Apple Pay Once and Play Games - Now With Less Gouging

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cknobman

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May 2, 2006
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Well for once I like something Apple is doing.

I hate freemium games with a passion as the model is setup from the beginning to screw people. These types of games make it so that $10 purchase will get you very little if anything and you could easily sink $100+ into it.

Having a dedicated section for pay once games is a great idea as I can cut out the tripe and get what I want.

What is ironic is before freemium games I hardly ever wanted to pay for anything. Now I am more that willing, and have plenty of times, to throw down $5-$10 for a pay once game.
 

stormblade42

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I guess gaming is coming full-circle? Pay for a game and actually get to use all of the content? So tired of the nickel-and-dime strategy. I've been gaming since the 80's and don't care for this model which is why I don't play those types of games.
 

Marshall Honorof

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Of course, AAA gaming combines the worst of both worlds. Take your average blockbuster PC or console game, and not only will you pay $60 up-front, but then you'll ALSO get nickel-and-dimed for multiplayer content. And, increasingly, single-player content. I'm not averse to F2P, but asking for microtransactions in a full-price release is just cheeky.
 

d_kuhn

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The answer is to just not play those toll road games... the last game like that I got suckered into buying was Diablo III, and once I realized that they designed the game specifically to make money on the auction house (instead of designing it to give users the best game they could) I stopped playing and will never buy another Diablo game... ever.
 

alextheblue

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I hate freemium games with a passion as the model is setup from the beginning to screw people. These types of games make it so that $10 purchase will get you very little if anything and you could easily sink $100+ into it.

Depends on the title. Some F2P games are really decent about it... many others are terrible. I wish PSO2 had received a proper Western release, they had a good model (I read all about the Japanese release but I never played, would prefer a local-ish server).
 

somebodyspecial

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Now if we can just get this to be the standard PERIOD. Microtransactions are holding back mobile gaming. Now that graphics are catching xbox360 (and soon 14nm etc xbox1/ps4 - likely at 10nm for this with better stuff around it too faster mem etc to help), we need tons of ports of old GREAT games to mobile. Very few games have ever sold 20mil units (most hits under 10mil), so you have a whole group of people that have never played these things (~1.5B units sold a year now and rising on mobile) and just selling them for $5-15 can make companies a mint on something that takes weeks to port.

NV took 2-3 weeks for all their ports each, so it's fast). NV also had only a few people needed to do it (they said a very small team). Even a few million copies at these prices makes you a lot of money for very small effort of time. These games went for $40-60 on PC/console. Many would buy now at $10 etc for full games. Look at the value for something like bards tale at $2 on android...LOL. That's a TON of play time for $2 (started at 10, even then a good deal, then down to $5.99 now $2). NV said they spent most of their time mapping the gamepad not the actual PORTING. WOW. Bring on the top 250-500 PC/console games from the last 10yrs! Use that to fund NEW content that fully uses their power that they have going forward (14nm and on) while pocketing some nice cash to boot. Those ports sound like they took less than 100K to do (small team 2-3 weeks? Under 50K?) but probably made a few million each or more or will at some point as more people get gpus on mobile capable of running games like portal, Half life 2 etc. Those two were sold for $10 at launch and surely sold a few 100K units by now. An X1 shield device coming shortly will only add more players, but think if you did this and allowed ALL android users not just NV shield devices. Just an example.

Porting to a Billion+ units that get better yearly is a good idea. Consoles never sell more than 100mil boxes over 7yrs. Here you get a new 1.5B+ every year that add power. It's a great time to be a dev with a catalog of old GREATS to port for easy cash now that you'll have so many devices with K1+ power levels this year and the valve ports were for T4. Even the junker socs should be at T4 levels at 20nm and 14nm hitting shortly for samsung (Q2 mass production for apple/qcom/nv and of course samsung themselves and GF gets this process too). Time to port massively!
 

AlphaCompton

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This is fantastic news. We can finally move past this disgusting business of micro transactions. Developers need to eat too so they can make games that have a one time payment or release a free app with ads. No need to frustrate customers or attempt to rip off unsuspecting children.
 
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