Consumable IAPs - data lost if player uninstalls game?

DigiChainDigiChain Member, PRO Posts: 1,277

I've not used consumable iaps before but plan to in my next game (player will be able to purchase gold coins to spend in game), but was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to retrieve consumable purchases if the app is uninstalled/reinstalled by the player?

I'm guessing there's no way we can do this - i.e. retrieve the amount of gold a player had before uninstalling, or the things the player had previously unlocked with the consumable iap currency?

Anyone have experience with this? Or had issues with unhappy gamers when all their data / iap consumable purchases were lost??

Comments

  • SummationSummation Member, PRO Posts: 476

    @DigiChain said:
    I've not used consumable iaps before but plan to in my next game (player will be able to purchase gold coins to spend in game), but was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to retrieve consumable purchases if the app is uninstalled/reinstalled by the player?

    I'm guessing there's no way we can do this - i.e. retrieve the amount of gold a player had before uninstalling, or the things the player had previously unlocked with the consumable iap currency?

    Anyone have experience with this? Or had issues with unhappy gamers when all their data / iap consumable purchases were lost??

    If there was a way to retrieve saved games from cloud storage then maybe, but other than that I'm not sure.

  • MarcMySaladMarcMySalad Member Posts: 158

    It can probably be done if you store the coin info on your own server and validate against that but it would be very complex to setup and I don't know of anyone that has succeeded in doing that.

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,327
    edited May 2015

    @MarcMySalad is probably right about consumables, but I had a client who asked for a similar problem to be solved in a fairly novel way. He wanted to have a remove ads option, and that it could be purchased on its own, or would be included with a purchase of consumable currency. Since you can't restore consumables, it would be impossible to tell after an uninstall if someone had bought one. So what he had me do was when someone bought a consumable IAP, we also triggered a separate IAP, a free one, that was non-consumable and disabled the ads. This way if they uninstalled the game and reinstalled it, even though their currency was lost they still got to have the game ad-free. Apple passed it, but I don't know if they actually noticed what we were doing or not.

    I think on the whole though players understand that deleting a game will lose them purchased currency. That said, cloud syncing is becoming more common with games.

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