Good Luck With That Dept.
Unfathomably, not everyone always agrees with WoSblog's informed and thoughtful assessments and analyses of the economics of the App Store.
In the interests of scrupulous balance and fairness, then, let's give some of those with opposing (trans: wrong) views a platform for a change.
This staggeringly blatant but nicely-made Galaga knockoff would doubtless be just lost in the release swamp if it went out for 59p alongside the hundreds of other retro arcade shooters all fighting for visibility and attention in the cut-throat commercial world of the Store.
But by charging five times as much, consumers are bound to think Alien Swarm is five times better, and at £2.99 it's almost certain to rocket up the Top-Grossing chart! Good luck with that!
Okay, so Tiger Woods PGA Tour might be only £2.99, be one of the oldest and most famous videogame franchises in existence, look nicer and have seven courses to your six. But by cleverly charging £4.99 for the basic game and a mere £7.13 more to download a bunch of extra courses, you've got a slightly bigger game for just four times the cost! Good luck with that!
A lean and compact compilation of just THREE different solitaire games? At last! I was so weary of tedious packages like Card Shark offering more than 50, with nicer graphics, for a ripoff 59p.
And you say I can have all this for just £11.99, representing a negligible premium of only 2p extra compared to buying the three games separately for £3.99 each? Wow! Good luck with that!
Snappy title, guys. And I'm sure that while first-week sales at £5.99 were probably disappointing as the market struggled to keep pace with your technological advances, whacking the price up 100% to £11.99 will ensure success, especially when accompanied by some really irresistible screenshots. Good luck with that!
("REMEMBER: IF ANY OF OUR APPS CRASH, THEN YOU ARE JUST OUT OF MEMORY. HOLD DOWN THE POWER BUTTON ON THE UPPER-RIGHT FOR 6 SECONDS UNTIL YOUR PHONE TURNS OFF, THEN TURN IT ON AGAIN, AND X-PLANE WILL RUN FINE!")
Okay, so not absolutely everyone understands the appeal of an app that replicates the random gambling of the cardboard tickets people used to buy before scratch-off covering was invented. At least for just £3.49 people can do it 100 times a day with no more to pay!
But the real standout mark of blue-sky hats-off genius here is charging for the Lite version as well. Good luck with that!
"Gullible is the ultimate quoting and knowledge tool. Learn about fun facts and be prepared from the homebrew Triva tournament to the final of a Who Wants to be a Millionaire."
At a whopping 0.3MB in size, I'm betting that this unique database contains pretty much the entire sum of human wisdom. And while stocks last you're asking only a piffling £5.99 for it? Good luck with that!
"This app is version of AttackerSummon to AdMob. This app is 4 line defence."
That's your entire sales pitch? For £5.99? Sir, I admire your moxie, even if I don't have the remotest idea what this monochrome wonder you're asking people to buy actually is or does. Good luck with that!
Well, looking at those pics I don't think anyone could ever seriously doubt that this exciting new strategy board game is "simple and intuitive enough for kids to play easily" – I'm sure "rc8s ed3e hg4w rg8s" is some hip and cool bit of street txtspeak that I'm just too old and out-of-touch to understand.
But just to be sure, pricing it at £5.99 should give it that air of exclusivity that all the young people crave. Good luck with that!
Quite a lot of people enjoy Pop, the bubble-bursting casual game that appeals to young and old equally. But it can be a bit tiresome choosing between its six gameplay modes, and not everyone wants to pay £2.99 to buy all of them.
So the best thing for everyone would be if you could download just one of the modes separately as a stand-alone game, and yet not have to pay a single penny more for the added convenience and simplicity! Good luck with that!
I know a bargain when I see one. Buying the entire Pokemon-style set of individual farting-rabbit apps would cost a prohibitive £21.35, yet no parent would want their child to be the one who went short. It's a dilemma for sure.
But what's this – you say I can have the whole lot at the touch of a single icon for a mere £4.99? Good luck with that!
Heartbreaks Revenge [sic]
But here's our champion. Weak, lily-livered developers sometimes bump the price of their app up to some crazy price in a fit of pique at not selling enough or people complaining about the price or something, but they usually relent after a day or two and put it back to a normal figure.
Not Neurofluid Interactive, though. These guys have real steel about them. They started off selling what appears to be some kind of Cupid-themed Missile Command clone at 59p in February, and after a month hiked it straight up to £8.99. Hey, they gave everyone a chance to get it cheap, right?
So there would be no cowardly backsliding on their principles from these guys. Evidently the higher price still wasn't generating the profit levels they felt their fine game deserved, so ten days later they doubled it, a week later they doubled it again, and two days after that they doubled it again.
The price held steady at £71.99 for almost a full month, but in a heroic effort to keep Heartbreaks Revenge special, as of June 2nd Neurofluid have given it one last shove to a breathtaking £114.99. That's just short of a 20,000% price increase over a six-month period, moving steadily and consistently in one direction.
Gentlemen, WoSblog salutes your enterprise. Good luck with that!
In their defence, reviews of crap overpriced games are far more entertaining to read.
RevStu, you are funny and it makes me smile.
"REMEMBER: IF ANY OF OUR APPS CRASH, THEN YOU ARE JUST OUT OF MEMORY."
That would be the memory we malloc'd but then forgot to do garbage collection on.
I don't disagree with the overall point, but I'm not sure about lumping X-Plane in here. If they've managed to get it running reasonably – and I don't have the tools to test that, but let's work on the assumption that they have – then it's a class apart from every other app you mention.
This is why I will never buy an iPhone. Games belong on consoles, phones are for calling people.
And never the twain should meet. NEVER.
What about PCs? I use mine for gaming and also for work-related Skyping all the time, and it's fine with both.
But PCs are a bit different, really.
The addition of calling features is a new thing. I'm just worried I'm going to wake up one day, and there's going to be an indescribably shit mutlifunctional tool for calling, doing work and gaming.
Oh wait – that's the iPad.
hangonaminute…
Oh, and mobile gaming has a lot of catching up to do if it EVER wants to be taken seriously.
Right now they're taking their cues from the likes of PopCap and their addictive, short-burst games. But in the long term they're going to need to evolve if they're going to be
a) Any good
b) Around for the foreseeable
I think that a decent RPG would be an excellent fit for a mobile device. You could play little bits here and there, ideal for someone with a hectic life.
Ten thousand games about penguins popping balloons make me want to vomit blood.
There are loads of RPGs on the iPod, both MMO and otherwise.
"There are loads of RPGs on the iPod, both MMO and otherwise."
Really? If that's the case then that's pretty cool. Decent ones or crappy JRPGs? Because last time I looked there were some terrible JRPGs available, packed with cliche and random battles, but little in the way of Western stuff.
However, I find the idea of a portable MMO a little worrying. When the people who play them get up from the computer to get some milk and pizza, that's occasionally the only time they get to interact with others. The idea that they could still be playing an MMO on the bus is just worrying. People like that NEED some restrictions on their gaming so they can switch off for a bit.
Do you see mobile gaming as a new way forward? Because I'm still convinced it's a fad.