Those of you who play the free version of Pirates and Traders, will notice that the new version (2.9.0), has a different form of advertising than the game had originally. Most (around 90%) of the banner ads are gone, freeing up the GUI so that the free version now gets the same UI as the Gold version. The banner ads have instead been replaced by two interstitial ads; one that is shown while the game is loading up its data files, and one that is shown when you end a game. Why is this? P&T has always contained banner ads in – I hope – a fairly non-obtrusive manner. At least, I have never received any serious complaints about these, which leads me to believe that I succeeded in implementing them fairly well. However, they also have a down-side, and one of them is – I believe – that they make the app more memory hungry. I suspect this because the free version of Pirates and Traders suffers from a particular type of crash bug that is almost non-existent in the paid version of the game – and pretty much the only difference that could cause this bug between the two games is the presence of ads in the free version. This is why I reduced the number of banner ads in the last couple of updates, and why the current version now is being tested with almost no banner ads at all (there are still a couple in, but not in parts of the game that is frequently used). The decision to try it this way was given an extra push due to a recent chat with a Google representative, who urged me to try interstitials instead. So here we are. As always, you are welcome to give me feedback either by e-mail or on the facebook pages.
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