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The Official iPhone/iPod Touch Gaming Thread

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Undeux said:
Well yeah, $10 is steep on the app store. When you can get hundreds of games for $1 or less, I think a company really has to prove that their game is worth that much. I get that they may have to charge that much to cover heavy development costs for an advanced game, but that's just how the market on the store is right now.
this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.

yokel A pays his $99 to apple for the SDK and codes a fart app in an hour. Puts it up at 99¢ to see how many people will buy it. If 20 people buy it, he just made $14 for his hour of work.

100 people do this and 99¢ apps dominate the top 10 lists.

REAL companies, tired of putting real money and effort into smaller titles only to get dominated in the sales charts (and resultant marketing) by fart apps, start putting on regular sales of games to 99¢ to keep their ranking up, useful for when the apps aren't on sale.

savvy users take note of these frequent sales and the regular occurrence of even the biggest titles making their way to $2.99 or lower eventually and start refusing to buy anything unless it's 99¢ for a regular game or $2.99 for an AAA game.

At the end of the day NONE OF THIS has anything to do with either actual value or perceived value. The valuation of the app store is so beyond fucked right now it's not even funny. It's essentially a knee jerk reaction by developers to compete with vultures looking to make a quick $25 on their useless app for 45 minutes of development time.

Fortunately this looks to be changing. Doom Res stuck around at $9.99 for a while. Civ Rev has been sitting high on the charts at $5 and will likely continue to do well at $10. All publishers have to do is release a quality product and stick it out. There have been tons of people in this thread who "finally caved" after getting sick of waiting for a $3-5 app to hit 99¢ or waiting for a $10 app to hit $3. Hell, how many people alone in this thread have bought Real Racing. Yeah there are a bunch who haven't because of it being $10, but I guarantee you that even some of those folks will end up buying it at $10. That's what MORE companies have to do.

There are only two ways things are going to change on the app store for games. Either apple is going to have to intervene on pricing or the layout of the store, or publishers are going to have to change their handling of their products. Fewer and less drastic price drops, higher quality titles from the get go instead of "meh features and serious bugs but here's what we have planned for the next update!!", and just generally treating the app store like a real retail store instead of a flea market. I mean that's what it really is, right there. It's the medium publishers actually trying to compete directly with the fart apps in some race to the bottom, and then the big publishers trying to meet them somewhere in the middle.

Like I said though.. EA is holding their ground. ngmoco seems to be good about not doing crazy "$2.99 sale for a $10 game).. publishers are starting to just let their game sell.

it's not the tyranny of the 99¢ app that is lowering relative value on the store... it's the buying public feeding off publishers doing frequent and massive price cuts on software. If they would stop doing that, the relative value of their apps and the price expectancy of good apps in general will go up.
 
My phone died and I had to get it replaced. I had a backup of my phone via iTunes but it looks like the backup didn't include any of my game saves. Did I just lose all of it or is there some way to get it all back?
 
Union Carbine said:
My phone died and I had to get it replaced. I had a backup of my phone via iTunes but it looks like the backup didn't include any of my game saves. Did I just lose all of it or is there some way to get it all back?


I've restored via backup before and all my game saves (and other 3rd party app settings) were restored as well.

when you say it "looks like" games saves weren't kept, what do you mean, exactly?
 
timmy01 said:
this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.

yokel A pays his $99 to apple for the SDK and codes a fart app in an hour. Puts it up at 99¢ to see how many people will buy it. If 20 people buy it, he just made $14 for his hour of work.

100 people do this and 99¢ apps dominate the top 10 lists.

REAL companies, tired of putting real money and effort into smaller titles only to get dominated in the sales charts (and resultant marketing) by fart apps, start putting on regular sales of games to 99¢ to keep their ranking up, useful for when the apps aren't on sale.

savvy users take note of these frequent sales and the regular occurrence of even the biggest titles making their way to $2.99 or lower eventually and start refusing to buy anything unless it's 99¢ for a regular game or $2.99 for an AAA game.

At the end of the day NONE OF THIS has anything to do with either actual value or perceived value. The valuation of the app store is so beyond fucked right now it's not even funny. It's essentially a knee jerk reaction by developers to compete with vultures looking to make a quick $25 on their useless app for 45 minutes of development time.

Fortunately this looks to be changing. Doom Res stuck around at $9.99 for a while. Civ Rev has been sitting high on the charts at $5 and will likely continue to do well at $10. All publishers have to do is release a quality product and stick it out. There have been tons of people in this thread who "finally caved" after getting sick of waiting for a $3-5 app to hit 99¢ or waiting for a $10 app to hit $3. Hell, how many people alone in this thread have bought Real Racing. Yeah there are a bunch who haven't because of it being $10, but I guarantee you that even some of those folks will end up buying it at $10. That's what MORE companies have to do.

There are only two ways things are going to change on the app store for games. Either apple is going to have to intervene on pricing or the layout of the store, or publishers are going to have to change their handling of their products. Fewer and less drastic price drops, higher quality titles from the get go instead of "meh features and serious bugs but here's what we have planned for the next update!!", and just generally treating the app store like a real retail store instead of a flea market. I mean that's what it really is, right there. It's the medium publishers actually trying to compete directly with the fart apps in some race to the bottom, and then the big publishers trying to meet them somewhere in the middle.

Like I said though.. EA is holding their ground. ngmoco seems to be good about not doing crazy "$2.99 sale for a $10 game).. publishers are starting to just let their game sell.

it's not the tyranny of the 99¢ app that is lowering relative value on the store... it's the buying public feeding off publishers doing frequent and massive price cuts on software. If they would stop doing that, the relative value of their apps and the price expectancy of good apps in general will go up.

Absolutely agree.

But it's also a matter of getting your attention too - I buy almost all my apps when they're cheap because, at that point I'm not done with whatever I was on last time. I was still playing 7 Cities but Defender Chronicles went down to 99c - at that price I'll buy it now and then play it later. But if I did wait it out I would have then seen StarDefense come down in price, so I'd be playing that instead.

It's an incredibly vicious cycle which is really kind of fucked.
 
LCfiner said:
I've restored via backup before and all my game saves (and other 3rd party app settings) were restored as well.

when you say it "looks like" games saves weren't kept, what do you mean, exactly?
I haven't checked all my games but I fired up Baseball Slugger and there was no trace of my existing save.
 
timmy01 said:
this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.

Great points. I definitely agree that this is something that will change, but I still do feel that it will be difficult for apps to succeed at that price for a while. I think more hardcore gamers will buy them, but I'm skeptical about the lucrative casual crowd. But yeah, like you said, the best solution will be a restructuring of the store to fix the pricing confusion.
 
GANGSTAR is out! - $6.99

388183_4.jpg


Trailer

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=327388183&mt=8
 
Union Carbine said:
I haven't checked all my games but I fired up Baseball Slugger and there was no trace of my existing save.


:(

i don't know what it could be. unless for some weird reason the backup was from a much older date. are your other settings for apps exactly as they were when your old phone died or are they outdated too?

shot in the dark, check your list of backups under itunes preferences and see if there are multiple versions and what the dates are. delete all old ones and keep your latest and try restoring again.
 
Union Carbine said:
I haven't checked all my games but I fired up Baseball Slugger and there was no trace of my existing save.
I replaced my iPhone recently and baseball sluggers was the only game after doing a restore that didn't have its save files intact. So I wouldn't worry too much. Check to see if your other games are ok.
 
Khanage said:
I replaced my iPhone recently and baseball sluggers was the only game after doing a restore that didn't have its save files intact. So I wouldn't worry too much. Check to see if your other games are ok.
Ah ok. Will do. That's a bummer about Sluggers though because I'd been putting quite a lot of work in there. I can't even get my ID back. :(
 
I'm currently downloading Gangstar. Oh, this is my first post in here. Been lurking in this thread for weeks now. And I couldn't agree more with the people who think the iPhone is actually a really great portable gaming device. I think Stoneloops, Infinity Gene, Civilization Revolution, Flight Control and a hell of lot of other little gems show that Apple is a real competitor in the handheld market.

About 75% downloaded :D. Hopefully Gangstar is at least good for 10 hours of gameplay...
 
Yasser said:
thanks, loved the lite version and was waiting for it to go down in price. have you (or anyone else) tried dragon portals from the same makers? it's on sale too and wondering if it's any good


Really late on this one, but I just picked up Dragon Portals this morning. It's very fun and very polished, exactly what you'd expect from the people that made Azkend. I very much recommend it. The gameplay is very fast paced and it's a refreshing take on the typical match-three game. And it has the same game changing power-ups like Azkend does, including a brush that lets you change the color of certain orbs or the ability to sacrifice one of your dragons to keep the rest in the air. It's a game well worth at least $2.99, and it's only $0.99 right now.

Short answer is: Go buy it. :D
 
Can't help it, can't wait any longer, brought gangstar.

I feel that when I read TA forums now for any kind of feedback i'm just burning away brain cells.
 
Foob said:
WHERE IS UNIFY
Maybe the edge guy copyrighted the word unify, too. I'm still mad that I can't play edge because of that guy.
 
Diablohead said:
I feel that when I read TA forums now for any kind of feedback i'm just burning away brain cells.

TA is a pretty strange place. A combination of blind excitement mixed with inane chit-chat back and forth.

IMO, Gangstar looks pretty nice, but for me personally I just don't know if I could deal with the virtual controls.
 
There's an app update I've been waiting for that has just passed the two week milestone, but I've heard of 3 month long approvals. It seems to be extra long at the moment.
 
gangster is probably one of the best look iphone games out there, and the production quality's in general are of a good standard considering all of the music and radio banter. shame there is no VA though. game also plays v nicely and is v smooth on the my 3gs at least. one problem is that the camera get annoying when reversing or doing a 180 as it takes awhile to adjust.

thumbs up
 
PopCap needs to choose an achievement system alignment... if achievements get added to this and backwards added to peggle... I think my heart might explode for overjoyousness.
 
StaticMoot said:
Really late on this one, but I just picked up Dragon Portals this morning. It's very fun and very polished, exactly what you'd expect from the people that made Azkend. I very much recommend it. The gameplay is very fast paced and it's a refreshing take on the typical match-three game. And it has the same game changing power-ups like Azkend does, including a brush that lets you change the color of certain orbs or the ability to sacrifice one of your dragons to keep the rest in the air. It's a game well worth at least $2.99, and it's only $0.99 right now.

Short answer is: Go buy it. :D
Thanks for the reply, that's all the recommendation I need. Can't believe that I have a backlog of iPod games!
 
timmy01 said:
this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.

yokel A pays his $99 to apple for the SDK and codes a fart app in an hour. Puts it up at 99¢ to see how many people will buy it. If 20 people buy it, he just made $14 for his hour of work.

100 people do this and 99¢ apps dominate the top 10 lists.

REAL companies, tired of putting real money and effort into smaller titles only to get dominated in the sales charts (and resultant marketing) by fart apps, start putting on regular sales of games to 99¢ to keep their ranking up, useful for when the apps aren't on sale.

savvy users take note of these frequent sales and the regular occurrence of even the biggest titles making their way to $2.99 or lower eventually and start refusing to buy anything unless it's 99¢ for a regular game or $2.99 for an AAA game.

At the end of the day NONE OF THIS has anything to do with either actual value or perceived value. The valuation of the app store is so beyond fucked right now it's not even funny. It's essentially a knee jerk reaction by developers to compete with vultures looking to make a quick $25 on their useless app for 45 minutes of development time.

Fortunately this looks to be changing. Doom Res stuck around at $9.99 for a while. Civ Rev has been sitting high on the charts at $5 and will likely continue to do well at $10. All publishers have to do is release a quality product and stick it out. There have been tons of people in this thread who "finally caved" after getting sick of waiting for a $3-5 app to hit 99¢ or waiting for a $10 app to hit $3. Hell, how many people alone in this thread have bought Real Racing. Yeah there are a bunch who haven't because of it being $10, but I guarantee you that even some of those folks will end up buying it at $10. That's what MORE companies have to do.

There are only two ways things are going to change on the app store for games. Either apple is going to have to intervene on pricing or the layout of the store, or publishers are going to have to change their handling of their products. Fewer and less drastic price drops, higher quality titles from the get go instead of "meh features and serious bugs but here's what we have planned for the next update!!", and just generally treating the app store like a real retail store instead of a flea market. I mean that's what it really is, right there. It's the medium publishers actually trying to compete directly with the fart apps in some race to the bottom, and then the big publishers trying to meet them somewhere in the middle.

Like I said though.. EA is holding their ground. ngmoco seems to be good about not doing crazy "$2.99 sale for a $10 game).. publishers are starting to just let their game sell.

it's not the tyranny of the 99¢ app that is lowering relative value on the store... it's the buying public feeding off publishers doing frequent and massive price cuts on software. If they would stop doing that, the relative value of their apps and the price expectancy of good apps in general will go up.
I disagree, I happen to think the sales have been healthy for everyone, especially apple.

I came to the iPhone oblivious to the app store. Actually you could say I lean towards disliking microtransactions and paying for digital products. I had an itouch before and I flat out refused to pay for any app, didn't even look at anything that wasn't free. And the free ones sucked so I basically didn't bother.

So I get an iPhone and get suckered into splashing out 59p on games at a pricepoint that makes it ok to gamble on something and occassionally miss.

In turn it encouraged me to splash out more and more. If these sales had not happened I never wouldve been tempted to spend anything.

why do so many gamers find this practice disagreeable? As people who spend money we want to get things for cheap, I don't care about perceived value or comparitive value. I hope developers DO keep having sales and setting prices in the microtransaction range (for me, the price of a mcdonald's meal).

Are some of you really complaining about the prices because it screws up your value scale and you can't tell which apps are shitty 59p efforts and which are fuller games experiences?

I actively hold back on games above 59p, sometimes I get suckered into spending more, but it's rare.

And I have mates who are very vigilant about even 59p apps, only willing to buy the occassional gem, and others who think playing games on your phone is stupid and embarassing.

Just drills home that the games are a bonus or luxury so developers have to fight for our attention.
 
Union Carbine said:
Ah ok. Will do. That's a bummer about Sluggers though because I'd been putting quite a lot of work in there. I can't even get my ID back. :(
Baseball Slugger is retarded and has your account and stuff tied to the hardware ID with no way to transfer it. I've actually held off on getting my phone fixed (minor stuff-dust, small plastic cracks, etc) cause of it but don't have a choice cause my warranty runs out soon. They said they're working on it but I wouldn't hold my breath.

edit-whoever was worried about Gangstar's performance on their old phone someone on SA said it runs well on his 1G iPod touch (which is the slowest of the devices).
 
Yasser said:
Thanks for the reply, that's all the recommendation I need. Can't believe that I have a backlog of iPod games!


I'll give you fair warning, it's much much tougher than Azkend. It's very tough to get a 5 star rating on all the levels, which gives it plenty of replay value. But those dragons nose dive into the ground shockingly fast in the mid levels. But it hasn't gotten frustrating yet.
 
timmy01 said:
this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.

yokel A pays his $99 to apple for the SDK and codes a fart app in an hour. Puts it up at 99¢ to see how many people will buy it. If 20 people buy it, he just made $14 for his hour of work.

100 people do this and 99¢ apps dominate the top 10 lists.

REAL companies, tired of putting real money and effort into smaller titles only to get dominated in the sales charts (and resultant marketing) by fart apps, start putting on regular sales of games to 99¢ to keep their ranking up, useful for when the apps aren't on sale.

savvy users take note of these frequent sales and the regular occurrence of even the biggest titles making their way to $2.99 or lower eventually and start refusing to buy anything unless it's 99¢ for a regular game or $2.99 for an AAA game.

At the end of the day NONE OF THIS has anything to do with either actual value or perceived value. The valuation of the app store is so beyond fucked right now it's not even funny. It's essentially a knee jerk reaction by developers to compete with vultures looking to make a quick $25 on their useless app for 45 minutes of development time.

Fortunately this looks to be changing. Doom Res stuck around at $9.99 for a while. Civ Rev has been sitting high on the charts at $5 and will likely continue to do well at $10. All publishers have to do is release a quality product and stick it out. There have been tons of people in this thread who "finally caved" after getting sick of waiting for a $3-5 app to hit 99¢ or waiting for a $10 app to hit $3. Hell, how many people alone in this thread have bought Real Racing. Yeah there are a bunch who haven't because of it being $10, but I guarantee you that even some of those folks will end up buying it at $10. That's what MORE companies have to do.

There are only two ways things are going to change on the app store for games. Either apple is going to have to intervene on pricing or the layout of the store, or publishers are going to have to change their handling of their products. Fewer and less drastic price drops, higher quality titles from the get go instead of "meh features and serious bugs but here's what we have planned for the next update!!", and just generally treating the app store like a real retail store instead of a flea market. I mean that's what it really is, right there. It's the medium publishers actually trying to compete directly with the fart apps in some race to the bottom, and then the big publishers trying to meet them somewhere in the middle.

Like I said though.. EA is holding their ground. ngmoco seems to be good about not doing crazy "$2.99 sale for a $10 game).. publishers are starting to just let their game sell.

it's not the tyranny of the 99¢ app that is lowering relative value on the store... it's the buying public feeding off publishers doing frequent and massive price cuts on software. If they would stop doing that, the relative value of their apps and the price expectancy of good apps in general will go up.

So, this was one of the main things we wanted to learn with Taxiball - how App Store pricing worked, and how it affected sales, and how purchasing on the App Store worked in general.

We spent a long time shifting the price of Taxiball around, and in many ways, it hurt us. It's weird, though, because the App Store is simply different now than it was two months ago, when we first launched the game. Free versions are radically less important than they used to be, and launching day one with a free version turns out to have been, from our experience, a huge *mistake*. Launching with a "generous" free version that gives you a sizable chunk of the game for nothing turned out to be *even worse*. Which is not at all what we expected, but there you go.

Now, we could take a couple lessons away from that, but lemme tell you, just for laughs, what we're actually *doing*.

Our next game, as I've mentioned, is free. Costs you nothing to download. We've spent months on the game, and I think it'll be obvious when you play it that it's got value. Mostly 'cause you won't be able to stop playing. I mean, I've played now for hundreds of hours, and the thing I'm looking forward to *the most* re: our launch is that I'll get to play even more with more people.

But that's a little beside the point. What we're doing with pricing is that we're pricing it at $0. Which is tricky, because to get anywhere in the free lists, you've gotta manage a ton of downloads. But like I said, I'm confident people will love the game, so that's what we're betting on. To make money? We're doing two things.

1.) It's a poker-style game. We give you chips at the start, we give you a chip bonus every day you play. We also sell you additional chips if you'd like to purchase them. If you don't want to purchase chips, you can play at the low-stakes table virtually indefinitely with the chips we give you. If you're good at the game, you'll never have to purchase chips, ever.

2.) However, if you enjoy the game, you'll also be able to donate to help support the game. You don't get chips, but for 30 days, you get a little icon that everyone can see that shows that you're helping to support the game (bronze, silver, or gold, depending on how much you donated). You don't have to donate unless you want to.

That's it. Paying for this game is totally optional. If you're concerned with money, you can play forever and pay $0. If you love the game and want to help support Self Aware, you can spend *as much as you want*. Rather than succumbing to the tyranny of our stated price, what we're charging for the game is whatever you *want* to pay.

We'll see how it goes. :)
seppo
 
japtor said:
Baseball Slugger is retarded and has your account and stuff tied to the hardware ID with no way to transfer it. I've actually held off on getting my phone fixed (minor stuff-dust, small plastic cracks, etc) cause of it but don't have a choice cause my warranty runs out soon. They said they're working on it but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Agree completely. It's very lame.
 
japtor said:
Baseball Slugger is retarded and has your account and stuff tied to the hardware ID with no way to transfer it. I've actually held off on getting my phone fixed (minor stuff-dust, small plastic cracks, etc) cause of it but don't have a choice cause my warranty runs out soon. They said they're working on it but I wouldn't hold my breath.

edit-whoever was worried about Gangstar's performance on their old phone someone on SA said it runs well on his 1G iPod touch (which is the slowest of the devices).

I had a problem where my character progress got wiped but still had my name etc. All my items disappeared and lost all my achievements. Stopped playing after not having a reply from the developers even tho they frequent TA.
 
billy.sea said:
A moral question. If Fart apps is what people wants and it is the ones that's selling, should companies just make apps that people want?

That's something I've been wondering about for the last few months, now. I mean, it seems like if you want to make a buck on the App Store, find a game that's doing well and make another one just like it, but with fart sounds.

Baseball Slugger + farting, every time you hit the ball? Probably a huge win.

Slam dunk contest where you have to keep farting to get more air? Oh yeah. Fart too much, though, and there will be... trouble.

But at the same time, I can't make myself want to do that. In some sense, I'm a shitty businessperson because I'd rather go down in flames making things I think are worthwhile than pander to the lowest common denominator.

And I lay the blame squarely at Apple's feet - because fart apps and actual quality stuff are all in the same lists, and those lists hold almost all the power in the store's structure, as long as you can flood the top with $0.99 apps and apps that are ... crap, the level of quality in the store will never get any better. Sure, there are a couple breakout hits - but at this point, you can't make a sustainable business out of hoping to win the lottery. :|

seppo
 
The thing is, though, that Apple's needs and the developers' needs aren't aligned. Apple gets more bang for their buck keeping the volume of apps high, and the cost of apps cheap. For developers, most developers - 90%+ - can't make a living with that business model. They just can't. So you won't see "deeper" apps except from companies that can fund something that's likely to lose $$.

But Apple laughs all the way to the bank. The only time this starts to break down is if developers start walking away from the App Store because they can't make any cash. But for the forseeable future, there'll be a lot of "prospectors" who take up any slots that are left vacant. But it really is a giant pyramid scheme, and unless something changes, and Apple's needs start aligning more with the developers' needs, it'll all come crashing down... eventually.

seppo
 
RelentlessRolento said:
i'm almost sure that PvZ was announced way back when the game was launched? ...

Not for the iphone. It's almost a foregone conclusion however that all games that are appropriate for the iphone from PopCap will eventually come over.
 
I won't get into the pricing discussion in depth again except to make the following general points.

It is in Apple's best interest to promote good games and try to get those good games good sales via promotion.

It is to Apple's best interest to do whatever it can to encourage pricing stability above a 99 cent price threshold for apps that contain quality typically found above 99 cents apps.

There are lots of ways to do this which we've discussed many times before. Apple so far has done a minimal effort job of actually doing anything about this even though they say "they have ideas" whatever that means. They can always continue down the path they are going and obviously achieve good sales and profit but to achieve better sales and wider marketshare and better developer support especially in light of competition from other services or platforms it is to their benefit to improve their business model and store structure and do things that encourage the two general points I made above.

Just like anything the app store is not perfect. Nor is it the worst service relative to the compeition. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be striving to do better and take some of the more obvious steps to improve things which they haven't done so far.
 
Is no one else having WiFi issues with the 3.0 firmware? I finally made the jump on my 2g Touch and the next day reverted back to 2.2.1 due to horrific coverage issues. Everywhere in our apartment my wife and my own iPods would always get full bars and speed at all times with 2.2.1, once 3.0 was in place I would get one bar or no connection at all...Even 2 ft from the router.

What the hell.

Damn shame since I was anxious to try some 3.0 exclusive apps but...I guess I'll hope it gets fixed in 3.1.
 
womp said:
Is no one else having WiFi issues with the 3.0 firmware? I finally made the jump on my 2g Touch and the next day reverted back to 2.2.1 due to horrific coverage issues. Everywhere in our apartment my wife and my own iPods would always get full bars and speed at all times with 2.2.1, once 3.0 was in place I would get one bar or no connection at all...Even 2 ft from the router.

What the hell.

Damn shame since I was anxious to try some 3.0 exclusive apps but...I guess I'll hope it gets fixed in 3.1.

My surfing the internet performance via Wi-Fi is as solid as it ever was. My speed when downloading apps or updates with 3.0 has always been rather spotty compared to what it was before.
 
Also Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is #3 on the games list. I'm happy for the devs. So often you see some rather ordinary apps near the top of the list but it's nice to see a legit awesome app able to break out of the pack and get good sales.
 
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