20$ games tolerated

Interesting poll.

No surprise to me, but still, it could lift up once again the overall quality of appstore games.

Considering there’s already outstanding quality games at 8$, I could say that would just raise the overall games playtime replayability.

Good thing.
8$ will be for short polished games ,
30$ will be for long polished games.
Seems fair to me.

We will see.
At $30 for a mobile game I expect at least 80h of gameplay and some replay value. ($30 for a mobile compares to more than $150 for a HD pc / console game due to the low definition and thus low dev costs in comparision)
Or generally games in the real range of good mobile console games, not BigFish and “higher big fish” class games that currently make up 99.x% of the AppStore.

I’ve so far not really seen any game for which I would be willing to pay more than it cost actually. Real Racing and potentially Zenonia the only games that show how games are meant to be done but even for them I wouldn’t be willing to pay more than $15

In that Comparison DS games are very overpriced compared to Wii games. I actually never calculated a game’s price in development costs. And I guess 95% of the expected customers won’t do that, either. Mostly because they don’t have any idea about it :wink:

I think most customers recognize that the teams behind DS games are generally much bigger than most iPhone games.

NDS games are much harder to do than Wii, as 4MB of RAM are kind of more restricting that 108MB.
Although, there are many that are overpriced :slight_smile:
But the main thing you forget here is the serious license fees applied to catridge game. I heard figures in the range of $20 - $30 per game, not 30% of whatever you ask for with no retail distribution costs etc etc.

I rate the stuff in what it is worth.
If a X360 game costs $95 and a PC game $75 with their visual quality and content, then I expect half a pc game at $30 and as the visuals are at best at 10% of the pc game, I expect significantly more content etc.

I think thats a calculus anybody is able to do, as thats how the mankind developed money as a universal comparable trading good :slight_smile:

It is interesting to calculate in term of work cost, but I don’t think this is how game pricing works, customer side.

A customer is just able to pay a certain higher amount of money if only the game can give a certain higher amount of pleasure.

That pleasure concept can be bound to several domains, like graphics, fun, gameplay, socializing, replay value, or originality.

Though I’m with you Dreamo with that 15$ maximum for now, some gamers are really involved in gaming, and could clearly put more money in really advanced games, either it’s on Wii, Xbox or iPhone. The only condition is to have a similar overall gameplay visual quality (and the iPhone screen can proportionally make its graphics play in the same yard than Xbox). The other risky condition is not to cross the thin line of it’s too expensive.

Just like, I remember the old years, when I begged my grandma’s charity to offer me a 400 Francs 8-bit awful looking game for Christmas. Was in 1988, when 400 francs were like 80 € today.
And all the console games got that price in those times :wink:

A TouchArcade poll is not really a scientific source by any means. In reality, TouchArcade users are such a small and specific portion of the total user base I would take this with a grain of salt. While there might be a small subsection of people for whom this holds true, it has absolutely zero bearing on the larger market.

Most customers don’t really think like that. Pricing has a lot more to do with relative cost. Some consumers will wake up early and drive 40 minutes across town to get a 50-dollar microwave on a Black Friday sale for 35 bucks, but the same person won’t generally be bothered to cross town to save several hundreds or even a couple thousand dollars on a new car purchase.

A cup of coffee or a movie ticket will set people back far more than a 3-5 dollar iPhone game, and in many cases the iPhone game will give them enjoyment over a much longer span of time. Nonetheless, as long as there are a ton of quality products available from 0-1 dollars, they will expect a AAA console-quality length and experience from pretty much anything over 3 bucks.

Adam is spot-on. Relative costs are really all that matters, you’re not gonna be able to justify high prices for apps until people stop having hours of fun with simple $1 games, and there’s plenty of profit to be made at $10 or less, even for a big budget production. The overhead of making physical cartridges, sticking them in plastic boxes with printed manuals in countless stores all over the world, paying your licensing fees to nintendo, buying overpriced devkits, etc… the actual profit margin on each sale of a DS game is pretty small. Even the act of submitting to nintendo (or sony/microsoft for that matter) costs thousands of dollars. Obviously iPhone games have a bit of an advantage when it comes to operational costs, and can actually turn much higher profits at lower price points than pretty much any other option out there. Why do you think EA and Ubisoft are positively drooling over the iPhone?

I wouldn’t go quite that far. They are into iPhone because it looks good to stockholders and they are a public company and need to be seen as being in all gaming markets.

The money generated by iPhone games is microscopic to companies like this. Even if they have 10 hits that generate $1m each, $10m is meaningless to the bottom lines per year.

No major publisher is into the iPhone for the money it generates.

They’re definitely in it for the money - how much money is up for debate, but they’re not just doing it to look cool for stockholders. I can gaurantee Sims 3 for iPhone has generated more profit (and required fewer development resources) than the majority of their console portfolio this year.

While the big publishers certainly couldn’t sustain their whole operation off of just mobile apps, it is definitely a very attractive addition to their gaming empires. But the sheer volume of games from EA and Gameloft would suggest to me that it’s more than just a passing interest.

Adam PNA, these are some valid and interesting points, I admit.

But :

→ Precisely :wink:
As some iPhone games quality is really steppin up to big console quality, in term of gameplay, graphics and stuff, this is why players are starting to reach some big console requests.

I know it’s not the most relevant forum in the world, but this thread, or the parent of this site are two of growing signs that could lead to believe in growing expectations within the mobile player database.
This is not taken for granted, for sure, but these kind of signs are fastly reproducing all over the net.

Adding all over that the incredible attraction those success stories do over non gamers.

Oh and by the way, those big publishers like EA, Taito, Capcom, … When they will settle for real in the appstore, I don’t believe they would stick with 5$ games, at least for marketing balance. I’m sure they will be the firsts to dare throwing 20$ games.

Everything is lifting the stuff up, litterally.

I remember last January, when I started to dev my game, everybody around me was just “oh, we’ll see, good luck”, but now there are at least 6 people who are aiming at buying one, or even developping their game. Plus the friends who kindly brought me some collaboration proposals, whatever their domain was (music, networking, IA, etc).

There’s a big hype, for sure. With a hype, everything is possible.

But we’ll see, 'cause no one knows, I agree :slight_smile:

edit : sorry for the yadda yadda, I love speculations :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve been developing a game for almost a year (part time) now in Unity for the iPhone and it’s something that I believe is worth far more than 99c, although right now it seems like it’s the only option I have to make decent money. It’s a big leap coming from my last game that I sold for $25 for the mac and windows, but it’s also a lot bigger budget with more risks.

I’m now also throwing around how to price the eventual mac/windows releases, would the community be fine with a virtually identical product (gameplay wise at least) for 20x the price of the iphone release?

at least 15 times the price does not seem to be a problem as games like Airport Mania have shown.

Question is always if you really want the desktop version to have such strange controls and restricted visuals … :slight_smile:

Obviously you map the controls to something comfortable on the desktop, and bump up the texture quality (plus use pixel lighting etc. as desired)…similar to how quality settings are used…not rocket science. :wink: It’s a bit tedious having to reimport textures; presumably the eventual merging of Unity and Unity iPhone will fix that.

–Eric

Good to know!

haha, already look into that :slight_smile: Sprites will just revert back to their 3d models, the background is already in 3d but with scaled down textures. The game was designed for use with a 360 controller originally, so that’s solved there. Although portions of the game that use touch and accelerometer controls will be interesting!

I don’t think the money they generate off the games is necessarily the goal, but I also think it’s not quite such a general, nebulous stunt to impress shareholders. Part of what they are doing is building brand recognition. If we think of it more like a profitable marketing campaign, then there is actually a fair bit of money at stake.

If people are only willing to pay $2 a game (for example), how hard does Apple make it to release a game with one level, then offer optional level upgrades, for $1-$2 each. Then (if it makes sense for your game design), you could get upto $20 if you have 10 amazing levels to purchase. I’ve played games where I’d be willing to do this. (Assuming each level is large enough of course, and independent of each other).

Do each of these have be be separate Apps (and therefore 30% goes to Apple), or once a customer buys your main game, can you market to them directly and somehow get them to download new levels. I’m very new to Unity and iPhone, so I was just wondering, before I get too far into development. And is it possible to have one main app that shows all the upgrade levels you purchased?

In-app purchases through OS 3.0’s new store kit are subject to the same 30% cut that Apple takes from normal app purchases, so I’m sure they’d be more than happy to let you release a game for cheap, but sell a fortune’s worth of expansions.