirable items or features that players can purchase if they lack the skill or available time to earn these through game-play. Also, presumably the game developer’s marketing strategy is that in the long term, the profits from a microtransaction system will outweigh the profits from a one-time-purchase game.
Loot boxes are an increasingly growing form of microtransactions. Through purchasing a loot box, the player acquires a seemingly random assortment of items. Loot boxes are mostly used on PC and console games. The concept behind loot boxes is that, despite gaining more items for a given price, the player may not want those items, and can end up buying the same item multiple times. Instead of a one-time purchase for the desired item, users may have to buy multiple boxes. This method has also been called a form of underage gambling.
Items and features available by microtransaction can range from cosmetic (such as decorative character attire) to functional (such as weapons and items). Some games allow players to purchase items that can be acquired through normal means, but some games include items that can only be obtained through microtransaction. Some developers ensure that only cosmetic items are available this way to keep gameplay fair and balanced.
Microtransactions are most commonly provided through a custom store interface placed inside the app for which the items are being sold. Apple Inc. provides a framework dubbed “in-app purchases” for initiating and processing transactions. Google’s framework for the same use is referred to as “in-app billing”, named more from the developer’s point of view. Apple and Google both take 30 percent of all revenue generated by microtransactions sold through in-app purchases in their respective app stores. Steam offers support for microtransactions in games on its platform through the Steamworks SDK.
Archive | August, 2018
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Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg ( SHEL-burg; Swedish: [ˈfeːlɪks ²ɕɛlːˌbærj] ( listen); born 24 October 1989), known online as PewDiePie ( PEW-dee-py), is a Swedish YouTube personality and video game commentator, best known for his Let’s Play commentaries and vlogs.
Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, PewDiePie originally pursued a degree in industrial economics and technology management at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. In 2010, during his time at the university, he registered a YouTube account under the name PewDiePie. The following year, he dropped out of Chalmers after losing interest in his degree field, much to the dismay of his parents. After failing to earn an apprenticeship with an advertising agency in Scandinavia, he then decided to focus on creating content for his YouTube channel. In order to fund his videos, PewDiePie began selling prints of his Photoshop art projects and working at a hot dog stand. PewDiePie soon gathered a rapidly increasing online following, and in July 2012, his channel surpassed one million subscribers.
On 15 August 2013, PewDiePie became the most-subscribed user on YouTube, being surpassed for a total of 46 days in late 2013 by YouTube Spotlight. Holding the position since 22 December 2013, the channel has 65 million subscribers as of August 2018. From 29 December 2014 to 14 February 2017, PewDiePie’s channel held the distinction of being the most-viewed of all time, and as of June 2018, the channel has received over 18 billion video views.PewDiePie’s most noted YouTube content includes his Let’s Play-styled video game commentaries, particularly of the horror genre. Many of his early videos consisted of him expressively reacting to the frightening elements of horror games, although he shortly broke his focus away from horror and played games of varying genres. While maintaining a focus on video game commentaries, PewDiePie began incorporating comedic vlogs into his content output with an increasing frequency. In the mid-to-late 2010s, PewDiePie began producing formatted vlogs that had a concentration on Internet culture and interactivity with his audience. His content has been praised as genuine and unfiltered, but also received as abrasive, and in some cases, met with controversy. As a result of an early 2017 controversy regarding allegations of anti-Semitism in several of PewDiePie’s videos, Maker Studios—the multi-channel network (MCN) he was signed to—ended their partnership with him, dropping him from their network. While he criticised the coverage of the situation and defended his content as jokes that were taken out of context, he conceded its offensiveness.
The prevailing nickname for PewDiePie’s fanbase is the “Bro Army”. PewDiePie has raised money for charities, encouraging his audience to donate to charity drives. Due to his popularity, PewDiePie’s coverage of indie games has created an Oprah effect, boosting sales for titles he plays. In 2016, Time named him one of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People”. PewDiePie lives in Brighton with his fiancée, Italian YouTube personality Marzia Bisognin.
How to Add 836 Million Potential Readers To Your Website or Blog
English is a very common language, but Mandarin Chinese is even more common – to the tune of 836 million people (or more, depending on which source you use.)
And you might want to consider other languages, too, such as…
Hindi (333 million)
Spanish (332 million)
English (322 million)
Bengali (189 million)
Arabic (186 million)
Russian (170 million)
Portuguese (170 million)
Japanese (125 million)
German (98 million)
French (72 million)
And it gets even more interesting. What percentage of online shoppers speak English? Probably 80-90%, right?
Actually no. So it must be 50-75% then?
You might think so, but no. The answer is just 27% of online shoppers speak English.
Can you see now why you might want to target other languages?
So how do you translate your website into another language? You might use Google Translate http://translate.google.com/translate_tools or any of the translating plug-ins that are available. Of course, these are only machine translations, and your results may vary. Sometimes wildly.
A better course of action is to hire someone off of the freelancing sites who is fluent in English and your language of choice.
Once you’ve got your website translated, you can then offer products in that language, including your own. Naturally you’ll want to get those translated as well.
Be sure to do research into the country you are targeting, just as if you were moving there. Find out what is important to them, what is offensive, who their celebrities are, what slang is commonly used, etc.
If you are really serious about marketing in this new country, you might want to learn the language. No, you don’t need to speak it fluently, you just need to be able to read and write it (easier than speaking.)
Find people you can trust, such as freelancers and even business partners native to that country or region.
And one more thing to consider: Keywords. Unfortunately, keywords don’t necessarily translate well, and so you may want to get some help with this as well for your multi-languange search engine optimization efforts.
Mega Millions (which began as The Big Game in 1996 and renamed, temporarily, to The Big Game Mega Millions six years later) is an American multi-jurisdictional lottery game; it is offered in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The first (The Big Game) Mega Millions drawing was in 2002; see below. (What is now Mega Millions initially was offered in six states; the logo for all versions of the game following the retiring of The Big Game name featured a gold-colored ball with six stars to represent the game’s initial membership.)
Mega Millions is drawn at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday and Friday evenings, including holidays. Mega Millions is administered by a consortium of its 12 original lotteries; the drawings are held at the studios of WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia, supervised by the Georgia Lottery.
Under the current version’s regulations (which began October 28, 2017 with the first drawing October 31) for Mega Millions, the minimum Mega Millions advertised jackpot is $40 million, paid in 30 graduated yearly installments, increasing 5 percent each year (unless the cash option is chosen; see below for differences by lotteries on cash/annuity choice regulations.) The jackpot increases when there is no top-prize winner (see below for information on how the Mega Millions jackpot is funded.) As of December 13, 2017, there has yet to be a jackpot winner under the current Mega Millions format, including wagers for the newly created Just the Jackpot option.
Reflecting common practice among American lotteries, the jackpot is advertised as a nominal value of annual installments. A cash value option (the usual choice), when chosen by a jackpot winner, pays the approximate present value of the installments. Mega Millions’ previous format began on October 19, 2013; its first drawing was three days later. The current version of Mega Millions uses a 5/70 (for the white balls) plus 1/25 (for the “Mega Ball”) double matrix to select its winning numbers.
Each game costs $2. Of the 46 Mega Millions jurisdictions, all but California offer an option, called Megaplier (plays with the Megaplier are $3 each) where non-jackpot prizes are multiplied by 2, 3, 4, or 5. The Megaplier was made available to all Mega Millions jurisdictions in January 2011; it began as an option available only in Texas.
The October 28, 2017 Mega Millions’ format change resulted in the game’s first price increase: plays are $2 each ($3 with the Megaplier; up from $1 and $2 respectively); as part of the format change, the “Just the Jackpot” option was introduced to seven of the game’s members. The new option is two plays for $3; only the jackpot can be won (or shared) on this wager.The largest jackpot in Mega Millions history was $656 million annuity value (with a cash option of $474 million) for the March 30, 2012 drawing, in which there were three jackpot-winning tickets; one each in Illinois, Kansas, and Maryland. All three tickets had been claimed by April 18, with each set of winners choosing the cash option of $158 million.
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MSN (stylized as msn) is an online website and related assortment of Internet services and programs for Glass windows and cellular devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, the same release particular date as Home windows 95.The Microsoft Network was in the beginning a subscription-based dial-up online service that later became a web company known as MSN Dial-up. At exactly the same time, the business launched a fresh web portal called Microsoft Internet Start and establish it as the first default website of WEB BROWSER, its browser. In 1998, Microsoft renamed and transferred this web site to the website name MSN.com, where it offers remained.Furthermore to its original MSN Dial-up service, Microsoft has used the ‘MSN’ brand for a multitude of products and services over time, notably Hotmail (later View.com), Messenger (that was once associated with ‘MSN’ in Internet slang and has been substituted by Skype), and its own web internet search engine, which is currently Bing, and many other rebranded and discontinued services.
The existing website and collection of applications proposed by MSN was initially unveiled by Microsoft in 2014 within a total redesign and relaunch. MSN is situated in america and will be offering international types of its portal for a large number of countries about the world.
TD Ameritrade is a brokerage firm based in Omaha, Nebraska with a major trading center in St Louis, Missouri. The letters TD are derived from Toronto-Dominion Bank, the largest shareholder. The company provides services for individuals and institutions that are investing online. The company offers an electronic trading platform for the purchase and sale of financial securities including common stocks, preferred stocks, futures contracts, exchange-traded funds, options, mutual funds, and fixed income investments. It also provides margin lending, and cash management services.
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WeChat (Chinese: 微信; pinyin: Wēixìn; literally: “micro-message”) is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. It was first released in 2011, and by 2018 it was one of the world’s largest standalone mobile apps by monthly active users, with over 1 billion monthly active users (902 million daily active users). Described as one of the world’s most powerful apps by Forbes, it is also known as China’s “app for everything” and a “super app” because of its wide range of functions and platforms. In addition to China, it is also the most popular messaging app in Bhutan.WeChat has been accused of censoring politically important topics in China, including human rights abuses.In the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, Charlie Munger identified WeChat as one of the few potential competitors to Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
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The Money Store is the debut studio album by the group Death Grips. It was officially released on April 24, 2012, but was leaked to YouTube on April 14 and made available on vinyl on April 21 to celebrate Record Store Day. It was announced along with a second album, which would be titled No Love Deep Web. It is the follow-up to their debut mixtape Exmilitary.
Motorola Mobility (or simply just Motorola) is an American consumer electronics and telecommunications company based out of Chicago, Illinois, that was founded in 2011. Motorola Mobility is currently owned by Lenovo after being purchased from Google in 2014. Motorola Mobility was formed after the split of the original Motorola on January 4, 2011. The split was structured so that Motorola Mobility took on the company’s consumer-oriented product lines, including its mobile phone business and its cable modems and set-top boxes for digital cable and satellite television services, while Motorola Solutions retained the company’s enterprise-oriented product lines.
The company primarily manufactures smartphones and other mobile devices running the Android operating system developed by Google. In August 2011, only seven months after the split, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for US $12.5 billion with the intent to gain control of Motorola Mobility’s portfolio of patents so that it could adequately protect other Android vendors from lawsuits, the deal closed in May 2012. Shortly after Google sold Motorola Mobility’s cable modem and set-top box business to Arris Group. Under Google ownership, Motorola Mobility began an increased focus on the entry-level smartphone market, and under the ATAP division began development on Project Ara, a platform for modular smartphones with interchangeable components.
Google’s ownership of the company was short-lived. In January 2014, Google announced that it would sell most of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, a Chinese technology company, for $2.91 billion. The sale, which excluded all but 2,000 of Motorola’s patents and ATAP, its team-based division who worked on Ara, was completed on October 30, 2014. Lenovo disclosed an intent to use Motorola Mobility as a way to expand into the United States smartphone market.
In January 2016, following the August 2015 merger of Lenovo’s existing smartphone business with Motorola Mobility, it was announced that the company would begin to phase out “Motorola” as a public-facing brand, replacing it with the “Moto” brand used on most of its recent devices, and Lenovo’s “Vibe” brand. However, Motorola later clarified that the brand will continue to be used, but marketing will focus on its “Moto” and “Vibe” brands, whereas the Motorola full brand name will appear on packaging and its brand licensees. In November 2016, it was announced that Lenovo would stop releasing smartphones under its own name and the Vibe brand, and that all future smartphones would only carry the “Moto” brand and the Motorola logo.
In March 2017, the company stated that it would no longer stray away from the Motorola name, scrapping the “Moto by Lenovo” moniker to preserve the company’s legacy.
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Venmo is a mobile payment service owned by PayPal. It allows users to transfer money to others using the service using a mobile phone app; both the sender and receiver have to live the U.S. It handled $12 billion in transactions in the first quarter of 2018.Cash transfers using Venmo are not instantaneous and can be canceled after an initial transfer is sent. The transfers can take one to three business days to become final. The Better Business Bureau has reported that some scammers exploit the cancellation period to appear to pay, but ultimately avoid paying for an item.
