In the last 3 months, I have totally seen a trend to freemium and inapps. Also price drops or free in less than one month. Kind of getting tired of it. Before I used to buy almost all the games I wanted on day one, and a lot of developers did early adopter sales. Now? You buy a game, and in a week, it is temporary free, and in one month, it is freemium. And early adopters? Get screwed big time. Paid $5 for a game, it will be $1 in a week. I dunno, I got sick and tired of it, so now, it must seems best to get a game after 6 weeks. And inapps, hell yeah, before I read posts by Gabrien, and was impressed by his ability to be an inapp police and raise hell about inapps. Now, I'm almost to a point I'm doing more research to see if a game relies on inapps... And also seeing if a game seems destined to go freemium with huge inapps. But there has also been very graceful conversions to freemium like Major Mayhem. It is important to reward early adopters well with coins, and to make the inapps fun to buy not a chore. Dead trigger seemed like a game destined to go freemium from day one, and I don't think they gave us enough coins as early adopters, but I like the game, so the conversion just went ok. Other games, I have seen recently sell for a high premium price like $5 and in one week go freemium! Way to screw over early adopters, then adding insult to injury they add inapps. Didn't really see this much before, but now it seems to happen quite often. If this happened to me, I would be hella pissed. Anyway, I sure have changed my buying habits lately because of crazy inapps and freemium conversions. I think there will be a huge backlash soon about it. Check out angry birds hd reviews. There are a lot of one star reviews and negative comments just from adding OPTIONAL inapps. Who knows Chillingo might make it freemium too I suppose. Chillingo is adding inapps to every new game nowadays, and it's sad to see. I hope things change. Getting sick of all these freemiums clogging up space on my new ipad. And for some reasons, when developers make freemium games with inapps, they seem to not be concerned about disk space, and make huge files. I don't know if there is a correlation, but I really think soon, I'm just going to delete most of them, and just load them up once in a while to play. Just hope the appstore doesn't get flooded with freemium, inapp required, ad supported, huge disk file, and just eye candy games. I sure hope not.
I will pause and wait for feedback on the game first if i'm paying for it. But 'some' games (I always bring up this example) such as Bullet Time and now Random Heroes, yes there are IAP's but they really arent essential at all. Its more like a 'cheat mode' to get further in the game quickly if you struggle. But when you pay for a game and IF its so difficult you're practically forced to buy IAP's or give up then thats terrible. Freemium was one thing, now having paid games with IAP's (is there a phrase for that ?) is another though. On the other hand 'perhaps' we're turning a corner and freemium might be fading slightly due to more paid games with 'lite' IAP's ?
