Kanye Stirs up Twitter Tornado Against In-App Purchases

New York Post

Ah Kanye, ever our lord and saviour. The outspoken rapper, producer and loud-mouth's Twitter feed is an almost ceaselessly entertaining tapestry of rants and raves about damn near anything you could possibly imagine. If it exists, Kanye West has an opinion on it, typically one which he will express in block capitals, with far too much punctuation. In recent days, he's decent to direct his wrath towards to mobile-gaming world, specifically games that contain in-app purchases, and encourage children to make use of them.

We've all known for a while that freemium is the tool of the devil, South Park even did an episode about it, but in typical Kanye fashion, he's coming at it as if the issue has never been raised by anyone other than him. His sudden interest in this seems to have stemmed from an incident involving his own daughter. Judging from the tweets, she had been spending her parents' money on her iPad without even realising she was doing it (or, given her age, having any concept of currency), sending her famous father into a frenzied fury when he got a look at the invoices.

That makes no sense!!! We give the iPad to our child and every 5 minutes there's a new purchase!!!

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) October 10, 2015

This very issue is why when you see an app on the store that doesn't cost anything to download, the 'Free' has been replaced with 'Get', underlined by a little disclaimer reminding you that it contains an option for in-app spending. It's also the reason why Apple settled out of court to the tune of $35.2 million last year, a sum which was sent to around 37,000 angry customers whose kids had made a similar mistake. Clearly this isn't enough the greatest musical genius that ever lived though, and based on how remarkably well his tweets about the issue have been doing, it's not enough for a lot of other people, either.

If a game is made for a 2 year old, just allow them to have fun and give the parents a break for Christ sake.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) October 10, 2015

That's what I would be saying if people were retweeting and responding with messages of support, but it's not quite that simple. There are some people throwing out approving responses like 'preach!', 'ily Kanye', 'Indubitably old chum' and of course, 'please come to Brazil', but equally, perhaps even more so, people have been taking him to task about this. The reasons are two-fold, the first line of criticism is that it's really easy to turn on parental controls to keeping exactly this from happening, but also the fact that his wife has an app which is packed to the gills with in-app purchase options, an issue which she addressed very directly in an interview with Matt Lauer. What did she have to say on the matter? Turn on parental controls.

.@kanyewest Sigh. Some free advice. You can: (1) Turn off in-app purchasing ability. (2) Vet apps to ensure they don't have purchasing...

— clarke (@radicalhearts) October 10, 2015

Putting aside the clear breakdown in communication in the Kardashian/West household, it's still a fair criticism, even if he is a bit late to the party. In-app purchases are pretty much evil, and even with parental controls it's clear there's an impetus on encouraging people, regardless of age, to keep spending to make the game better, when really you're only making it worthwhile. Kanye's little spat likely won't do anything to damage their prevalence, but if he gets more people talking about it, there's at least some benefit.

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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