For starters, I want to thank the Cogs fans on TouchArcade. You guys have been amazingly supportive and have given great constructive feedback on the forums. Sales for Cogs have been good, but there's no shortage of controversy in the way that we're selling the game. As it stands, $1 gets you the first 10 puzzles and for each additional $1, you get 10 more. So for $5, you get all 51 puzzles. We did this because Cogs is a notoriously challenging game and a lot of players are happy with just the first 10 puzzles. It's hard to get visibility in the app store, so to be perfectly honest, we also thought that the pay-as-you-go approach might help keep us up in the top 50 games better than a flat $5 purchase, even if the $5 version got us more revenue over the short term. This approach has been surprisingly controversial, to the point where iLounge devoted an editorial to it. Here's pretty much how the iTunes reviews break down. Most fall squarely into one of these categories: Five stars: Amazing game. It took me 10 hours to finish! One star: I hate the pricing model. I feel like I'm getting nickled and dimed. So what do the players really think? We're getting Cogs ready for the iPad, so it's a good time to change the pricing model. For reference, Cogs on the PC is priced at $10 and has won some major awards. The iPhone version has all the same puzzles, which players have reported finishing in anywhere from 5 to 13 hours. Rob Founder, Lazy 8 Studios Twitter | Facebook
I LOVE COGS, I first heard about it here quite a few months back and tried the demo on steam. I was hooked! Needless to say I am a cheap bastard and waited for the steam Christmas sales, and I wound up getting the full ver. of Cogs for only $1?! Maybe $2, but either way it was a deal I couldn't pass up. I feel with the iphone version for the price of $5 (All DLC included) it works out fine, so far I have only bought the first gamepack levels 11-20, I play my iphone games rarely so I just play as I go, I have 3 more levels and then I'm sure when I get bored I'll buy the next and so on... Yes if someone is looking for a full ver. game for $1 then thats not what they'll get here obviously, but to try the game at a $1 and to decide if you want the whole shebang for only $4 more, I think it works out the same either way you look at it... [EDIT] - For me though i prefer judging a game on a lite edition and then if I like it I would much rather buy the full game for whatever price it's set at and be done with it! But in the end your spending $5 either way... But I'm not a huge fan of in app purchases....
The game I really cool, but I was really dissapointed by the pricing model. I finished the 10 puzzles and was surprised for having to pay for more (didn't know about that) I think 2.99 for all would be a lot better, since there are much more valuale games in the store fr .99 (vs only 10 stages)
I played Cogs and actually bought all the DLC levels. As the levels got more and more challenging, I found the option not to pay for everything at first quite a nice idea for the reason that if you get stuck at say level 35, you actually save up some money not buying the even harder levels.
quite agree with this - i'm not normally a big fan of dlc but in this case its been ok. Sailed through the first 10 so bought the next, since then i've been slowing down - so i'm not unhappy that i have not already spent 5$ on it
This actually is one of the few games that in my opinion did the DLC correctly. Each person will have their own threshold of how many levels they can solve. I love these sort of puzzlers so I easily purchased all of them and enjoyed every last one, several times in fact to try to get as many stars as possible. There are others however that might like to "dabble" (for lack of a better word) in these types of puzzlers. For them one or two packs might be perfect for them. They can purchase the packs at their leisure and feel they are getting their monies worth. There is nothing worse than purchasing a game that feels over your head and then you feel like you wasted the money. 99 cent games? Sure you can easily have fun for a buck. 5 dollar games on this platform? Not so much.
Without giving much thought to big picture stuff and what I think might benefit you guys in the long run, I'd say I like the current approach best. I think it's great, and if the alternative is to pay $5 straight up I certainly prefer this 99 cents per ten puzzles model.
I like the pricing model, I don't know why everyone is bitching about it so much, but for your sake, I'd make the iPad version a flat $5 purchase.
personally I would rather gotten the first 10 levels for free to see if I liked the game or not, from there I would gladly pay for additional content if I liked it. kind of like how ngmoco did rolando 2, they gave the first few levels, and then from there you could purchase the additional worlds. I found I didn't like r2 as much as r1 so I appreciated the ability to sample it. or atleast give maybe 2 levels for free, and then buy all the others in app.
I think the biggest issue I saw in the reviews was that folks didn't know they weren't getting all the puzzles for one price. I haven't checked the app description lately, but when I bought the game, I didn't know it was only 10 puzzles. But I knew I wanted the game, I knew I wanted all the levels, and once I saw that I had to use in-app purchases to get the rest I bought all the other levels within a few minutes of buying Cogs. I would have bought the game and packs for twice what I paid, whether via in-app purchases or all at once up front, but I'm finding iDevice owners are exceptionally focused on $1 pricing, and even $4 or $5 apps get criticized for the price. I think if it is super clear, so even complete idiots can see that only the first 10 puzzles are included for the $1, there will be fewer complaints about the pricing. Make it the first line of the description, with nothing else but something like "The initial price of Cogs only includes the first 10 levels - to play additional levels you must buy level packs in-game" and some blank lines following. You'll still have complaints from idiots who didn't read and will say they had no warning, but I think you'll get fewer complaints. All that said - I can't vote as no answer applies to me. I would have paid all at once pricing. I immediately bought all the level packs once I realized I had to, and I still haven't gotten past the early 20s. If additional levels get released I will buy them. I don't know what the "best" pricing is - I think a single purchase $5 would be fine, but not because I'm opposed to in-app purchases. On the PC side, I bought 3 copies of the game - one for my desktop, one for my laptop, and one for my brother (who isn't playing so I made him give me a code so I could install it on my son's laptop). Damn, I ramble. Sorry.
To be honest I was quite impressed by the reasons devs gave for current pricing method. People got to try the game and make a choice to buy other levels, given the game difficulty. They exhibited high ethical standards by doing that, in my opinion. Commercially, it probably would've been more profitable to charge flat $4.99 for all levels, that way overall revenue would've been higher. It seems that a few people were confused by the way in-app purchasing was set up as well. Perhaps the devs could release another version of Cogs that includes all the levels (like some companies do) and run both versions side by side?
You guys sold the tutorial! The game time was much to short. People have been of the opinion the packs would have been that easy, too. That is part of the one star problem. And I (who bought the levelpacks) gave 4 stars instead of five cause I do not like this DLC thingie.
Gotta say $5 flat, because if I accidentally delete the game, I'll lose all of my downloaded packs and have to pay all over again instead of just re-downloading it.
I say do both, and to generate extra sales - you could probably price the whole thing at $3.99 and a lot of people on the fence would purchase the whole thing, and not be upset. $4.99 becomes a big head scratcher - mostly because the games generally go on sale at some point. DLC never goes on sale to my knowledge. I think that people also have different thoughts about what gets saved with DLC, and having to re d/l DLC also becomes a pain if you delete, or change devices. I actively avoid games with DLC. Would rather get the whole thing, or nothing. Creeps - which was out for a year or so, then came out with DLC was fine by me, but games designed with DLC in mind are not for me.
