Thanks @sobriquet, that was our exact intension. Just to give an impression of a time pressure but not a real timer. Although @CygnetSeven shares the more common opinion that it might be distracting. We'll have to rethink it again Thanks for your input! @8BitFlash, Thanks for your support! I'm sending you a PM regarding the code.
What?! Free already? And the sale? Instead of going up like you said the price goes down to free? I will never buy a game from you again! Thank you and good luck!
That's not fair. We should at least ask why they made it free so soon. My guess is to boost the exposure. Right now it only has 8 reviews on the App Store. Instead of getting mad tell your friends about the awesome game you have and that they can pick it up for free right now. Also, isn't supporting great games better/more important then getting a deal on something that's only $2 to begin with. Any ways, not trying to hate, just think it's a bit harsh.
I agree. It's a great game. If you decided to purchase the game you must have thought it was worth playing. We don't boycot the grocery store when we buy a box of Pop Tarts, then the next they are BOGO. Also, this could be an App Store error. It should have gone up $2 not down, which made it free.
It's not about the two bucks, this is the reason i will think twice before buying a game! But it's ok, i'm not saying the game wasn't worth the money, only that i can't help feeling a little misled, since they said the price would go up. But it's only my opinion! Sorry for my english, it's not my native language
I agree with you. They said it was a release price that would go up. We're all thinking, "buy now & get the best price." It will be interesting to see what happened. The app description still says to buy once & never pay again (no IAP). Could be an error. I don't know. The App Store is a difficult beast to follow.
olomorolo, What a fantastic game this is! Good implementation of tile pushing mechanics. Fantastic visuals. Polished production. Some cleverly designed levels, even earlier on in the game. I am very ambivalent about the timer. The game, by its nature, is a logic puzzler. Hence, once you have discovered the solution, you can simply repeat it to achieve a better time (notwithstanding the levels in which there is a random component). Thus, the timer inherently is a POOR metric of how "well" the player has been able to solve the level. Instead, I prefer that the game rates the player's performance by the NUMBER OF MOVES (tile pushes, for example) that the player needs to make to solve the level. For the fixed (not randomly generated) puzzle levels, it should be algorithmically possible to determine what the MOST OPTIMAL solution (or SHORTEST solution) is. Have you investigated on this?
Hey guys! To tell you the truth, we were a little bit afraid of this kind of reaction, when we planned the whole thing. Giving the game away free might not seem fair to the people who paid $2 to get it in the first week. But we do have a good reason to do so. See, on September 30, 1791 Mozarts great masterpiece was staged for the very first time to a relatively small crowd of opera-goers who could afford to attend the show in Vienna. That's pretty much like the original release of the game, although our price was much more inclusive, I'd say ;-) 224 years later LabLike would like to celebrate the anniversary of that special day by inviting all iOS gamers of the world to experience The Magic Flute, the game, for free! It's not a permanent drop. The price will go up again in 2 days. But you can imagine, that the people who created the game want - more than anything - for the people to PLAY it. Giving it away to everyone interested - even if for a short amount of time - is the best way to achieve this goal. We're really grateful to those, who purchased the game upon release. Making it free on the first day would not let us test its commercial potential, and selling it was something of a learning opportunity for us. We still lowered the price to $2 just to be as fair as we could to those who made that learning opportunity possible for us. We do hope you'll find the game to be worth the expense. The anniversary giveaway was planned from the start and yes, now that we know that the game CAN sell quite OK, we're hoping for our work to reach as many people as possible. No hard feelings?
I'm glad I bought at the advertised 50% off launch sale price before the game price went up to.......FREE # Oh well. Seems they have a cool & interesting reason. I'm happy with my paid purchase & the game for the most part. It's just one of those things. I've grabbed plenty of games off my wish list when they've gone free for a few days so I can't complain.
It's ok, the game is good, but now i really know that we are led to belive the price would go up only to go free later, and worse, it was not because poor sales, only a marketing strategy planned in advance! Thanks for telling the truth, but i don't think this sets things right. Again, it's not about the two bucks, it's about trust. Good luck! (I'm not looking for any kind of compensation, only expressing my opinion)
I can understand feeling misled. I don't think that was their intention. Of course I don't know that for sure but lying to your potential customers, especially with your first release, isn't a very good strategy for building a fan base. Oh yeah, a move to freemium would definitely be unforgivable and make me feel like I was swindled but I don't see any signs of that yet. I agree about the App Store too. Sometimes I think Apple is deliberately trying to make it hard to find things. The organization is awful.
It looks like the misstep was advertising a launch sale when your plan was to go free before going up in price. You probably should have just not said anything and it would have been ok. Well hopefully it's a lesson learned. I don't mind. I paid a good price for a great game. Keep up the good work. On a different note, do you guys have any future games planed yet? Something with Beethoven's Fifth or Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Grieg's Peer Gynt (which is from a play so there's a story to that one).
If they wanted to celebrate the date like they said they should used a strategy like lunar flower, launch free then go up in price. Bad decision for a good game. I even lost my interest in keep playing the game.
Even though some may not agree with the way they handled it, I can see there is a good reason for why it is free right now. I thought this game looked interesting from the start, but because I generally suck at puzzlers I probably would have never bought this. But now I have downloaded and I can let my girlfriend play it, and she loves puzzle games like this. Although I can understand how some of you feel cheated. There have been more time than I can count where I pay full price for a game, then a week later it goes on sale or goes free. It does NOT feel good. But you download enough games and apps and constantly check AppShopper/TA for sales, you will get that money back tenfold. You win some, you lose some. I think these guys had a good reason for it to go free, so don't write them off just because of this. I think they had the best intentions.
Best intentions, poor execution. Launch for free on the 30th and then price up. This is a lesson in how not to do an app lqaunch pricing model! I didn't get it until today, but sympathise with those who responded quickly by buying immediately being worse off than having waited a few days.
Yeah, there were entirely better ways to handle this situation. I don't care about the $2 and have spent way more on stuff I've immediately deleted, but this whole thing has been super-weird. Between the social media thing with the promise of a free copy of the game and the mention of a launch sale...I dunno. It's just so odd considering there was an intention of going free regardless of anything. It would've been much more effective adding in a "The game is set to go free on the [date] to celebrate [event], but if you want to support us and blah blah blah, you can right now with a launch sale of x% off".
Bought this game for supporting dev, then found out that they don't need my support at all To dev: $2 maybe is nothing for you, but still my hard earned money. I don't think I will recommend or support your games from now on. Cheers
"We were a little bit afraid of this kind of reaction" So then why do it? Honesty is the best policy. I would imagine those opera-goers in 1791 were well aware that they were paying for an exclusive performance. I hope the Magic Flute is not also powered by a VW diesel engine.
Beside the pricing issues, I don't even like the game. Just a sliding puzzle with nice graphics....And what does a dragon have to do with mozard?? Glad I got this for free
