I wonder if my experience is typical. In the post Christmas period, hardly anything interesting arrived on the App Store so I have shifted to the iTunes store and bought lots of music and movies instead. Spent like $60 in the last week. That was $60 that was meant for game apps...
Same, I was expecting much more. There seems to be a lot of good stuff coming early 2014 though, I guess they didn't quite make it before cut off date..
I was expecting a crazy Xmas period but it was quite disappointing. The year before i remember being amazing. Lego Star Wars coming out the week before was a great surprise and i'm very happy with that, Shadowsun was the other 'big' game for me but i only bought 3 games in the final Xmas launch date before the cut-off, year before 10+. Battle Supremacy was a great start to 2014 though
I spent nearly nothing before Christmas and nothing since on iOS gaming. I did buy some music on iTunes for the first time since my wife wanted something and I wasn't using the money already invested in iTunes cards. Instead this was the year of the ps3 for me. Two systems, one for me and the other for the kids. Ps+ with a nice collection of free games. A myriad of awesome games in bargain bins or at cheap prices even new to collect. Some great deals on digital games on the playstation store. It's been a heck of a great time to get back into console gaming and kick to the curb all the worry about games being optimized for better hardware or specific versions of iOS or converted from paid to freemium. I spent two years as a diehard iOS gamer and it was great. I have more games to play than inever will get around to. But it's really comforting to get back to playing games that are just games and not a pay scheme with some addiction factor programmed in. There are some absolute gems on iOS. Games I can put up against anything on any system. But, it's just nice not having to deal with all the garbage that makes me a paranoid freak when it comes to buying new stuff on the platform. So for me, the next couple years will be the time I go back to console gaming. I've had a blast playing through and finishing inFamous on hard mode and I have a huge backlog of some absolutely fantastic stuff to play for the first time already waiting on the shelf. I think it's gotta be getting harder for app developers and the next couple of years is going to head further down the path of mediocrity that the Atari 2600 and other systems of that day faced. Just worse since the bait and switch is becoming more of a rule than exception and free sales and massive sales push consumers int devaluing the products all the more. I'll still buy stuff that interests me, but no doubt my days caring week to week what is hitting the AppStore are over. Why deal with this stuff when I can just buy a game and play it without worrying about any of the devious stuff or if I'm on the right hardware to run it properly.
Apple needs to put a stop to premium games becoming paidmium games halfway through its life via updates. That is losing my trust in just buying game apps because, how bad can it be? And also include special categories in the App Store for paidmium and freemium games, just like the different categories for iPhone and iPad apps. Looking at the recently released games other than wondering about installed size, my new query is, "Paidmium?"
Paidmium has been a reoccurring question for me except I phrase it more as "is the IAP required to beat the game in a reasonable amount of time?". I kind of like what Android does with no "free" sales without just converting the game to always be free. But the big game companies seem to police all of this stuff well enough to prevent all of the bai and switch. So just having apple take the game market seriously and demand a little quality over what it publishes to the AppStore would be a welcome change. Enforcing pay models and denying changes that turn on ads and other annoying features after a purchase would be great. Heck just offering customers a simple way to complain would be great. I love the creativity that comes to the AppStore, I just have grown sick of playing Russian roulette with my game purchases, especially when it comes to installing updates. Anyway hope my post wasn't too off putting. I think the market is just so over saturated and anyone that focused on iOS for serious gaming is going to hit a wall where they own so many good games that they don't really need more. I've heard similar stuff from people I know that have taken advantage of a lot of steam sales. There comes a point where sales and stuff just don't mean much and there's just not much to buy. Then again, that could eh a blessing.
It is disturbing that it seems that devs now believe that bait and switching to freemium, early adopter blues with sales within 3 days, and the trend to freemium with constant updates to make the grind harder; now seem to be desirable business tactics. Personally, I don't think so, nowadays it seems clear that so many aren't early adopters anymore, and many are just losing interest with ios gaming, and considering freemium games as mostly junk games. Used to be so many good buck releases, even some early adopter sales, but those days seem to have changed to trying to milk early adopters and even worse, a month down the line with a bait and switch to freemium. Well, if you go back to console gaming nightc1, good luck. Hopefully things change a bit, and someday ios gaming changes direction a little bit than what it has become as of late.
