Watch Gameview’s Riz Virk Defend Tap Fish on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show
Update: Virk posted a rebuttal to the segment here.
Gameview Studios co-founder Riz Virk was brave enough to take an interview from Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show about his game Tap Fish, which has been the top-grossing game on Android through the fall. According to the segment, Gameview, which was acquired by DeNA last year, is making $1 million a month.
Unsurprisingly, Mandvi goes straight for the jugular, ribbing the company for in-app purchases that sometimes result in unexpectedly high credit card bills for parents who give their children their iTunes passwords.
Mandvi asks, “You provide a product. The first one is free and then as they get more accustomed to your product, the price rises.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re a drug dealer?”
“No… we’re not a drug dealer. We’ve had many parents e-mail us telling us this game is teaching their kids responsibility.”
Right after that, Mandvi puts Virk on with an angry parent who berates the company. However, the show leaves out the part about how the parent was refunded. On top of that, developers usually have to pay their 30 percent revenue share to Apple even if the full amount is refunded to the customer. So unintentional purchases of virtual currency sometimes end up costing developers, not parents, if they push for refunds from Apple.
December 10th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
[...] too surprisingly, Gameview Studios’ co-founder Riz Virk was not too happy with his portrayal on The Daily Show this week. Aasif Mandvi interviewed him on a segment that aired on Thursday night and criticized the freemium [...]
December 11th, 2011 at 12:38 pm
[...] Watch Gameview’s Riz Virk Defend Tap Fish on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show [...]
December 11th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
[...] Watch Gameview’s Riz Virk Defend Tap Fish on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show [...]
December 23rd, 2011 at 8:22 am
[...] and has remained firmly ensconced in the #2 spot since November. While the game has attracted some heat for its free-to-play model, it hasn’t detracted from the game’s popularity or profitability, as [...]
February 2nd, 2012 at 2:32 pm
[...] 2010 for an undisclosed sum. Gameview’s best-known game is Tap Fish, which makes more than $1 million a month in revenue and is currently the top grossing app in the Android market. Virk recently did a spot on The [...]