Apple just decided to quit their own Banner Advertising Service called iAD.

At the same moment allowing Ad-blocking apps to appear in the iTunes store.

Of course that lead to a lot of conversation specially between Indie game developers.

And the question if a free Ad monetised app is still a viable way to go.

A strong side of more established indies kind of seem to like the idea of going back to premium games, pay for the game upfront and no further purchases within the app.

Which I think to be illusive, a pay wall I see as a bad thing specially for us indies.

It will work if you get your premium game featured or already have thousands of waiting fans, but how many of us can count on that?

Of course Games can still be free and sell in-apps just as clash of clans or candy crush do without any additional advertising. But these in-app purchase sales are much less likely to happen for us indies too, specially consumables.

In an indie game you mostly do not have that server structure keeping all the players account data saved, there for buying something consumable that can not be re-gained in case of losing the mobile phone or just mistakenly deleting the app will be not a good selling point for the player.

Ads are enabling the small man to make a living of this craft as it lowered the wall to test out an indie game for a consumer. Allowing to block ads might be nice for apple and the consumer but does hurt the flexibility and opportunity to try out smaller alternative things as an indie developer.

On the other hand you could ad block on google play since „ever“ and my main ad revenue always came from google play. So the impact might not be to much of a big deal at all.