I only just managed to get my hands on an ipad and i love it. Everything was perfect until i realized how many of the games i brought on the iphone have so called "HD" versions that i will have to pay again. I know i know, the ipad appstore section was live for awhile, but it really didn't hit me until I got an ipad to sync my old purchases in. As much as i love flight control and all the Gameloft games, i'm not going to pay for the same game again!! Flight control is $5 on ipad??!?!? I mean, didn't they earned millions from that game, couldn't they at least have the decency to update the build to support ipad since they obviously already earned a ton of profit on it. Why rape your loyal customers again? It isn't even a very different platform. It is based on the same OS and developer kit. I'm kinda pissed off and this "pay for the same game again on ipad" thing really left a bad taste. As much as i love Gameloft, i would think very hard about buying their iphone games in the future because its not going to be optimized for my new shiny ipad and playing the iphone games 2X on ipad really sucks. I know because i got a lot of iphone games that are updated to ipad's fully resolution and they are all beautiful compared to flight control blown up 2X on ipad. Its not all lost. Some respectable developers did provide free updates to optimize their games for ipad. It is ok for developers to not update their iphone games for ipad, not all games are profitable for them to bother working on anymore. I'm just really pissed at those that tries to ripe/rape their loyal players by charging a lot more money for their old games on ipad.
Have you bought Flight Control on the iPad? 3 or so new, iPad-specific maps, much better graphics, two-player splitscreen mode, I believe there is a co-op mode, and there's a totally new user interface. I'm really not sure what you're complaining about.
I definitely agree with you. I don't think it's too hard for developers to do both: - give you a higher resolution version of the iPhone game you've already purchased for free, - and release a brand new version with new features and new functionality especially built for the iPad that you would have to pay for.
Well, a lot of people know what i'm complaining about, apparently not you. The multiplayer mode is already in the iphone version. Charging 500% for some blown up graphics and a few maps isn't really much of a justification. Adding maps for games like Nova is difficult. But of all games, adding maps might be the easiest thing to do for a game like flight control. This is just a money grab whichever way you slice or dice it and a lot of people are going along with it. We all just love to spend money don't we.
Adding four new maps, multiplayer on the Same device and enhanced graphics (one map 3d) seems like a steal to the dsiware version.
"Flight Control" was only .99 on the iPhone and I spent hours playing it. Spending $5 for the HD version (especially with all of the additional content) felt like I was finally paying the developer what I should have payed initially. However, spending $12.99 for the HD version of Red Alert after spending $10 (plus DLC) for the iPhone version just was too much to bear...
Don't buy the HD version then... Redownload on the ipad and play the regular version you initially and rightly paid for.
you have a choice, your not being forced to rebuy the apps. just download the iphone version again for free and click x2 on the bottom right
Let's apply this to the hardware, shall we? "I'm shocked that Apple dares to charge for the iPad! I already paid for the iPhone and they only gave it a larger screen. They should give it to me for free!"
It’s not like you have to pay again to play a native iPhone application. An iPad one has additional coding and new artwork. It’s not reasonable to expect the extra work for free.
As a developer this kind of customer whining really upsets me. It's one thing if the app you purchased was a significant amount of money (significant being what? > $10?) But to buy something like Flight Control, for a dollar - and then throw an extra couple of dollars at the dev for the "HD Upgrade" and then complain about that seems absolutely ludicrous. This is very similar to the issues that people have had with having to pay for upgrades "when updates should just be free." The work going into creating anything, whether it's creating completely new content or uprezzing or just porting - it is never free for the developer. Particularly us independents who are scrapping that much more to please the audience, we spend time fine-tuning much of the nitty-gritty (it gets quite labor intensive, generally) and to be met with this attitude is just a smack in the face. But... At the same time, I feel your pain. The audience is being pandered to and when something like this happens (a market full of, essentially, devalued software) then of course they are gonna say "WTF" when the pattern is being broke. Personally I see these HD prices and think "this is what iPhone apps should cost, at least, and it is good to see the waters being tested with these (slightly higher) prices, maybe it will change the way things work around here." Unfortunately, I doubt it. these aren't boxed products, this is not an item you can stick on your shelf. It's essentially all DLC, and rock-bottom is what people have been taught to expect to pay. To wrap it up, in my POV I should say that $10 rule-of-thumb seems fair enough. If you've paid less than that, you should not be whining about having to pay for *more work* (if there's generally new content involved - new maps, art, levels, characters, etc). Will anyone out there agree with me? Time will tell I suppose, and people will answer with their wallets. Just my two cents.
I agree that the universal binaries are nice. As a developer, I also get that it takes a good amount of effort. You need higher resolution assets (which cost money, if you didn't have them for the iPhone version), you might need to redo the interface, etc... It's not like one day of effort. It might take days or a few weeks depending on how complex the changes are. If it were an app like Photoshop, no one would question why they didn't get CS2, CS3, and CS4 for free after buying CS1 -- there's an upgrade path and you pay for it. Why would anyone expect iPhone apps to be different? I'd also like to point out that other game companies do this all the time. Final Fantasy on iPhone? Some of us probably paid $60 for the SNES cart when it was out. Why don't we get the iPhone version for free?!!?!?! The easy solution is to use the iPhone version on your iPad (whichs works perfectly fine).
I appreciate the developer's argument that it costs them time & effort to redo the art in HD resolution but if it's basically the same game, which a customer has already purchased, I don't think we should be charging them a profit margin on top. We should only charge them the overhead to give them the game they already own in a higher resolution. I ran a record label for several years. When customers came to our online store to purchase a CD or vinyl, we would always let them download the digital MP3 copy of that album free of charge. As far as I'm concerned, they already owned that album, and so I shouldn't charge them any further profit margin. It's the same with movies; when we consumers buy a $15 movie DVD, that disc only cost us 10¢; that majority of the DVD price is us paying for the content of the movie itself. And so we shouldn't need to pay that large profit markup again if we wanted to watch our movie in a digital download format — we should only pay something like a $1 charge as an overhead fee to cover bandwidth and other costs, but at the moment, we're having to pay that whole profit markup all over again as if we're a new customer who doesn't already own it. It's unfair for developers to be double-dipping their consumers for a second profit on the same game. There really needs to be a better upgrade path for pre-existing customers.
i think most or some developers see this as an opportunity to change the current appstore habit. 99cents per game obviously isnt going to make this a solid industry for any dev, but if its at $3-$4 at least its reasonable compared to what it currently is. this is a good thing tho, it means developers will have more money and resources to make better games for us. its win win really
Another developer chiming in here, albeit one that has not even looked at the iPad for developing yet. First I would say that as a gamer the vast majority of up-rezzed iPhone games simply don't excite me that much. The iPad isn't out here yet, but when I get one it will not be to play iPhone games with a higher resolution. What I really don't get though is the logic behind some of the complaining regarding the issue: This truly confuses me. You vastly prefer the HD versions, you don't want to pay for them but it is still OK that the developers do not update their games? To me the solution sounds simple: Only buy the updates you truly feel is worth it. From a consumer's point of view your argument is perfectly reasonable. However, comparing video-films and music being compressed to different standards doesn't really translate that well to re-designing iPhone apps for the iPad. There's a lot more work than simply checking a "create iPad version" check-box. Redesigning the graphics have been mentioned, but also stuff like interface and customers' expectations from an iPad app put demands on the developers. Some seem to think that offering a dual-version with media for both platforms is the ideal solution. For people owning a 16GB iPhone however it is a serious drawback. The app-files might suddenly become 4x larger rendering the device less useful. All in all I think we should all keep in mind that the iPad is an extremely young platform and that we all (consumers as well as developers/publishers) will probably need time to figure out the right path for the device.
Those are really silly statements. Photoshop, seriously? Each version of Photoshop introduces some new sets of useful tools that has helped me a lot from each version, a lot of very much improved features from previous versions, a lot of new interface tweaks, new graphics engine as in CS4, and much more. These take generally 2 years to develop. With a lot of these HD updates on the iPad, it's not a big difference at all, you generally get the same exact game but with little updates...it should be free, like the updates to each photoshop version...as developers have pointed out, making their HD versions take a couple of days to a couple of weeks, and you want us to pay for the same exact game on the same OS with little updates? You're ripping off your own customers, just like adobe would be if they charged their own customers for updates on each version of Photoshop. And come on, you seriously pulled out that NES to iPhone game crap? Final Fantasy was originally released on an entirely different OS that isn't designed to work around any other systems. Porting games over to a new OS and a new system that it isn't designed around takes a lot of time, a total of 1-1.5 years for the DS version of Final Fantasy in development time IIRC. With something like Soosiz and Soosiz HD, you're getting the same exact game, nothing at all extra other than updated textures, and it's made for the same OS on hardware that is similar to another, an update that probably took the developer a week or 2, maybe even just a few days considering what little it looks like was done to it. I'm sure there will be games on the iPad that will look vastly different and just simply not possible on the iPhone, where maybe the iPhone version is completely different from the iPad and the much higher price for the HD version is actually justified, but right now majority of these games don't fit anywhere near that...majority of them are little updates to the same game on the same OS that took them a few days to a few weeks to update and they expect their fans to pay for the game all over again at a higher price. So yes, a lot of fans are pissed off and for good reason, I'm just glad there's still some good developers out there like IUGO and Konami who don't want to rip their customers off and some universal games. I know I would definitely be pissed off at Adobe if they charged me more money for some of their good upgrades to each version of Photoshop I have had over the years, or if a PC game developer charged me more money for drivers because they upgraded the game to better support my new video card so the game I previously bought would look much better. So you want to charge your fans a lot more money for little upgrades that should have been free that took you little time to do? And you want to know why people are mad over it? Oh no, I guess the solution is to not run updated software and put it on 2x mode instead. Big middle finger to the developer. Oh and big thanks to IUGO if you're listening, awesome job on the universal game Cliffed XL, love the few new iPad exclusive features being a universal app is definitely a great incentive to buy more of your games
Would you mind telling us your line of work? Clearly a couple of weeks here and there of your time is also free and you don't need to be paid any wages for it if a customer comes back months later after making a purchase and wants more. Your customer service is impeccable.
If my customers need a few updates on their brochures or want a few extra touches on the photograph I took, then yes it's free for them. But its a different field than programming, and trying to campare the graphic design business to a system software business is ridiculous. Imagine if all updates to every program you have on your computer costs money every single time...having to rebuy the same exact Microsoft Word version 2003 on the same OS once a big update comes out for it. Or if Blizzard charged it's customers $9.99 for every big update to the same game their fans have been playing for a long time...yeah, everyone would be pissed off, but according to your statement, it's ok cause it took time to update...who cares if you screw your long time supporters in the end? Lets charge them more money cause we did updates to the same exact game on the same OS. Seems as if iPhone developers think they're somehow different to this...especially when their updates took them far less time than what a lot of PC games usually take to provide their free big updates
