Touch Arcade is not representative of the iOS gaming community. We, on average, are far more hardcore/dedicated. Freemium developers are often pursuing a consumer base that are even gaming fans all at. We're are talking about people who own a smartphone primarily because it's a phone.
If you wanted a phone would you not just get a cheep one? People get iPhones as they have games on them. Not because the are good phones.
nay ~ definitely premium games~ the price tag associated with it somehow gives off the feeling that it has at least some quality and fun and isn't only trying to milk the player of his/her cash
Hmm that statement is as wrong as wrong can be. Shockingly I have seen iPhones with solitaire as the only game and all productivity apps on it.
You realize that last summer Gameloft announced that they'd had something like 200 million downloads of their titles, right? 40 signatures is 0.00002% of that.
I'm a developer. My preference would honestly be to make a good game, and sell it for a price. Unfortunately, this is how indie developers go bankrupt on iPhone. When Solomon's Keep was 99 cents-- only 99 cents, mind you, sales eventually fell so that I was selling less than 20 copies a day. The only way I'm making enough money to write Solomon Dark (the sequel to Solomon's Boneyard! Solomon Dark! Tell your friends! Get excited!) with all the features I want is to make games free and sell an in-game currency. Yeah, it feels dirty, even to me. But the alternative is to quit and get a day job writing biz software or something. I never seemed to fit in when I did that in the past. Among my circle of developers, we *hate* this new in-app paradigm. We sometimes have hour-long bitching sessions about it, because frankly, it ruins the clean lines of a game. Meanwhile, finding the right balance between "people can buy stuff" and "people can earn stuff" is a triple headache. So, everyone's unhappy. I know some freemium companies don't even try to be reasonable-- they just make it so you have a choice: Play a simple game for 500 hours to get enough coins to unlock stuff, or fork over money. But I hate to say: most of the blame for this lies with the iPhone audience. People want to get Diablo 2 or Civilization for 99 cents (or free!) these days, and then will complain that for 99 cents, the game really should have included 8x the content. Since I'm a game purist, I don't like to buy coins or "cheat" my progress-- it feels like I didn't play the game right. As a result, I'm not enjoying games as much. This sucks! Some indies and I have been talking, and we're working on a possible modified solution. If it works, Solomon Dark is going to come out free, with an in-game currency that you can buy more of at any time. Or, at any time, you can buy the "real game" and the game perk prices will be knocked down to what we WOULD have set them at, if iPhone users were willing to pay money for games any more. So purists can play, and yet we can still make money off in-game currency prices, which, with the exception of one indie I know of (Donut games) is the *only* way an independent developer can interest players in continuing to fund development.
Thanks for your opinion it's very intriguing. It seems like Gamelofts freemium mood is also effecting indies and causing them to go free. Hopefully for the better of you and your games freemium ends and you can go back to paid. But sadly it's not likely to happen. Keep developing though!
As much as I don't like freemium, I can't ignore the fact that most of my friends play it. In about 10 people with iphone, none of them have carcassonne and all of them have smurf's village. Figure that!! I like that. Hopefully it works!!!
First - you really had to ask about the arrows???? Second - did you see how many freemium games that were on the app store BEFORE Game loft jumped into that fray? TONS. So the blame only on them is wrong. Did you not read that whole response? It is iPhone gamers as a WHOLE whining and complaining a game is NOT 99 cents and NOT 50000 hours long that is the problem. Gamers ruined it for gamers.
Thing is I am willing to pay $10 for a game. I'm not a guy that expects a game to be 99c. It's not really iPhone gamers. It's more kids with their new shiny iPod Touches who can't afford to buy games so instead have to beg parents for 99c to buy a game. It's kids that can't afford games that are buying these freemium games. My cousin who is 11 recently got an iPod Touch for her birthday. For months she had not once paid for a game and she believed that she would not need to as freemium games where good enought for her. So at Christmas I bought her a $30 iTunes card and said that she must buy real racing 2, fruit ninja and league of evil. She loves them and can't believe she used to play freemium games. It's kids like her that don't realize that there is a difference in quality between freemium and paid games. They don't notice this till they buy a paid game. Also I am aware there were freemium games before Gameloft. There was NgMoco (who EA bought if I remember). But Gameloft didn't need to go freemium, fans where happy with what they had made and done. Looking at their shiny new building in their vid casts money wasn't a problem as they are backed by Ubisoft. The reason they have done it is an attack on indies and mostly out of greed.
Actually most of my friends are getting free games or at most 99c games that is highly popular (angry birds and such). Because they rarely download paid games, they only have free games. Since freemium has their own addictive charm, they are willing to pay (not much, perhaps 99c to $5) for those smurfs rather than buying other games. It's something understandable since I'm playing Hanging with Friends with them and I always have the temptation to buy coins to change my balloon. As for Gameloft, I completely agree with you that I like it better their older releases before this freemium thing. Hopefully they switch back.
The problem with freemium is that most developers don't take the time to actually plan out its integration and balance it against actual gameplay. Furthermore, these same developers don't realize that it's really friggin hard to do that sort of balance in the first place. So you end up with games that have it ridiculously (and lazily) shoehorned in, it ends up screwing with the game as a whole, and you end up with a lot of angry gamers and this thread. I personally don't have a problem with freemium if it's done correctly. Of course, that really doesn't happen much often, but I'm still hoping that the freemium-addicted developers will eventually get it in their head that they have to do some major work to make it worthwhile. Of course, the skeptic in me thinks that all of this doesn't matter because there will always be some suckers out there that'll pour gobs of money down the game, making it profitable on the developers' end, and the cycle continues.
Hope you purchased every CAVE game or else you could be partially responsible for this: http://toucharcade.com/2012/01/12/cave-to-focus-more-on-social-games-following-poor-earnings/
What really would have to happen but definetly will not is that apple should filter out all the BS on the AppStore. Oh look, the 500 millionth chess game! Do we really need that? With out all those games the quality games would be easyer to find, would probably get more sales and wouldn't have to go freemium. (Not to say that there wouldn't be any freemium games atall, but devs wouldn't be forced as much to go that route.) The reason why it isn't going to happen is because devs who make these apps/games that get filtered out would complain. Hidden gems would also go missing. Another possibillity would to divide the game section into price ranges. before selecting the game genre there could be a category with free games, one with 1$ - 5$ games, 5$-10$, +10$ (...). Since there are less expensive games the expensive games would be easyer to find, so someone who just bought an iDevice wouldn't have to go through hundreds of games to find a premium, ~10$ game.
