What's better value: a £300 virtual gun in a freemium game or a £10.99 PSP port from 2007?
If you're not a fan of freemium gaming models, you might want to look away now. Smartphone publisher Glu Mobile is selling a gun in its Gun Bros game for the virtual currency equivalent of $500 (£306). Not much less than the price of the top-end 64GB iPod touch.
This is no joke. The gun is The Kraken, which according to mobile gaming site TouchArcade is "the mack daddy of all premium unlockable guns... which promises to instantly vaporize all nearby enemies". It costs 3,499 of Gun Bros' war bucks currency, which sells in packs of 710 for $99 via in-app payment: hence the $500 figure.
Money well spent for a gun that makes you essentially unbeatable? Or simply an expensive way to make the game no fun at all? As the heated debate on this Apps Blog post about freemium gaming shows, plenty of people are puzzled at the notion of - in the words of Guardian community member R042 - "simply paying to remove what little gameplay there is by immediately getting everything".
The phenomenon of so-called whales who pay lots of money within freemium games is well known, but charging $500 for a virtual item is a rarity. Social location game Gbanga caused a stir in March 2011 when it unveiled a $99 World Domination Satellite item (and sold one within a few hours), but you could buy five of those for one Kraken gun.
By contrast, Square Enix's pricing for its new Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions iPhone game is relatively restrained. Even so, here too is an example of a publisher looking to stretch the generally accepted boundaries for iOS game pricing.
The game - a tactical RPG based on the publisher's famous fantasy franchise - went live today on the App Store as a paid app costing £10.99.
At the time of writing, it's the eighth Top Grossing iPhone game in the UK App Store, two places ahead of the 69p Angry Birds, although behind freemium titles Zynga Poker, Smurfs' Village, Tap Pet Hotel, Tap Zoo, Zombie Gunship and Tiny Tower.
£10.99, though. It feels like a stretch given the history of the title. It was first released on PlayStation in 1997, then re-released in 2007 for Sony's PSP handheld with the War of the Lions subtitle. It's that game which has now been released for iPhone, albeit with touchscreen controls, faster loading times and tweaked graphics.
You don't have to be a cheapskate to wonder if both Glu and Square Enix are, frankly, pushing it with their pricing strategies. But it's their right to set whatever price they like for their games and items, and either reap the commmercial rewards, or swiftly bring the costs down if players keep their (virtual) wallets in their pockets.
Part of the fascination of mobile gaming in 2011 is that there is still an immense amount of experimentation going on around pricing. A marketplace where companies like EA routinely drop the cost of their biggest brands to 69p, yet where virtual guns are offered for 443 times that price, could at least never be accused of being boring.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/aug/04/gun-bros-final-fantasy-tactics
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