We released a new update for Drag today, in which we tried to improve the user experience and strengthen the conformity to the Developer Content Policy. In this blog entry we want to provide you with patch notes and some information on why we changed things.

Patch Notes 1.3

• Added new Privacy Policy From now on, Drag has its own GDPR based privacy policy. You can read it here. It will be displayed once at the startup, if you haven’t read it before. You can always reach it in the credits screen where you can also change your consent status to it.
• Banner Ad got replaced by Interstitial Ads The Goolge AdMob banner you had at the bottom on the screen got replaced by interstitial Unity Ad videos. These videos are going to pop up now and then, but will never interrupt your game flow. See Why did we replace the ads? below.
• Added hint purchase box While you are solving puzzles, you can tap on the hint button in the lower left corner to get hints how to solve the current puzzle. Previously, when you were out of hints, the game brought you directly to the job, clearing your current progress on the puzzle. The game now displays a box where you can get free hints or visit the store, resulting in you having the ability to get a hint without destroying your progress so far.

Why did we replace the ads?

At some point last year, Google terminated our contract for AdMob, resulting in the disappearance of the banner altogether. However, since we need to make money with our products, we started to experiment with other third party ad-providers that provided banner ads for mobile games with Unity.

Unfortunately, the tools we tried did not satisfy our needs in privacy and security for you, the player, since we do not want our app to require access to your contacts, the camera or other features that are not directly used by us in the app. In comination to these features, the GDPR consent system provided by the third party tools was interrupting our flow and the app did not even work on our test-devices.

After not being satisfied with other tools, we moved to the ad provider we used already for the free hints system, UnityAds. This ad provider is also the developer of the whole systemt that runs the game, so the integration is easy and not interrupting. In fact, since we already use the system, it was just a few lines of code that needed to be added.

However, UnityAds does not serve banner ads, so we needed to come up with a system to show interstitial (and skippable) video ads that do not interrupt your flow when solving puzzles.

Using the interstitial video ad instead of the banner ad also has another feature that may be of your interest: The game is now completely full screen and will stay that way. This results in less stretching on the content of the game.

How does the new hint system work?

Actually, nothing changed for you. If you are out of hints and try to use a hint, you are able to gain new ones, like you did before. However, whenever you need hints, you are usually already in your puzzle saving flow and do not want your progress to reset at once, when tapping on the hint button.

Because of that, we added a box that will allow you to earn free hints without resetting your current progress. Of course, you still have the option, to recieve hints the old fashioned way, but if you just need a little push, a single free hint during the puzzle may be more helpful than resetting the puzzle to get more.

What are you talking about?

You stumbled on this blog post and don’t know the topic? Welcome! This blog post is dedicated to the free mobile puzzle game Drag. You can get it on GooglePlay and the AppStore.