5$ you wish, The price of the game depend on the devs, and if they can't sell it at the way they want, they will just develop for other platform. Xoom is not a 5$ game I do agree that the app going on sale before holyday season suck. From my experience. I bought dead space for 10$- it was a good game , but a day later it goes for 1$. Godfire- was the worst. That's one of the reason for certain devs they will only get my money when there games are on sale. They drop the prices of their games almost every 2 weeks. The other reason I wait for the review of the game to buy it full price or not. God fire for example, people payed 8$ for an incomplete game. " where are the 3 last chapters?"
Not backing the system up, because it is unfortunate that the App Store has become 90% freemium, but I can't blame the developers. If I was to make a game on ios I probably would make it freemium as it gets so much more money. At the end of the day this is a business and you can't expect developers to spend their time and then have their game flop because nobody downloads it, they want to make money and you can't call them greedy because of that. It may not be an entirely customer-friendly business idea, but it's one of the most successful. If you were asked to make a game that sells 1000 copies (getting you £1000) and gets great reviews and the people who play it love it, or you could have a game that gets 1,000,000 downloads and you get hundreds of thousands from IAPs, but the reviews are 50% good 50% bad, which would you choose?
Pretty much have to agree with OP. Although I'm not going to be giving up on iOS gaming. I've got too much money invested into the whole thing to just turn my back on it now. I did start playing World of Warcraft again this past year so that keeps my mind off of the freemium upswing of the App Store.
People are not mad for paying a lot of money for games. If a game have the quality I will pay 100$ for it. What people are mad about is the cash grabs performed by game developers. But what they don't know is there is a lot of game developers out there , and people have a lot of game to choose from. This result in people avoiding them, and never want to spend a dime, because they know at the end of the day they will need to spend more.( causing lost of potential buyers, and a gain into money hacks) If you think it could not get worst from that, read the rest of the story. By loosing money from hackers, and having people less likely to invest into there games, the developers mutated their games to a more aggressive cash grab. Take asphalt 8 for example.
I think Freemuim came from someone making a mediocre premium app and no one buying it, and come up with the idea to give it for free and make purchasing "optional." Of course then comes one of the seven deadly sins- GREED. I remember when developers made sure that every game had an absolute deadline, and pushed the platform to its limits. Now it's whatever makes money, or rather how a competition to see how many whales and casuals can they persuade to spend money on virtual credits to get a little further in the little candy themed version of Bejeweled. King.com had the audacity to try to copyright the words Candy and Saga- Showing how far they really think they can go with this shit. Honestly in a decade from now there'll be one or two premium games per week and like a plethora, a myriad amount of the opposite. I suggest you stay away in the future...
Also, arguably, if you look at popular demand, people want these freemium games. I know most people on here like premium games which are of high quality, but the majority of people who play mobile games want clash of clans and candy crush.
That's an issue here because we have to differentiate between the majority of customers (who seem to prefer free to play) vs traditional gamers. People who are traditional gamers are more frequently the ones who are mad and you know what? Many of us ARE mad at spending money and it's just because psychologically, as heavy users, we much free the 'all you can play' business model much, much more than the average consumer. Logically speaking, if you entered into every new game with the mentality that you're perfectly willing to spend $100 on it, why be mad at all? Pick a game you like and play it to your heart's content! $100 in IAP goes a very long way in a lot of cases. My question is 'what is wrong with cash grabs?'. I think an issue only occurs if ALL games were aggressively monetized and the customer has no options or if we feel like the average customer is incapable of determining how to spend their money. Obviously, if a game is overly aggressive to the point where the game's quality is affected, then this is counter productive to the dev and their bottom line. It's basic economics - a dev can grab all he wants but at the end of the day, they can only sell as much product as there is demand for it. Actually, freemium isn't anything new but it's hardly like people needed to use a method to sell mediocre apps and games. We've had horrible games for DECADES before free to play. Companies have used marketing to convince people to buy crap games, watch crap movies, eat crap food, etc for as long as these things have been around. Traditional games have been using free to play as 'shareware' and pay for play in arcades for decades. What makes freemium work is really that the average consumer LIKES the idea of a no-commitment entry into a game. And many people simply value their money much more than things like time or effort (which is why 90% of people rather play these games than try anything that costs 99 cents). Psychologically, it just makes the decision easier and this is no different from any of us. Greed? Of course. But let's face it - consumers are just as greedy as companies. It's the reason why we demand that games are bigger, longer, better looking etc year after year without increasing the amount we want to pay. 10 hour $60 console games are no longer good enough, for example. We're looking for 30, 40, 60+ hours. We want bang for our buck. Each time we balk at paying for more characters, more episodes, DLC storylines, etc aren't we being just as greedy? And that's because gamers are a minority. The vast majority of people - commuters, moms, bored office workers, young kids etc - they outnumber us gamers like maybe 20:1. The vast majority of people can't or won't appreciate high quality. For example, when's the next time you think you can convince your mom or grandma to enjoy a great RPG or maybe a action adventure game? These people don't need high quality experiences to fill their times any more than you or I need $500 Italian leather shoes no matter how much a person tells you how much they're worth it.
Well, people will just stop gaming on iOS, I would rather play on consoles What's wrong with cash grab? # evil
I will never make a 100$ in app purchase on game credits, and cosmetics. I more greedy than the devs in that sens. No cash grab, no movie, no freemium games. Before buying any game I think a lot, and go through a lot of reviews, so their crapy products will not affect me. And I always get a freemium tactic that will get me through the end of the game without spending money. And if by any chance my favorite game come as a premium, I will just ignore it.
The other issue I have with premium apps is when you buy them and a week later they make it free with IAP and or ads. For example Luxor was a premium app it dropped to 99cents with ads. Or Mushroom wars, buy the premium game and the next thing you know its free and you have to pay for the full version again using the IAP. Deleted this one and refuse to buy anything from this dev again. There are many others too which has done this and it makes you feel bad/ ripped off when it happens. So sales for premium games are likely poor due to customers been burnt multiple times and low customer trust/expectations. So you end up asking yourself "Should I risk buying a premium game and risk getting burnt?"
How many times have you been burnt though ? Just a couple ? Probably 5% ? I buy lots of premium games, only a few times have they then gone to freemium. Frustrating but devs do it so they can survive instead of folding and then we get no updates ever. In say 100 premium apps i've bought only 2 or so have gone freemium (and one reversed - Tabletop racing) If we all hold back from buying premium then there'll be even more freemium apps as devs wont be making money on the premium apps, so that'll be yet more devs going freemium So its a catch 22, you wait to see if a premium game might go freemium, but theres a huge chance it will if we dont buy premium apps !
You just blew my mind. Why indeed release a game for £1, who'd want to do that by choice. That you cannot see how ridiculous that proposition is says more about you than the "greediest" developer. To call developers greedy for thinking their work deserves a higher income than that makes you the most self-entitled, ignorant, greedy person I could possibly imagine. With your passing, I've lost the very slight potential of earning £1 from you in future. Well, goodbye, I think I might be able to take the hit.
Freemium can be done right, and I was disappointed not to see our Combat Monsters listed earlier. But there's no point moaning about this new norm. It's simply the developers reaction to try and earn money in some other way than begging for £1 like a street bum. "Got a pound for a cup of tea, guvnor?". Only it's not £1, it's 53p after Apples cut. If customers were happy to pay reasonable amounts for a game, games would be on sale "in full" for reasonable amounts. You cannot get away from this fact no matter what your feelings are about the current state of play. Developers didn't do this, the marketplace did.
Wow man, you just blew my mind. Either you TOTALLY misread what I said or you didn't read it and assumed. I've paid £5-10-15 for lots of ios games and I've never complained about the price. Way to go dev, trying to twist what I said..
No, I think I got the gist. The max amount you listed was £5 but that puts you in a tiny minority. We tried our premium stuff at $5 and it bombed completely. The same games sold like hot-cakes on steam at twice that. I do apologise for pulling your quotes and appearing personal about it though. By "you" I actually mean any thread I read containing the word "greedy" which is several times a day. More and more developers are looking for a new audience, because the traditional audience doesn't pay the bills. It has nothing to do with greed whatsoever. The target market is no longer the crowd that thinks they should get your new creation in return for 53p. That crowd don't like being marginalised so lash out. I wish there was a crowd prepare to pay $5 for small games and $10 for larger ones, but it's just not there. We don't have any choices.
It would be nice if moblie gamers were willing to pay what gamers on PSN/Steam/XBL are. Like look at say velocity 2X on the PS4. It's a fairly simple shmup with a little bit of platforming, but over all it's not that much deeper a game than some of the better games on iOS. And I Paid $19.99 for it and am very happy with my purchase, and I know that many others are, too, because it's very succsessful. Now, I know it's futile it imagine an alternate situation but I wonder where in the app store's past something went awry and all of the $7-$15 premium EA and Gameloft games that used to flood the App Store in the early day of the first-generation iPad (which is when I started gaming on iOS) slowly faded into the background and became unsupported in favor of new flashy "now FREE!" titles, and what could have been done to stop it.
