Band Together

[tecwrtr]

Originally Posted by s💩💩💩💩💩7

My guess is that the developer was making a joke by that statement and many posters here are over-reacting.

Still, I'm waiting to buy until I hear that from the developers. I want to buy this game. Devs?

[cabdog]

Just finished the game; I think I enjoyed it best in small 2-4 levels sessions to prolong the experience, but I really didn't spend too much time with it. I will say the time spent was fun, just not a mind buster or anything. Just a pretty average puzzle platformer with a unique story and great atmosphere.

One thing I noted in the app description;
"Skip the levels that you aren't ready for and return to them later"
This is false as the levels are only unlocked as you complete the previous one. Or am I reading this wrong?

[pavarotti2007]

Dropped in price again. Now free.

[Ravenblack]

Lucky for us who hesitated due to the em... "joke", I guess.

[Connector]

Originally Posted by Ravenblack

Lucky for us who hesitated due to the em... "joke", I guess.

So sad, but true.

[pavarotti2007]

Originally Posted by Ravenblack

Lucky for us who hesitated due to the em... "joke", I guess.

Glad I waited.

[Snake Eater]

$5 to free in less then a week, my sympathies for those who were duped into giving these snakes $5

[ddt]

Hi guys,

My name is Dave Taylor. I'm the producer on Band Together, and I wanted to explain the excitement surrounding the price and the sale.

But before that, I want to thank everyone who got behind us early on at $4.99. None of us got paid during development, and we developed the game right to the ends of our savings. Our early supporters have really saved our respective bottoms. That said, we're far from out of the woods.

While getting featured on the App Store was a huge and unexpected surprise, that all ends Thursday when they rotate in the new featured games. While we got up to about the 30s on the top grossing list for a little while, we stalled out, I think because of the initial pricing mistake (my fault!) and we're not currently charting on the top of any lists, so that means after the feature ends, we'll be very hard to discover.

If any of you have tried shipping an iOS game (I smell a developer or two in here), you know that discoverability is super challenging, and once you're hard to find, odds are you're going to be quickly forgotten. It seems to be a very all-or-nothing thing. If you're wondering why a lot of games do sales like these, that's why. If you're lucky enough to get featured, you want to use the opportunity to try to chart elsewhere in the App Store before the feature ends.

We're actually in a pretty unusual situation for a featured game and at a pretty big disadvantage in some ways. We don't have any "nag" in the game asking for good reviews, nor any in-game assets to sell, nor any free demo. It's a really old-fashioned game in that regard. Because we have no free demo, the closest way to emulate that is to release it for free for a little while, see if we can get enough attention to keep the inertia going, and then end the sale as soon as we can.

If we didn't do that and disappeared from the various menus of the App Store, it would mean we don't have the foundation of support we need to keep developing for the game. As John pointed out, we want to add more levels, and we have a million ideas we'd love to implement, but if we disappear from the App Store charts, it becomes a real slog to claw our way back up. In fact, odds are excellent we never would again and that we might have to discontinue development.

This was a really difficult decision for us, as we had a hunch people would get upset, but I think frankly we just made a mistake coming out at $4.99. It was too high, as some of you have noted, and I take full responsibility for that. By the time we realized our mistake and lowered the price to $2.99, we had already taken some beatings in reviews and lost the inertia that might have gotten us visible in one of the App Store pages.

Thanks again for supporting us and particularly for supporting the students. It isn't common knowledge in the press, but the students are getting paid 50% of the royalties, the same as the veterans (John & myself). Every sale is making a big difference to their lives and will hopefully help them pay back their student loans.

If you want to learn more about what the students went through to get here, btw, I just did a talk on it for the IGDA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaU54Rqgw9E

Small compensation for stepping up with your early support, I'm sure, but again, John and I really appreciate it, and the students do too. I hope you guys don't think less of us!

By the way, we really appreciate your candid feedback. We're reading it all and taking it all very seriously. We're a tiny team (and still without any income), so while we certainly won't be able to address all of your concerns, we've already begun addressing some of the more common ones in our first update.

[CzarCastic]

Gaah! While I can appreciate a "pricing mistake", it really sucks when you're one that gets shafted in the process. This is one of the bigger hits I've taken in recent weeks. Guess it just reemphasizes my personal price point of $1.99 for impulse buys. There was a reason I implemented that personal limit and I'm kind of sorry I deviated in this case. However, now that I'm $5 invested into this game, I hope it does well. I'll need a lot more (FREE!<---Important for those of us that paid full price!) content to get my money's worth here. If the content isn't free, then hopefully you can build in some sort of redemption code to give some of us that paid full price a chance to get some more content. Here's hoping for the best!

[Sanuku]

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