We do, and they don't do anything. They could make their games $40 like portable games without iAP and we wouldn't have any complaints. There are other ways to make money.
I wanted to pay $40 for premium games, years ago, when the App Store started. We lost. The market has spoken. People won't pay in advance for the amount it would take for premium games to be profitable. There is no point anymore in fighting over that, because the average gamer will never pay premium prices for premium games. It's over. Move on. This game isn't anywhere close to being worth a premium price anyways, it's a moot point. The more I play Godfire, the more I realize it was nowhere near ready to ship.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room. PC GAMING. Right now, the Steam Summer sale is going on. Devs are getting a ton of money. Premium gaming done right. It's the right thing to do. And yes, millions upon millions of gamers use Steam or GoG. I use it. The average gamer with an IQ over 10 pays for premium games. This fight isn't over. Join me.
The percentage of App Store customers who have any idea what Steam is has got to be less than 0.1%. If Apple made more of an effort to promote hardcore games and position the iPhone has a hardcore gaming device, expensive games could be a sustainable business. But as long as the top charts determine success, it isn't going to matter, because premium entries for a small market will be competing against the Candy Crushes of the world.
... �������� it. This has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever seen. The amount of stupid in this post... damn... I can't even comprehend how stupid this post is. As for a reply? I'm speechless. I got nothing. 80mil steam users 900mil app store users. About 10%. Added on to 3DS/DS/Vita owners and you have about 30%. 30% of 1bil is 300 million. 300 mil times 40 is 12,000 million dollars. 12,000 million dollars could be made off of premium games on the app store. That's more than King.com. It's called math. Do it. Also, Candy Crush will fall, just like Zynga before it. Remember the Zynga stock market crash? This Candy Crush bubble will burst, and heads will roll.
*sigh* there've been far dumber posts here, you're not looking hard enough. Anyways, you can't put two unrelated numbers up and immediately compare them. EVERY one of the 80 mil people who HAVE a steam account does not automatically correspond to someone who has an App Store account today. Picture a Venn diagram between the two circles - the relevant number is in the middle. Now, consider the number of people who made steam accounts once, but never use the service, and take them out of it. The App Store is a stickier service due to it's mobility, which means it's customers are generally more frequent users. I probably undersold it a bit, I'm sure it's more than 1/1000 active users of both. But I'd also wager that it's less than 1/100. The issue here is the way the Top Charts work in the App Store. They necessarily merge the casual game market with the premium game market - they take what SHOULD be two separate, sustainable businesses and make them compete against each other for the same eyeballs. As long as Apple skews eyeballs towards apps that target marketshare over high-price-limited-market strategies, premium games will always have a difficult time on the App Store. Again, this is a solvable problem - Apple can decide what to promote and how. But their policies currently skew success towards freemium and away from paid.
Wait what? Math? What does 3DS and Vita have to do with steam? Where does 1 billion come from? What is 12,000 million? Isn't that 12 billion? I'm confused.
1. IAP is being discussed. On topic. Additionally, I quoted someone specifically, to explain that $18 up front is very different than $9 up front and then hiding the rest of the $9 in the game. This was the topic discussed and playing the game is not necessary to comment on this practice. 2. "IAP in general is not evil in any way, it is the way app developers implement them that can be questionable or intrusive" This is your opinion and not fact. You can't use your opinion as fact , in order to declare someone else's opinion invalid. I disagree. IAP, in itself, is disgusting and intrusive to an immersive experience. 3. Disliking something and posting it on a forum is not different than you liking something and posting on a forum. Ridiculous hyperbole only weakens your post by showing your clear bias and trying to discredit someone by attacking them by assumption/innuendo. Why does it mean so much to you that I have a different opinion that you feel the need to make things up to attack me? "Burst a vein"? Get real.
1. The fact remains that you cannot apply your opinion of a group (games with IAP) in general to a specific part (Godfire) of it. It's like saying a game published by Warner Bros. must be a movie tie-in. 2. But it is a fact! I... I don't know how you can call a method of voluntary payment evil or disgusting. What about IAP for additional content? For cosmetic items? Why, outside the gaming field, for subscription or donation? Like I said, you are clearly bashing the wrong subject. A knife is neither bad nor good, what matters is whether the knife holder is a cook or a mugger. In this case, you are jumping to conclusion that Vivid Games is a mugger even though you don't know how they have been using their "knife". 3. I was neither attacking you nor making things up. You apparently claimed that you could criticize optional payment in a game without actually having bought it or played it. I found that unreasonable, so I voiced my opinion. Do not take this personally.
AppSpy review. http://www.appspy.com/review/8664/godfire "This challenge highlights the fact that, despite being a premium title, Godfire is full of in-app purchases. From continues to upgrades, it is possible to push through the game with ease if you are prepared to pay - which is a shame because it feels like the difficulty curve has been deliberately broken to encourage this." Appspy. Exactly and what ruined the game for me and many others. Dear devs sell it for $12.99, no IAP crap and I'll buy extra content too when it comes out but with IAP I refunded not playing something deliberately designed to cash in on the weak and less experienced gamer. You'd still end up getting $20 from me but I'd get a good experience as it was meant to be played not manipulated by IAP and we all know games difficulties are manipulated to sell IAP's. For some maybe no need but not everyone is a pro.
I'd be very annoyed at any game which fit the description in that Appspy review too. Thing is, based on my experience so far playing through the game on Normal and part way through on Hard difficulty, that description doesn't fit this game at all. In fact one of my main complaints is that the game is just too simple and easy. I've certainly not felt any need to be leveling up or upgrading my character any faster to deal with the enemies thrown at me so far. Maybe if I get to the hardest difficulty I'll see the problem. I have to suspect though that the Appspy reviewer is just reacting, like a lot of people seem to be doing, to the the fact that a paid game has consumable IAPs at all, and hasn't bothered to play it enough to see how optional they are. Actually, I just went and read the rest of the review, and well, I normally think it's a cheap shot to dismiss people's opinions of a game based on how skilled they are at playing it, but in this case I really do think his conclusion about the IAPs is based on his not having figured out how to play the game. He cites the Minotaur boss fight as an example of a boss which is unfairly hard and designed to drive the player toward purchasing IAPs. The thing is, I found that fight to be very easy once I noticed the Minotaur's tells that he gives before he attacks. Once I figured that out, it was dead simple to simply avoid his attacks until he goes into his "tired" state for a bit, at which point you can get in some attacks and then go back to avoiding him for a while, and repeat until he's dead. In fact, my main criticism of the boss fights is that they're too simple, and really just require patience to wear the boss down. If you read other players' reviews in this thread, and TA's review and Pocket Gamer's review, you'll see most people said the same thing about the boss fights, that they're too easy and the only thing challenging about them is the challenge to your patience. This is just a guess, but I suspect the Appspy reviewer was already offended by the fact that a paid game had IAPs in it, so as soon as he ran into a challenge with the boss fight, instead retrying the fight a few times and discovering how easy it is to avoid the attacks, he just jumped to the conclusion that the game must just be being purposefully unfair to push him toward the IAPs. I think this is one of the problems with consumable IAPs -- even if a game is fairly balanced and the IAPs are just shortcuts, the mere existence of the IAPs makes people suspicious.
Not really. I think this is beginning to go too far. Eli said he didn't want discussion of "evil" IAP and the "horrors" of freemium/paidmium in general clogging up threads. But c'mon, discussion of points brought up in a professional game review as they pertain specifically to the game in question do, as a matter of fact, belong in the game discussion thread. I'd love to hear anyone tell me, with any sort of logic or sense, why they don't.
I think it's just a practical decision. The discussion of IAPs ends up dominating the whole thread, so anyone who would like to discuss any other aspect of the game has a hard time doing so. And while a tiny bit of the discussion has actually been about IAPs as it pertains to this particular game, 95% percent of the discussion has really just been about IAPs and paid DLC in paid games in general. Some posts do claim to be talking about this game in particular, but it's clear from how unfamiliar most of them are with any particulars about this game other than the fact that it contains IAPs, that they're really just using this game as a pretense to vent about IAPs in general. So that's why I think it makes sense to move this discussion to its own thread.
