We’re happy to announce that we’re releasing a new Ad-supported version of MMA Manager. It’s completely free and available today on both the App Store and Google Play.


What do we mean by Ad-supported?
Pretty straight forward really, like all real sports we’ve added some adverts into the game at key points where we have the player’s attention. And by some, we mean “a few” or “not very much”, we’ve added the following:

• A full screen static interstitial advert before every fight as part of the event opening.
• A video ad lasting at most 30 seconds every 3 game months.

Why are Bit By Bit releasing an ad-supported version?
A few reasons really:

• First and foremost, we’ve had a lot of players that were interested in trying the game, but not used to paying for premium games on mobile ask about it and every one of them we’ve talked to has been happy with the approach we’ve taken with integrating infrequent adverts.
• The fact our player reviews and feedback have been so positive has given us more confidence that players who aren’t necessarily huge MMA fans, but like more general management games would give it a try and enjoy it if they didn’t have to pay for it themselves.
• We think we’ve integrated Ads into the game flow well, with them fitting the feel of the advertising actually shown during sports events. Hopefully, players should agree that it reduces the level of intrusiveness of the advertising compared to most ad-supported games and fits the general feel of a big sponsored sporting event.
• Instead of taking the already released version to be purely ad-supported, we wanted to be able to experiment more without affecting our current players. We’ve had a hugely positive experience interacting with everyone that’s actually played the game & we’re happy to go out of our way to make sure that we don’t screw them over. Our existing players are hugely supportive and have been generally awesome with feedback and suggestions and the last thing we want to do is risk making unwanted changes in the game they’ve already paid for.
• Last, as with most paid games released on the App Store it’s not sold as well as we need it to if we’re going to continue developing it. Hopefully the ad-supported version should help alleviate that and help spread the word about the game.

Does this mean there will be no more updates to the current version?
Absolutely not! They’re based on the same codebase and every new gameplay feature added will be in both versions. The only significant differences between the 2 will be in terms of advertising in thead-supported version, something we’ll be closely monitoring and perhaps changing slightly based on feedback and finding what works and what doesn’t for our players.

We released version 1.2 of MMA Manager for Android on Friday evening, on Saturday morning we were getting emails and Play Store reviews saying people were losing their save games.  This was obviously something to do with the new build so we put 1.1.5 back up there as quickly as we could, and this got people their save games back.  But, there was still something wrong with version 1.2.

The last three days have been dedicated to trying to work out what was causing this issue and then fixing it.  The main issue is we didn’t have access to anyone’s save that had lost it, so we were taking educated guess at what the issue was.  Our first solution was shore up everything in our code to do with save versioning and how things are loaded, as this seemed the most likely candidate.

Unfortunately this was not the issue, this issue comes from the a combination of how Android handles storage and how Unity interacts with it.  The plugin we use for capturing screenshots adds the Read & Write External permissions to the Android Manifest.  As a result of this version 1.2 is installed to a different location than version 1.1.5, and the persistentDataPath in Unity is where the game is installed meaning we couldn’t read the save files from the old location.

We have fixed this and made the loading of save games on Android more robust so this will not happen again.

If you lost your 1.1.5 save and started a new game then you will be offered the chance to load your game from 1.1.5 rather than the new one.  We would advise doing this, especially if you have a lot of time invested in the old save or have purchased IAP.

We’re sorry this happened, and we hope we caught it quickly enough so it didn’t affect too many of you.  We’re new to releasing games on Android and this just completely blindsided us.  Version 1.2.1 will be on the Play Store soon, all the advantages of 1.2 with none of the lost save games.

As usual you can contact us via feedback [at] bitbybitgames [dot] co [dot] uk

We’ve got another positive review!  This time from Zero1Gaming:

http://www.zero1gaming.com/reviews/mma-manager-review/

Another fair and even handed review pointing out that MMA knowledge helps and having Female fighters would be great.  Along with some bits we’re really happy about:

• “being developed by a talented, but small, studio.”
• “MMA Manager is a great management sim to pass time or any train journey or whenever you get a spare moment. It is deep enough to allow you to feel like you are running things without ever being too overwhelming and will keep you entertained for many an hour. A must for any MMA fan.”

To go with this great news, we’ve also submitted our next update to both the AppStore and to Google Play.  We’re hoping for around a 7 day turnaround again for the AppStore and the Google Play version should be available in a couple of hours.

It’s a massive update, here are the main features we’ve added:

• Sharing screenshots via the camera button.
• Fighter stats gradually decay down to 40, if they’re not training in that discipline.
• Happy fighters train more effectively.
• Cross training now takes a little longer and only trains the specific Stat for that gym.
• Your corner gives advice between rounds.
• The Fighter’s info screen now has more complete data. This includes their complete fight history (from this update). Also, the number of times they’ve failed PED tests or missed weight.
• Coach negotiations now only allow 2 attempts to recruit them. Also, coaches will never accept a pay cut.
• Training Dilemmas Changes: Giving your fighter the day off will mean they don’t train this month.
• Gameplan Techniques are now explained better.
• On changing Leagues your Fighter’s new Rank takes their old Rank into account.
• The end of the month will now always show your monthly finances and will show any fights booked for the coming month.
• Miscellaneous fight system improvements.
• Various bug fixes, including a very rare crash and a small issue where you could get stuck in the Objectives screen.

There’s also a whole bunch of small fixes, tweaks and changes under the hood and we hope you enjoy them!