I emailed the text below to the TA podcast yesterday. I'm interested to know what the TA forum thinks about this as well " Jared's explanation of Wayward Souls' pricing strategy on last week's podcast was a real eye opener. Upping the price of your game, every time you do a big content update, does not only sound logical, it could also fix the whole 'too many people hold out for new paid games, waiting for a sale-price' thing. If we, as an industry, could come up with a name for that payment model (and NEVER, EVER get tempted by doing a sale), it could lead to way more games buying those game on on release. As that's the cheapest time to do so. But just like F2P, it would need a catchy name. Something that explains that more content will up the price. Maybe the TA community can help? "
Scaling Premium Price Up on Update - PUU pricing Prepaying For Updates - PFU pricing Pay now or pay more - PNPM pricing Version One - v1 or v1.0 pricing Premium Level Over Nine Thousand - PL9K pricing Totally Rad Incrementing Premium - TRIP or T3P pricing F*** Freemium Forever - FFF or 3F pricing
PUU pricing wouldn't work, sounds to much like poo. Military loves catchy (and not so catchy) acronyms. Maybe something like M2P.....more to play, meaning both in price and content.
That sounds more like the episodic ones. You only pay once, but the prices increase for each major update.
Inventive acronyms aside, this is simply reaonsable. I don't expect to get all later seasons of a series for free, just because I bought the season 1 dvd pack. Not to mention I remember the good old days where you actually had to go to a store and buy CDs - or floppies and data tapes if you want to go prehistoric with us old geezers - with expansion packs on them Almost forgot, acronym: OSP - old-school pricing
I only got WS recently, but I wonder if the incremental update system works particularly well on a Roguelike, when a goodly chunk of players won't even get to see any of them. Otherwise, I'm all for Paymium doing whatever it can to seize the reigns from Freem--- Paymoremium.
MC Hammer The "MC Hammer" - Get "hammered" by the price the longer you wait to buy, as "more content" will jack up the price in the long run. The idea is to buy right away.
Ironically Wayward Souls and Mage Gauntlet do not follow this pricing strategy on Android so it's not been entirely consistent. Mage Gauntlet was recently $0.99 on Google Play and is now included along with Wayward Souls in Humble Bundle (get both plus a slew of other games for $8).
That's exactly the model under discussion, though. DVD-style or "Old school" pricing would be more like an up front cost followed by IAPs for the rest. I don't know about an acronym, but I don't think it's particularly unique. I don't really see the different between this and Minecraft or Steam Early Access: pay less money to play the game early and hope the dev makes good on promises to expand it. I've lost count of the number of games where I've paid for something which includes access to "all future content updates", then those content updates never arrive.
Early Bird Pricing. Also seen in event registrations. The faster you are to buy it, the cheaper you get it for.