Hey everyone, I check this forum regularly as an anonymous user (this is actually the first time I create an account) but in any case... I just wanted to let you all know that my company has recently put a Push Notification service into beta at http://www.appnotify.com/. Basically, we need developers to come test out the service and that's why I'm here. It's really well suited to turn-based games more so than any other style, but we're looking for people to build games with our platform. A sample use case would be to notify people when its their turn or if something major has happened in a game. Please check it out: it's free for the beta period (which it will stay in until we're satisfied with the server). I need your help to test this thing out!
I see your current pricing is $1 for 2000 notifications. I appreciate the service that you are trying to offer, however, if that pricing is correct, I don't see you getting a lot of developers interested. I don't mean to be negative or burst your bubble, but I think your pricing is rather unrealistic. Let's say I have a measly 10,000 copies of my turn-based game out there, and people play only 1 game a day across 5 turns for each player times 30 days per month = 1,500,000 notifications. That works out to $750/month! I can get 3 dedicated Quad Core 2.66Mhz machines with 4GB of RAM, 750GB of storage and nearly unlimited bandwidth for that monthly price from somewhere like ServerBeach.com, and I can do whatever I want with them, not just send notifications. If the price was somewhere around $1 for 100,000 notifications then it might start to make some sense to me. I might pay $15/month for that level of service. Even then, for $15 I can get a pretty great monthly server hosting package and run my own notification server with unlimited notifications and host my web site and host any downloadable content, and, and, and.
