It wouldnt be so bad if it was like 99c then went free after a week lol but around $4 then going to 99c stings a little more for some reason.
Because they just basically lie in your face and take $3 from your pocket, rather than honestly warn you beforehand that if number of sales doesn't go well they will drop the price (both implicitly and explicitly). They made a promise they couldn't keep, hopefully they don't go any further and make this game free or a freemium and give us another big slap in the face.
In defense of Hippo, he/she clearly states a few times throughout this thread that 3/4 of the current heroes require IAP.
Bottom line is the Appstore is a tough place to do business. This game is actually very solid but I guess was being swalloed by the PvZ 2, Frontiers sale hype... so price drop was probably not planned but a kind of sink or swim decision. Superhippo if you pay someone to set you app price point then maybe you need to give them a beating
Paid $4 launch night, don't mind the sale a bit. It wasn't that long ago that the best thing I had for handheld gaming was a Nintendo DSI - it was $3 for a freaking uber basic alarm clock app on their store, and the app was tied to the specific unit it was purchased on. So, really, $4 for a fully functioning video game of this complexity is chump change by any rational standard. Yet, we have to consider the tiddly winky bonkers asinitude of the app store economy. There's dozens of new apps daily, and the majority of the higher quality apps all like to throw themselves out there on the Wed->Thu gaming feeding frenzy of the week. So, while I firmly believe devs are doing all devs a huge disfavor by not sticking to a more practical price point for their long term survival, I get it. You need a critical mass of recognition for sales to become stable, if they're not willing to wait for a slow climb, they need to do something like this to drum up enough sales to hopefully get the gears moving. People are far too short sighted. Too many are so quick to view a game getting discounted/free as somehow taking money from them; ha. When you're picking up the quantity and quality of iOS games at the prices most go for, the truth is, you already got your bargain. These discounts are far more about devs taking a huge gamble on their actual livelihood (at least as game coders for iOS). Take this game, it went from a $4 title with a reasonable amount of pre-release buzz to a $1 title just a week later. I have no idea what their sales were like that first week such that they felt compelled to slash the price to $1, but they will have to quadruple their future sales just to break even from where they already were. What if low sales were simply due to too many seeing it as a water re-skin of KR?
Not trying to offend anyone, but if you paid $4 and are unhappy, you should mostly be unhappy with yourself. Every tower defense game with IAP goes free, or at least very on sale, at some point. Its just a question of when, and it usually doesnt take too long unless your a Kingdom Rush kind of game. You should have also realized that $4 was not a realistic price point for a new tower defense game without a pre-existing following. As has already been pointed out, the developer didnt necessarily "lie" and could have easily been shocked and upset by the sales of a game that obviously consumed a ton of time and resources to make. So the only one left to be upset with - if you need to get upset over $4 - is yourself.
I waited for the sale, but I now see based on the quality of the game that I would have been happy paying the launch price. There are definitely some elements to the game that differentiates it from the great KR games: control of the target ship's aiming point, effects of the water waves, the very well implemented pirate theme. I am thoroughly enjoying this. Off to buy a hero since a dollar was way too cheap for this high quality game...
Well said C Hannum. Another factor that probably prompted them was being featured by Apple (in some countries at least). They wouldn't have know that would happen and most probably want to capitalise on the visibility until tomorrow! Price might go back up again then but probably not the full amount. I used to get worked up about this sort of thing too, but can see it from the other side now since having released my first (and 2 other) games - and you need to react to the situation no matter what you assumed or promised beforehand. And as CH said, whatever the price it's still a bargain.
C.Hannum & Baracus These theories make a lot of sense to me, an indie studio, sees a problem in sales, realises it has a very small window and has to react, hence what happened. Anyway would recommend this game to folks who haven't downloaded it yet to give it ago I really enjoyed it. The "I like Tutles" voiceover from the pirate ship is boss!
Hard to get a solid idea of where your sales are at if no one buys your game at launch because they assume a sale will happen a week later. Have a launch sale and then once your happier with numbers raise the price and note in your app description the price is fixed. I instabought this and don't mind the price drop but I do think a better pricing strategy could have been used.
Well, I wasn't burnt by the sale, but given the devs "promise" to not have a sale plus the fact that they HAVE been visiting the site since the sale, but haven't bothered to say anything to early adopters, that's just poor customer relations. At least some devs admit to what they did and try to explain it. Not commenting makes things look even worse.
We wanted to shed some light on the Pirate Legends price drop the occurred yesterday. From reading some of the posts in the various threads some of you guys have nailed the reasoning already. Unfortunately we had the dumb luck of launching on the same day as the biggest Tower Defense game launch in the history of mobile (Plants Vs Zombies 2). We found out that it was coming live one day before launch and it pretty much powned all our plans. As a result of this our downloads were way lower than expected and after the weekend our possition in the charts started to fall, which was really lame as we were getting very solid visibility on the Appstore. Yesterday we made the call to take full advantage of the last 3 days of apple featured placement and try to get the game in the hands of as many fans as possible so everyone can enjoy our baby and hopefully recoup some of the dev cost. We'd like to thank everyone who has bought the game, we really appreciate your support.
This seems understandable. I bought the game yesterday so I'm not getting screwed by the price drop. I wouldn't have bought it otherwise because looking at the IAP in the App Store automatically made this look like it should've been freemium, not 4 bucks. Hopefully I'll feel different once I start playing it.
Fair enough. Just wish we knew you guys were so flexible in pricing. I bought it and gifted it to my brother at launch. If I knew you were going to drop in price so quickly I would have waited and gifted a few more copies out to my wife and mates. All good. Hope you hit your targets
Well, now I can redownload it. I feel bad for the people that got screwed, but it was really bad luck on the devs part. So they can't be 100% blamed.
I still say that the developers should have something for first day buyers. (Kind of like what Breach & Clear did with the gold gun.) It doesn't have to be something huge, a special outfit, character, vehicle, ect. It would take the sting out of paying full price and the game going on sale days/hours later. At least you have something to show for it ya know?
Gotta say folks, I am enjoying this every bit as much as the Kingdom Rush games. And the art is so great; I wish I could see it zoomed in even more. I currently just got through level 8 - the Swamp Hag boss. At this point, there are some really fun tower upgrades. Loving it!
